This article is part of a series documenting civilian deaths in Basra during British control from 2003 to 2009. Drawing on testimony, eyewitness accounts and archival records, the series examines incidents—often uninvestigated and absent from official histories—that reveal the risks of urban occupation and the lasting effects on the families involved. Britain entered Iraq in March 2003 as part of the United States-led coalition to remove Saddam Hussein. Its area of responsibility was the south, centred on Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and a key oil hub. Geography and political calculation shaped that role: British forces could advance directly from Kuwait, and ministers believed the city’s Shia majority might be more receptive to coalition forces than Sunni areas elsewhere. About 46,000 troops took part in the invasion, with the 1st (UK) Armoured Division leading the push into Basra. Resistance was uneven, some Iraqi units surrendered, others fought short engagements before withdrawing, but the urban setting made civilian casualties more likely and harder to investigate. This report, undertaken during a trip to Iraq in June 2025, examines one such case, part of a wider effort to record the human cost of the occupation.
Warning: this post contains distressing images, posted here as evidential proof of death – without claiming full knowledge of the circumstances leading to those deaths.
Ahmed Quasem Drbash still works in the same garage he has run for decades, a low-roofed workshop on First Line Street in Basra, filled with the smell of oil and the hammer of engines battered in a heat that touches on 50 degrees.
He co-owns it with his brothers, as he has done since the time of Saddam Hussein “He was my right hand,” he says quietly, recalling the day he died. “When I come here, I remember him.”
That death came in 2008, in circumstances the family still cannot fully explain. On the day in question, Ahmed and his younger brother Nasser (known formally as Muntsar Quasem Drbash) were working side by side among the cars, jeeps and trucks. It was hot, the kind of dry Basra afternoon when the metal roofs trap the heat. Outside, the Mahdi Army had planted a roadside bomb near Karama School. British troops, already engaged in a tense city, removed the device without detonation.
Then a firefight erupted between the militia and the British soldiers. Ahmed says it lasted long enough for people to take shelter.
By around four o’clock the shooting had stopped. The brothers closed the garage for the day. Nasser walked home along the dusty streets to his modest house on Semsi Street, a poor area where roofs were corrugated metal and walls unfinished. His wife, 29-year-old Donia Noori, was inside with their children—three-year-old Noor and one-year-old Murtada.
Ahmed, meanwhile, went fishing by the river.
What happened next has never been investigated by the British military. Ahmed says two British Apache helicopters were flying over the area when he got a phone call from a friend: “Your brother’s house has been hit.” The caller told him there had been three rockets. The explosions were so precise that no other homes were damaged.
“They were poor people,” says Ahmed. “He had no connection to the Mahdi Army, no weapons in the house: only a child’s hunting rifle. He was a simple man. If he wanted to fight, he would not be with his children.”
Nasser and the two children died instantly. Donia was pulled from the rubble and taken to hospital, but died at around 8pm. Ahmed and his older brother Karim went to the morgue, where they saw the bodies for the first time.
“Part of the shoulder was gone, the head open,” Karim recalls. “The boy had lost both lower arms.” They buried the boy with his father, and the girl with her mother, in Najaf.
Only one Iraqi media outlet—Al-Alam—reported the killings. A local journalist had gone to the house, photographed the scene, and later sent the images to the family. There was no British military presence at the site afterwards, no forensic collection of fragments, no interviews with witnesses.
Karim tried to file a complaint. At the time, British forces had taken over Basra’s TV and radio centre as a base. When Karim and his elderly mother approached the gates, they say soldiers raised rifles and fired into the air. It is impossible to corroborate this.
“My mother pulled me back and said, ‘Don’t be a martyr,’” Karim says. They left without making their case. A local lawyer said he could take on the matter for a fee of $40,000; well beyond the family’s means. They never heard from any British lawyer or official.
For Ahmed, the absence of accountability is as bitter as the loss itself. “We don’t want compensation,” he says. “We want the pilot to face justice. You can’t kill children. You can’t hit the wrong target.”
He is certain the attack was deliberate – something that cannot be verified. “The rockets hit in the middle of the house. There was no fighting from there. They must have seen.”
When British troops first entered Basra in 2003, the Drbash family were among those who welcomed them with flowers.
“We thought they would bring democracy, comfort,” Ahmed says. “We were happy.” He even laughs grimly at the memory: “We threw roses at them—and they threw missiles at our home.”
Yet, even after the death of four members of his family, Ahmed says he still considers the British more civil than the Americans, who he believes treated Iraqis with greater hostility.
“But this,” he adds, “this was wrong.”
If these events occurred as described, they took place in the middle years of Britain’s six-year occupation of Basra. By then, hopes for stability had given way to militia control, criminal violence and insurgency. Mistakes were made, tragedies forged, but justice was rarely served.
The Ministry of Defence maintains that British forces used proportionate force and sought to protect civilians. Yet incidents like the killing of the Drbash family often ever appear to have entered the official record. Whether the strike was based on mistaken intelligence, misidentification, or disregard for civilian safety remains unknown. What is unquestionable is that the journalist’s photograph of that day showed bodies killed in an explosive attack, and that the universal claim of those close to the family is that such an attack came from helicopters.
From the outset, Ahmed’s opinion of the British was shaped by both hospitality and loss. “They are better than the Americans,” he says, “but they must not kill children.”
His words echo across a war where such deaths were often written out of history, for whatever reason.
By the time Britain withdrew its last combat troops from Basra in 2009, the city had endured years of militia rule, sectarian violence and political upheaval. Incidents like the Drbash family’s killing remain preserved only in personal testimony – detailed accounts from those who lived through them, but all too often absent from the histories compiled in London.
This report is one of many in the Ghosts of War – Iraq series, which seeks to piece together the human toll of British military operations in Basra between 2003 and 2009. Each case presents its own evidentiary challenges: the absence of formal investigations, the loss of records, and the distortions of memory over time. Yet taken together, these accounts form an alternative record of the occupation, one in which civilian deaths are neither abstract nor incidental, but central to understanding the war’s legacy.
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