As Gordon Brown prepares the ground for a British troop withdrawal from Iraq, Conor Lallyspends a week embedded with the Irish Guards in Baghdad and Basra.
It is probably the most dangerous flight in the world. The helicopter journey between Baghdad's Green Zone and the city's international airport is not for the faint-hearted. The RAF's Puma helicopters fly in pairs in darkness across the night sky. The "Baghdad Express" flies no more than 90m above the suburbs below, bobbing up and down and from side to side, to make it more difficult for any would-be attackers to take aim with rockets or mortars.
The doors on each side of the chopper are left often for the 15-minute flight to allow for the easy operation of the massive machine guns attached to the aircraft. An RAF gunner secured with a harness to the ceiling of the helicopter flits nervously from gun to gun, using his night-vision equipment to scan the ground below.
The darkness and silence among the small group of passengers is broken only by flares being fired from the helicopter to confuse any heat-seeking rockets that may be coming its way.
The RAF Pumas criss-cross the skies through the night, competing for air space among the incessant helicopter traffic above the Iraqi capital.
On the ground in Baghdad International Airport, the full scale of the US-led international coalition force is laid bare. All life is here; British and US troops and some Australians. Contractors chasing the massive pay cheques on offer mill around. Others dressed in civilian clothing are the secretive special forces of the UK and US military, as well as staff employed by controversial private security firms. Troops congregate in smoking areas and swap stories about gun battles. On the wall of a toilet cubicle, one soldier has scrawled the letters RIP. Beneath this, others have written the names of their fallen comrades along with the dates of their deaths.
The airport operates from desks in the open air beside the runways and from a series of temporary structures housing toilets and other basic amenities. Luggage is simply presented to staff, placed on a pallet and transported to the troop carrying aircraft by forklift. It is a truly no-frills approach. Passengers wait in line in the dimly lit reinforced concrete structures which have been put in place to protect from mortar or rocket attack. Passenger names are shouted, alerting them to their imminent departure times.
Among the British forces in Iraq are soldiers named Flynn, Mongan, Rooney, O'Neill, Whelan and Sheehan. These are the men from the island of Ireland, or of Irish extraction, who have joined the British army and are now stationed with its Irish Guards battalion in Iraq.
The Irish Guards have a no-alcohol policy during their six-month tour. Every soldier gets two weeks' leave to go home. While in Iraq, they must be available to work a seven-day week. Any down time is spent surfing the internet, watching TV or playing pool. There is even a church on the base, near Basra city in southern Iraq - St Patrick's Chapel - with a chaplain to meet their spiritual needs.
Aged 18, Guardsman Ollie Vaughey, originally from Shankill, south Dublin, but living in Belvedere, Drogheda, is the youngest soldier with the Irish Guards in Iraq. He joined the British army 14 months ago aged 16. He passed out in February after six months' training and found himself dispatched to Basra at the end of April.
"I was surprised to get sent out so fast," he says smoking a cigarette in 46-degree heat at the Shaiba airbase near Basra. "You get nervous sometimes. But when you get contact [ enemy fire] you just have to get out on the ground and deal with the situation." One of his brothers is a Marine, while another brother and his father are in the Irish Naval Service and Irish Army respectively. He concedes his parents are worried but says they were glad to see him better himself. "They wanted me to get out of the town because my town's a dead end. There's nothing to do unless you have a proper degree. I left school in fifth year."
Another soldier who joined up after dropping out of school is Guardsman Bernie Mongan. The 21-year-old is a member of the Irish Travelling community based in London. He spent his early life living in caravans "in fields, beside shopping centres, everywhere" across the UK. The family finally settled in a site under a flyover in Shepherd's Bush, in west London, called Stable Way.
"That site's been petrol-bombed before and lorries have tumbled over, it's not safe," he says in a distinct Traveller accent. His mother cried when he was sent to Iraq, while his father "couldn't be prouder". "He'll do the odd block-paving job to get a bit of money. Most of my uncles do it as well. They'd probably sell you a blind dog," he laughs.
Mongan joined the British army at the age of 18. "Ever since I was a wee baby watching films like The Guns of Navarone, I wanted to do something military-based. I always got asked questions when I joined, like: What do you put down as your postal address if you don't have a house?" He says he was shocked when a soldier he knew well, Lance Cpl Kirk Redpath, was killed in Iraq. "But I didn't cry over it. That sounds mean, but things like that happen."
Lance Cpl Eddie Rooney is a more seasoned campaigner. The 30-year-old single man from Ballyfermot, Dublin, has been in the British army for 12 years. Now four and a half months into a six-month deployment, this is his second time in Iraq. He first served here when the occupation began in 2003 and was in one of the first British wagons to roll into southern Iraq from Kuwait.
As a gunner on a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle, he was responsible for destroying enemy positions, usually militia firing from bunkers, with the tank's 30mm cannon and a large vehicle-mounted machine gun. "We kept going in and pounding them," he says of the 2003 operation in Basra.
He recalls one incident in which his Warrior vehicle was hit with rocket-propelled grenades as well as countless occasions on which mortar shells and small arms fire came his way. In one case an Iraqi insurgent opened fire at close quarters, to which he responded with lethal force.
"You have to say to yourself, 'it was me or him'. He woke up that morning and kissed his wife, his kids. He got that rifle and went out and he wanted to kill somebody. He wanted to send somebody back in a coffin to the UK. Unfortunately he wasn't that good a soldier or a terrorist."
Rooney was in Basra when his fellow Ballyfermot native, Lance Cpl Ian "Molly" Malone, was shot dead in 2003. "It's hard to take in. But you've got to put it to the back of your mind because you have a job to do." By the time Rooney's deployment ended in 2003, Basra had been taken by the British forces.
It was a time when the British were not under constant threat from mortar and rocket attacks and roadside bombs.
When he returned in late April for his current six-month tour, the militia groups were well organised and Rooney found a "very, very different ballgame". In 2003, when he heard gunfire it was a question of estimating how many kilometres away it was being fired. "Now you're hearing it and it's only metres away. When we were up in Baghdad we heard 14 rockets fired in the international [ Green] Zone in five minutes."
Like most of the Irish soldiers in Iraq who spoke to The Irish Times, Rooney said his family and friends had no difficulty with him joining the British army, despite the historic relationship between Britain and Ireland and the troubles in the North. "I got people calling me a Fenian or whatever when I joined but it's just banter with the lads," he says.
A soldier from Limerick, who did not want to be named, said he has not told many people at home he is in the British army for fear of being targeted.
"Obviously my family know but I just tell others that I'm working in England in construction. The Continuity IRA has a large grouping in Limerick, so I certainly wouldn't advertise what I do."
Another soldier said he would "be careful about what pubs I drink in" on visits home. However, he says, because most Irish men join the British army young and live in England, the reactions of people in Ireland to their membership of the army encroaches only minimally on their lives.
Regiment Sgt Maj Pearse Lally is the most senior non-commissioned officer from the Republic of Ireland in the Irish Guards. The 38-year-old from Coolock, Dublin, joined the British army aged 18. He enthuses about the travel and promotional opportunities the army has given him. He points out that both of his children are being put through quality boarding schools under a financial package provided by his employer.
He works alongside Lieut Col Michael O'Dwyer MBE, commanding officer of the Irish Guards in Iraq, to ensure their training policies are "drilled" into their 500 Irish Guard charges.
"It's life and death stuff," says Lally.
He was a senior gunner when the British forces first moved into Basra in 2003. He says that, while he and his comrades came under sustained rocket-propelled grenade attack, Basra was taken relatively quickly.
"We could patrol in berets; and here we are, four years on, you wouldn't dare go out on the street in berets." Like most of his colleagues, he believes much of the violence he has seen since arriving back in Iraq in late April has been sponsored by Iranian groups who want to bolster their own country's influence in the Middle East by plummeting Iraq into chaos, thus weakening it.
He identifies the training of the Iraqi army as the most important function of the Irish Guards during their six-month tour.
Lally is among 5,250 British troops still in Iraq. They are deployed in Basra, north of the Kuwaiti border and west of neighbouring Iran.
There were once 46,000 British troops controlling southern Iraq. However, troop numbers have been gradually scaled down, with an endgame now in sight.
Last month, the British army pulled out of its Basra Palace base in Basra city after an intense summer of shelling won it the unofficial title of "most bombed building in the world this year". It leaves Britain with just two remaining bases in southern Iraq.
The largest is the contingency operation base (Cob), just south of Basra city, which houses Basra airport. A sign at the airport explains that, while firearms may be carried on to military aircraft as hand luggage, "all sharp items must be surrendered in the bins provided."
The 5,000 men based in the Cob are charged with securing their own base by patrolling the perimeter fence. Their only other task is to run a supply route - named Operation Connemara - to the British army's only other base in the south, at Shaiba, 16km away.
About 120 British troops are stationed at Shaiba, an old airfield from which Iraqi bombers took off to bomb Iran during the Iraq-Iran war. Their only function is to train the Iraqi army, which, when large enough, will take over from the British. There is also a small British base in US-run Baghdad, where 60 men provide security for visiting British VIPs. The only time the British venture outside the Green Zone is to bring in supplies.
Apart from the training of the Iraqi army in Shaiba, the remaining troops have no operating role in either southern Iraq or Baghdad.
During the summer months, between 30 and 40 rockets or mortars rained down every day in the area south of Basra where the Cob is situated. (The situation got so dangerous that breeze-blocks were laid four high to create a wall around all soldiers' mattresses and a hardened cover was placed on top. These "Baghdad coffins", as they have become known, protect sleeping soldiers from flying mortar shrapnel.)
In Baghdad, mortars and rockets were fired over the small British barracks towards the US embassy in the Green Zone. In late August, the violence stopped. But once a six-month ceasefire period declared by Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ends next March, Shia attacks against the British in the south are likely to resume. Fighting between the Shia and Sunni groups in the north, as well as attacks by both on the coalition forces there, are also expected to intensify.
When The Irish Timesvisited Baghdad, four car bombs could be heard exploding in a two hour period close to the Green Zone one morning. The sound of hand gun and machine gun fire in the city was constant. The next day, two rockets were fired at the Cob base in Basra.
Capt Charlies Williams, from Bruree in Co Limerick and based in Basra, is the only officer from the Republic currently serving with the Irish Guards in Iraq. He did his year-long stint at Sandhurst after a four-year degree in pure maths at Edinburgh University.
A qualified jungle warfare instructor, the 28-year-old once survived a 1,200m parachute jump by landing on a shed roof in Kenya when his chutes failed to open during a training exercise that was, ironically, designed to combat his fear of heights. "I sped to earth and accepted I was going to die".
On his second tour in Iraq, Williams concedes, the security situation in Basra deteriorated to such an extent over the summer that the British were forced out of their Land Rovers and into armoured Warrior vehicles.
He witnessed four employees of a private security company being killed by a roadside bomb as he was travelling behind their convoy. "It was a massive noise, you feel the overpressure in your ears and you see a lot of smoke."
He says the British will not leave until the Iraqi army has been fully trained. "What you don't want to have is us pulling out and it turning into chaos and potentially civil war."
Up North in Baghdad, Platoon Sgt Mark Flynn from Tullamore, Co Offaly watches as his "30 blokes" practise convoy manoeuvres on the old Iraqi army's parade ground in the Green Zone, built by Saddam after the Iran-Iraq war.
The two entrances, one at either end of the parade ground, are marked by the iconic crossed-swords arches. Helmets worn by Iranian soldiers killed during the war were sunk into the concrete under the swords so Saddam's troops could walk over them.
One of the giant metal hands holding one of the crossed swords has been stripped away by vandals. "It was modelled on Saddam's hand," an American solider explains. The three grandstands from where VIPs reviewed the military parades have been vandalised, every glass pane has been broken and the building ransacked.
The place stands as a pathetic, garish reminder of Saddam's reign of terror, the ending of which by the US-led coalition has almost been forgotten now.
Sgt Flynn was in Basra Palace on the day in June when 86 rounds hit. "Apparently it was the peak of any of the [ tours in Iraq] in one day." Some of the young soldiers in his platoon have seen friends killed. "It's boys to men very quickly," he notes.
He says the urban terrorist tactics employed by the insurgents have been difficult to counter. However, the experience has done nothing to dampen his appetite for military life. Like many in the Irish Guards, he is already looking forward to his next overseas operational tour; six months in Afghanistan in 2010. "I think, with Afghanistan, the enemy is a bit more obvious. They seem to stand and fight. So the opportunity to cause attrition is immediately available."
Drill Sgt Tony Charles is from Inniskeen, Co Cork. The son of an Irish Guardsman, he applied to join the British army aged 16.
The 38-year-old is a veteran of six tours of Northern Ireland. He was first in Iraq during the 2003 occupation, organising supplies for 200 men on the move. On returning at the start of the summer he said he was "shocked" at the security situation.
"These guys are cleverer than the IRA. There also seems to be an awful lot of them. You'd have to say that until last month they were doing damage to us. Every time we went in the city we knew we were going to get taken on."
He says that, given the strategic location of Basra - the city closest to Iraq's only deep sea port, through which its oil exports flow - the region may remain troubled long-term.
"There's a power vacuum that happened after Saddam and nobody thought it through. Now we're picking up the pieces."
Embedded: the restrictions
The Irish Timesspent a week embedded with the Irish Guards at the invitation of the British Ministry of Defence. There were no reporting restrictions put in place and soldiers were interviewed on a one-to-one basis with no senior officers or Ministry of Defence personnel present.
Travel to Iraq was paid for by the Ministry of Defence. Travel into the region was by charter flight carrying troops from RAF Brize Norton near Oxford to Qatar.
Flights from Qatar to Basra and within Iraq were by military aircraft and helicopter. Accommodation was provided with the British troops in their bases in Basra and Baghdad. Armed soldiers accompanied all excursions outside the bases and an army officer was assigned as a guide for the visit.
The Irish Times was free to leave the planned itinerary at any time in favour of travelling independently within Iraq.