Kut, which is defended by another group of Republican Guards, the Baghdad Division, was the scene of one of the greatest humiliations to befall the British Army when, in 1916, an attempt to reach Baghdad failed and some 13,000 British troops were captured after being besieged by the Turks in the First World War. Few survived captivity.Prospects look better this time, the British commanders hope. Some 500 Iraqis have been killed in the past two days in the sweep through southern Iraq. Allied generals yesterday morning, acknowledged that, in the words of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, US General Richard Myers, “we think the toughest fighting is ahead of us”.Fears by some military analysts that the swift advance has dangerously overextended and exposed the Allied lines of support and supply are primarily based on the experiences in the Nasiriyah region where the most protracted clashes with Iraqi forces have been – and where US Marines have sustained their largest casualties so far. It is also where the only American prisoners of war were taken (apart, that is, from the two Apache helicopter pilots who were named yesterday as Chief Warrant Officer Ronald Young, 26, and Chief Warrant Officer David Williams, 30).By yesterday, though, things had begun to change at Nasiriyah.

Although the area was still not totally secure, substantial numbers of US forces began to pass through the town. Over a two-hour period, a convoy of hundreds of tanks, armoured vehicles and lorries passed through a protective corridor of armour in the hostile city and over the Euphrates to begin the 230-mile journey north-west to Baghdad.Their difficulties were not over. Despite an air strike that killed at least 30 Iraqis, the convoy met a fresh ambush on the road north.The ambivalence of the rest of the world to all this emerged in various forms. The South Korean parliament will hardly have given cheer to Washington with its decision to postpone, until next month, a vote on sending non-combat troops to Iraq. The Turks – who have sent an entire US division on a long sea journey from the aborted northern front to the Gulf where it will not land for another 10 days – braced themselves for a visit by the US envoy Zalmay Zhalilzad for talks to try to heal a rift between Washington and Ankara over the refusal to allow troops on to Turkish soil. And in Europe critics of the war continue to operate on a variety of fronts.In Britain, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, broke the silence he has maintained since fighting began with a critique of “the underlying weaknesses and moral inconsistencies that have led us to a situation where our leaders have concluded that we have no alternative to war”. He called for nations “urgently to develop better methods of working together” on international law, proposed a reform of the UN Security Council and pressed the need to rebuild “broken or threatened bonds of trust with allies not involved in military action”.How far such healing has to go was clear from a newspaper article by Joschka Fischer, Germany’s Foreign Minister, who was scathingly dismissive of any attempts, post-war, to rebuild the world in the image of the United States.

And the announcement that France would unveil proposals this week to give greater powers to the European Commission showed the contrary direction in which thinking was going in Paris.Back on the battlefield, things were changing to the south in Basra. Early yesterday, British military commanders announced that the status of Basra had changed. The city had now become “a military objective” because of the amount of resistance encountered there. Originally, the plan at Basra was to isolate the city and bypass it. The hope was only small pockets of trouble would be encountered in the mostly Shia city where, in 1991, the people rose up against President Saddam and his largely Sunni followers.