127th British soldier killed in Iraq
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
London, Dec 29, IRNA
UK Death-Iraq
A British soldier was killed by roadside bomb while on patrol near the city of Basra in southern Iraq, the Ministry of Defence in London announced Friday.
The soldier, who has yet to be named, was said to have been taking part in a routine patrol in a Warrior Armoured Fighting Vehicle, when it was targeted.
He was reported to have been seriously injured before being airlifted to a field hospital at Shaibah Logistics Base, where he died later. There were no other casualties reported in the incident.
His death takes the number of UK service personnel who have died since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to 127. Of those, 96 died in action, while the rest were in accidents or of natural causes and illnesses or remain unexplained.
More than half of the British deaths have been in the period since sovereignty was handed back to the Iraqis in June 2004 with the toll rising to 27 this year compared with 13 in 2005.
News of the latest fatality came as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams warned in an interview that the political mistakes of going to war had "put our own troops increasingly at risk in ways that I find deeply disturbing."
It also comes after the head of British forces in southern Iraq made an unprecedented appeal on Wednesday for support for the 7,200 troops deployed under his command.
The warning by Major General Richard Shirreff that the military covenant between the nation and its soldiers was "seriously out of kilter" coincides with the British government coming under growing pressure to set a timetable to withdraw the troops from Iraq after admissions that the war had become a disaster.
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