The passage of time has done little to ease the pain for Sandra and John Hyde. Their son Ben was killed by a 600-strong mob in June 2003 in one of the most notorious incidents of the Iraq war.
Ben, 23, was among six Redcap military policemen massacred at a police station in the town of Majar al Kabir near Basra.
Sgt Simon Hamilton-Jewell, 41, Cpl Russell Aston, 30, Cpl Paul Long, 24, Cpl Simon Miller, 21, and L/Cpl Tom Keys, 20, died at Ben’s side, trying to negotiate with the angry crowd without firing a shot.
At the time it was the British forces’ biggest single loss of life since the Falklands conflict.
The families say the deaths were avoidable. They were refused a second inquest by the European Court of Human Rights in 2019.
The men did not have enough ammunition, just 50 rounds each, and no satellite phone.
John, still working at 75 and raising money in his son’s name, said: “The military police repeatedly asked for sat phones and were told there weren’t any. Yet there were 29 in the Battle Group HQ. If they’d been given them and called for support the outcome may have been different.”
Sandra, 77, a retired clerical worker who has been treated for bladder cancer, recalls Ben leaving for the fateful mission. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll be back’”, she said. “Of course, he never did come back.”
The Hydes learned of their only child’s death on June 24, 2003. Sandra said: “You never forget the knock on the door.
“There was a man in a dog collar and I knew straight away something was wrong. When I saw the blackened police station where they died on the TV, I thought ‘Oh my God, he was burnt to death’. But they had set the station alight after they got the bodies out.
“If he had more bullets, Ben might have been with us now. If he had a sat phone, they could have got in touch for help.”
His home town of Northallerton, North Yorks, has not forgotten Ben, a Lance Corporal in the Royal Military Police. There is a street named after him, and the Lance Corporal Ben Hyde Trust continues to raise money for good causes.
John said: “I’m very aware of the anniversary. We have an annual charity dinner, and this year, it is held 20 years to the day since they lost their lives.”
The 2016 report by Sir John Chilcot into the Iraq War found then-Prime Minister Tony Blair had deliberately exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein and went to war before peaceful options had been fully explored.
John said: “The Chilcot report was a waste of millions of pounds as it achieved nothing whatsoever. I’ve always maintained someone in the chain of command had the responsibility; the men should’ve been properly equipped. The army has never admitted liability.”
At the time of Ben’s last phone call home, the Hydes had Ben’s girlfriend Sarah Tash, then a Leeds University student, staying at their home. He was going to ask her to marry him when he returned but he never got the chance.
This summer John and a team will walk the Thames Path for the charity, in memory of the “peacemaker, who lost his life so others could live in peace”. John said: “We’ve raised almost £200,000. I could talk about Ben all day, he was a better person than I’ll ever be, the fund has helped so many.”
* For more information see lancecorporalbenhydetrust.org.uk
Warnings on post-Saddam tribal conflict were ignored
British former intelligence officer who was in Baghdad at the beginning of the insurgency.
Early 2004 we hosted a dinner for senior US staff from the Coalition Provisional Authority.
I sat next to a colonel who was part of the invasion planning team and an advisor to Paul Bremer, head of the CPA.
Insurgency violence grew at an alarming rate following Bremer’s disastrous CPA order No1: getting rid of the Ba’ath Party of Iraq. The infrastructure in Iraq was
broken, increasingly without electricity, water.
Law and order was not existent and this rang alarm bells and coalition forces were in denial.
But we were able to travel throughout Iraq and talk to Iraqis, hear their experiences and growing resentment. The invasion was met with hope and you could see this ebb away as they faced increasing danger.
There was infighting between the US State Department and Department of Defense.
CIA assessments concluded in the aftermath of an initial US military victory, significant ethnic political conflict was likely.
Intelligence assessments on post-Saddam issues were particularly insightful. But it seems nobody listened.
Our job was protect the innocents... and it still is
UK Army veteran Major Chris Hunter, awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal, is a former special forces bomb technician.
I was commanding a specialist airborne Explosive Ordnance Disposal team.
Within days of arriving my team and I experienced the horrors of war.
Tasked with clearing roadside bombs left behind by insurgents who were trying to kill our soldiers and Iraqi civilians, we were there to “bring peace and stability”.
Four days later we were ambushed. My second in command I were both shot.
It was our first close combat and the first time we took lives on the front line of a brutal war that left a country in ruins. Now I am back in Iraq working for a humanitarian aid agency helping to clear the half a million IEDs left by ISIS.
The landscape has changed, the enemy has changed, but the mission remains the same: protect the innocents and give them a better life.
Despite years of conflict, Iraqi people have defied all odds, rebuilding communities, starting new businesses, and sending children to school, a testament to the human spirit.
But ISIS is still very real and so is their use of IEDs.
An invasion built on weak foundations
The US-led Iraq invasion 20 years ago on Monday sparked a bloody war and helped create a horrific terrorist group.
Led by the US under President George W Bush, 200,000 troops stormed Iraq, 40,000 of them British. They reached capital Baghdad within weeks.
It had been claimed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a terror threat, neither of which turned out to be factual.
Hundreds of thousands were killed, including thousands of US troops and 179 Brits.
For over a year the US and Britain had furiously debated the war. More than a million protested it in London.
But despite the lack of evidence al-Qaeda was in Iraq or that Saddam had WMDs, war went ahead.
Saddam was overthrown but within months a brutal insurgency was taking hold. Sectarian violence broke out and Western troops fought daily battles.
First al-Qaeda in Iraq arrived with a series of bomb attacks before its brutality was surpassed by Islamic State. This group, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, still exists in Iraq and local security forces are still fighting it.
In 2009 then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown asked Sir John Chilcot to investigate the UK’s role in the war.
In 2016 his inquiry ruled that the war was based on flawed intelligence.
Exclusively in the Mirror, veterans and parents of a murdered soldier have their say.
