John Reid Iraqi Quotations

While we take what happened seriously, and I stand by everything that our commander on the spot did, don't let's take one incident like that and try to pretend that it reflects the whole of even the Iraqi police force,

We are not saying that everyone will be out by the end of 2006 but we are saying that this process - despite the terrorist attempts to destroy it - is going relatively well, and, in the course of the next year, we could well see the handover to Iraqi forces at certain places in Iraq, including in our own area,

There has not been a fundamental breakdown in trust between the British government and the Iraqi government,

What happened yesterday was that two of our service men were arrested by Iraqi police and under the law as it stands they should have been handed back to the military authorities,

This decision will be taken by the British government, at the request of the Iraqi democratically elected representatives,

This is about 500 fewer than at present, reflecting the closure of two small bases in Basra, the transfer of some training tasks to the Iraqi security forces and structural differences between the two brigades,

I can confirm that the two British service personnel detained earlier today by the Iraqi Police Service have now been released and are back with British forces in Multi-National Division (South East),