Article published in The Daily Mail, 1 August 2026. © Richard Kemp

Among the 800 men whose gravestones and memorial panels at the First and Second War World cemetery in Iraq were summarily pulverised on the orders of the Ministry of Defence, 130 were from a forerunner of my own regiment, the Royal Anglian.

So you can appreciate why I am appalled at such a callous disdain for the memory of the fallen.

It does not matter that some of these men died over a century ago, what matters is that they did so fighting for their country. Such patriotism and heroism should never be treated so shabbily.

The Army removed the headstones for their own safety in 2003, after British forces invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

No doubt the removal was carried out by soldiers in good faith that the stones would be replaced when the time was right.

But that faith was betrayed after 18 months, when it appears that the MoD decided the stones should be destroyed. Having fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can sympathise with soldiers given wrong-headed orders from London, clueless as to the reality on the ground.

In Kabul, we had intelligence of a planned coup d’etat on the parliament building. We understood that the thrust of the assault would be carried out by tanks. Only, when I proposed to lay anti-tank mines around the insurgents’ tank enclosure, the MoD’s response was one of horror – along the lines of ‘You do realise Afghanistan is the most land-mined country in the world?’ A few more to prevent huge political upheaval seemed a price worth paying to me, but we thwarted the coup nonetheless.

Soldiers follow orders, and those in Iraq who helped in the destruction of the headstones would have done so with a heavy heart. It must have been galling to know that a drainage ditch had been filled in a way that was so obscene to the memory of past British soldiers.

But what twists the knife is the evasiveness of the top brass. They have stonewalled the attempts of relatives of those buried there to (more…)