Essam Al-Sudani / AFP-Getty Images
Taking Control: Iraqi special forces outside Basra Palace

After four and half years, British troops officially handed over responsibility for Basra to the Iraqi government on Sunday. There wasn’t much fanfare: a handful of government officials, including National Security Adviser Mowaffaq Rubaie and Basra Governor Mohammed Waeli were on hand. British foreign secretary David Miliband flew out for the occasion, and Maj. Gen. Graham Binns, the commander who marched troops into Basra in spring 2003 (a coincidence he said was “especially poignant”), presided over the official handover. “Basra security forces have demonstrated that they are capable,” Binns said. He explained that the Brits are now “guests in your country and will act accordingly.”

But the Brits aren’t quite packing their bags yet. The 4,500 British troops currently in the province will stay on to give the Iraqi security forces backup through next spring, when they will drop down to 2,500. On paper, it doesn’t appear that the British soldiers will be seeing more combat. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki would have to sign off if they were to provide backup for Iraqi forces in battle. In reality, though, it probably won’t be long before the Coalition troops are called up to fight: the rivalries between various Shiite groups have spilled over into bloody street fights several times this year. The violence in Basra has dropped noticeably in recent months, but the city is hardly secure. The official handover ceremony today was held at the Basra airport, which is miles away from the city center. A public ceremony in the city would have been a tempting target for the rocket men and mortar teams that pounded British bases during the summer. Rubaie acknowledged the unstable situation after the ceremony. “We have huge challenges ahead of us,” he said. “We have yet to declare victory and [say] this is the end of the fight. We are a long way from that.”

There are at least a dozen militias in Basra, but the group that some Iraqi officials point to as the spoilers are the supporters of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. It’s widely believed that Sadr’s Mahdi Army controls the police in the city. It’s not hard to understand why these rivalries have turned into such a bloody struggle. Not far away from the Basra airport, gas flares from massive oil fields burn night and day. The oil fields around Basra provide a huge share, nearly 90 percent by some estimates, of the government’s income. But there are more arcane matters that the Shiite groups fight about. The Sadrists and a splinter faction called Fadhila see themselves as an indigenous Iraqi Arab movement. They ridicule the dominant Shiite party, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq, as Iranian stooges because many of the group’s top members, who are now senior officials in the Iraqi government, spent years in exile in Iran.