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, |
When I got here, we were practicing against bags, ... Players were holding up bags because we couldn't practice against other players. They weren't big enough. Now we're building depth and creating quality players in practice. |
When that condition has been met, we will hand over the lead in counter-terrorism to the Iraqis, |
When you have stability, it will be time to depart, |
When they develop the security forces to the level where they can take control of that counter-terrorism, we will hand over that to the Iraqis themselves, |
While we are in Afghanistan we are defending people in Britain, the US and the rest of the world by denying terrorists a base from which to plan their operations, |
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, |