BASRA, Iraq - Britain handed over security to Iraqi forces on Sunday in the last of four provinces it once patrolled, effectively marking the end of nearly five years of British control of southern Iraq.
Thousands of Iraqi police and troops marked the handover with a parade along the palm-fringed embankment in Basra, the country's second-biggest city, in a show of Iraqi military force on a scale unseen since the days of Saddam Hussein.
They drove past in heavy tanks, armoured vehicles, pick-up trucks with mounted machine guns and police patrol cars with flashing lights. Iraqi helicopters buzzed overhead and gunboats sailed up the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which leads to the Gulf.
"Today we stand at a historic juncture and a special day, one of the greatest days in the modern history of Basra," provincial governor Mohammed Mosbah al-Waeli said at a ceremony held in the departure lounge at Basra airport, where a scaled-down British force now has its last remaining base.
Control of Basra province will be the biggest test yet of the Iraqi government's ability to keep the peace without relying on troops from either the United States or its main ally.
The province, site of Iraq's second-largest city, its only major port and nearly all its oil exports, is far wealthier and more populous than any of the other eight of Iraq's 18 provinces previously placed under formal Iraqi control.
The British commander, Major-General Graham Binns, said Iraqi security forces had "proved that they are capable".
"I came to rid Basra of its enemies but I now formally hand Basra back to its friends," said Binns, who also led the force that captured the city from Saddam's troops in 2003.
RESIDENTS OPTIMISTIC
Basra is a lively place, with restaurants open late and little of the barricaded siege mentality of the capital, Baghdad. The mainly Shi'ite south escaped the sectarian warfare that killed tens of thousands in central and northern Iraq.
