BASRA, Iraq (CNN) -- British forces have made their largest incursion into Basra, setting up a base inside Iraq's second-largest city.
At the outskirts of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, coalition forces skirmished with Iraqi troops.
BASRA, Iraq (CNN) -- A giant food distribution complex seized Wednesday by U.S. and British forces in this city grappling with hunger contained massive amounts of food.
Apart from the tiny coastline near Basra, Iraq is landlocked.
Pte Barber, of 2nd Battalion, was killed in Basra, Iraq, a year earlier after he was hit by a ricocheting bullet while he drove a Warrior armoured vehicle during a night operation.
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In Basra, a Shiite-majority port city in southern Iraq, a car bombing at a gathering of day laborers killed 13 people and wounded 50, according to an official in the Basra Command, Iraq's southernmost military detachment.
Abu Ahmed spent a total of 20 months in U.S. custody, between Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, outside Basra in southern Iraq.
Coalition forces have now largely brought under control all of major cities of south and central Iraq, including Basra, Nasiriya, Najaf, Hillah, Karbala and Baghdad, as well as Iraq's main port, Umm Qasr, and its southern oil fields.
The same request was expressed to British authorities concerning the Basra area in southern Iraq.
Earlier this month Halliburton won a deal to drill 15 wells in the Basra province in southern Iraq, though the financial terms have not been disclosed.
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Worries that going after Shia militias in Baghdad might have an impact on security in Basra and the rest of southern Iraq were dealt with by Defence Secretary Des Browne.
U.S. Special Forces and British troops Wednesday entered the huge complex, located on the outskirts of Basra, northwest of the center of Iraq's second-largest city, British military forces said.
The difficulty of determining who is responsible for the chaos in Iraq can be seen in Basra, in the Shiite south, where British forces had earlier presided over a relatively secure area.
Bechtel engineers who meet with the Southern Iraq Electricity Co. in Basra each Sunday left a meeting thinking one substation was ready to go fully online, only to return a week later to find it had been completely stripped.
British troops took control of territory around Basra but faced resistance from guerrilla units within Iraq's second city.
As a senior diplomat told me, I feel optimistic about the future of Iraq and then I think of Basra.
Less than a week after that departing U.S. convoy drove through the border gates, the U.S. military put out a press release: A U.S. Forces-Iraq soldier was killed today in Basra while conducting operations in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
But no one is at all certain that harmony will persist when most of the Americans, who have recently taken over the leading foreign role in Basra from the British, themselves withdraw from Iraq in little over a year, if Barack Obama sticks to his proposed schedule.
As a hub for Iraq's largest oil fields, Basra could have the financial clout to make that happen.
Jassim also denied reports that a major oil pipeline had been attacked in Basra, but the strike was later confirmed by Iraq's Southern Oil Company.
Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, has what's being called the best newspaper in town.
Next year, it will also become home to the Basra Wall - a memorial dedicated to those killed in Iraq.
Iraq's prime minister has given gunmen in Basra three days to hand over their weapons.
And the Mehdi Army and Badr Brigades -- the principal combatants in the Basra region -- are hardly the only militias at arms in Iraq.
One of his first jobs was to manage an insulation project in Iraq at Khor al-Zobair, 50 miles southeast of Basra.
With such riches around it and Iraq's only port on its doorstep, the city of Basra could become a wealthy oil hub.
Like it or not, Iraq fell to the British share, and Gertrude Bell, who had already been working in Basra and Baghdad as Oriental secretary since 1916, liked it enough to feel passionately that this was a magnificent opportunity.
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