Meet the Head of the New Iraqi Navy

March 19, 2007 — -- Thamir Nasser is a sailor, so he knows which way the wind is blowing -- in every sense.

In 1991, during the first Gulf War when he was in Saddam Hussein's navy, he jumped off of his missile patrol boat onto a jetty seconds before an American jet destroyed the vessel with a rocket. "I saw a big flash behind me," he said.

Today, he is Commodore Thamir Nasser, head of the new Iraqi navy, and he knows the wind is blowing from the south -- specifically, from the wealthy Persian Gulf states, who all want to trade with Iraq by sea.

His job now, he said, is to protect those shipping lanes. As the main roads out of Iraq have been mostly cut off by insurgents, the majority of Iraq's trade moves through this port in the south of the country.

Nasser, 45, was born in Basra and graduated from the Britannia Royal Naval College in 1986. He was one of many Iraqis whom Saddam sent to Britain for education in the 1980s.

The U.S.-led coalition, having disbanded Iraq's Saddam-era navy, appointed Nasser commodore of the new force in 2004 and gave him the job of building a new Iraqi navy. He now has a modestly sized fleet: 29 small patrol boats and 1,000 sailors, one-tenth the size of the prewar navy.

Early on, fighting pirates was his first priority. In the first days after the March 2003 invasion, ships loaded with air conditioners, refrigerators and secondhand cars had to run a gauntlet of speedboats manned by heavily armed pirates looking to steal money and valuables. Nasser launched a crackdown, searching every boat and ship. Now, he said, "It is no more. No more piracy."

He has moved on to smugglers. "We catch many dhows [wooden-hulled fishing boats] smuggling sheep and camels and even diesel [fuel]," he said. Nasser said he has cut smuggling to 20 percent of 2004 levels, but needs more ships to stamp it out completely.

He worries about the safety of his wife and five children. Shiite militias operate rackets in the port, and he fears becoming a target. But Nasser is generally optimistic for the future, particularly for southern Iraq.