Lieutenant-Colonel Gerhard Wheeler, Commanding Officer, 1st Battalion The Royal Welch Fusiliers studies names on the Basra War Memorial, Iraq, 2004

Digital photograph by Warrant Officer 2 Giles Penfound, Army Media Operations, 2004.

The Basra War Memorial, designed by Edward Warren, commemorates over 40,500 Commonwealth service personnel who died in the operations in Mesopotamia from Autumn 1914 to August 1921. It was unveiled in March 1929 in the naval dockyard at Maqil but was later moved to a location outside Basra by the Saddam Hussein regime.

In 2004 soldiers of The 1st Battalion The Royal Welch Fusiliers, serving in Iraq on Operation TELIC as part of a six month deployment, took part in a ceremony of remembrance for British Army soldiers who died in Mesopotamia during World War One (1914-1918). The soldiers led by Lieutenant-Colonel Wheeler and Battalion Chaplain Captain Mike Parker paid tribute to the fallen in a dawn ceremony by the imposing memorial. After a minute silence the Regimental Sergeant Major broke the silence with a reading from John 15:9-17, 'They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn: At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.'.

One of a collection of photographs relating to Operation TELIC 4.