RICHARD WILLIAMS: As an ex-SAS officer I understand how many British troops Iran has killed. That’s why I imagine we should face the evil – and battle

After they were beaten and thrown to the floor, they were executed by shooting, one at a time, in cold blood. No mercy, just maximum distress – with each survivor watching the death of his mates until it was his turn.

Such was the brutal fate of the six Royal Military Policemen in Majar Al-­Kabir, southern Iraq, on June 24, 2003.

They were in that sun-baked town to keep order after the fall of Saddam ­Hussein and to help train local police recruits. Their killers were not Iraqi insurgents but heartless members of Iran‘s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operating covertly in the country, intent on destruction and ensuring Western attempts to stabilise Iraq would fail.

These Special Forces assassins from Iran ended the naive fantasy that the British Army could exert military influence in the Middle East by patrolling in berets and soft-skinned vehicles and drinking tea with local sheiks.

It was a violent and expensive wake-up call. In Iraq, notwithstanding some exceptional displays of bravery – Victoria Crosses and Military Crosses were won deservedly – Britain lost 136 service personnel between March 2003 and April 2009 with the vast majority killed by the IRGC and their bloodthirsty ­proxies in the country.

All those carried in the flag-covered coffins through the patriotic ceremonies at Royal Wootton Bassett, were placed there at the express direction of Tehran. The regime’s orders, relayed to their agents in Iraq and often intercepted by our ­intelligence beforehand, were ­simple and warlike: keep killing them, with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), mortars, mines and shootings until they leave Iraq and the Iraqis to us.

Always ruthless in execution, merciless and clinical, they achieved their bloody aim, with our final exit marked by a grubby, undignified and humiliating deal that left the country in ruins and handed power in Iraq to one of their political allies.

I offer this insight about Iran’s role in the Iraq conflict to highlight, in ways that only our countrymen’s blood can, what we are dealing with in the Middle East at this moment.

Defence Secretary John Healey speaks to military personnel on his visit to the Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, London, last week

As a former commanding officer of 22 SAS Regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan, I ­witnessed the brutally effective and sinister IRGC at work close-hand. It gave me an understanding of the utter evil that is the Iranian regime as it spread terror and carnage on a scale never experienced in the UK.

We have to take that evil seriously, which is why I believe that today’s war on Iran is a just war. We have let the regime fester and grow since the Revolution in 1979 as a result of the cowardice and indecision of our ­political leaders.

Iraq wasn’t the end of the mullahs’ campaign against us, for that same IRGC had deep and long-standing relationships with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. They were well placed to equip the Taliban with the IEDs and weapons needed to create hell for us as we moved our forces from Iraq to Helmand.

Expecting to recover our reputation as counter-insurgency experts and hopefully without a shot being fired (as the then-Defence Secretary John Reid declared optimistically) this too ended in disaster. In spite of herculean efforts and courage, the British lost another 457 in this second Iranian-supported killing zone before we finally returned home.

For the Americans, the ­failure of the British to hold ground in southern Iraq against Iranian pressure had even more deadly consequences. As our forces fell back to the temporary safety of Basra palace, they left open an unpatrolled province that became the main supply route into Baghdad and central Iraq for the Iranians’ deadly off-route mines or explosively formed penetrators, that detonate next to a vehicle rather than underneath them, had killed more than 600 US soldiers by 2011.

The Defence Secretary flanks Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at an RAF base in Oxfordshire

The numbers maimed in body and mind by these weapons add up to many multiples of those killed, such was their dreadful efficiency.

And as with all strategic campaigns run by espionage agents, the Iranian campaign against Britain didn’t end when the troops left.

Skilled in subversion and determined to further weaken any long-term Western threat to their position, they became masters at feeding the poorly-conceived and badly-run Iraq Historic Allegations Team, as well as a hungry British media and London-based bandwagon lawyers, with convincing witnesses to alleged breaches of ‘human rights’ by our brave forces in Iraq.

Those lawyers included the disgraceful Phil Shiner who was given a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to three counts of legal aid fraud, and struck off for pursuing false torture and murder claims against British troops.

In this way, the Revolutionary Guard-sponsored ‘lawfare’ became a deliberate act of state subversion. Hard to execute in the US but easy in a Britain, whose Army is being held accountable to human rights legislation that effectively outlaws most forms of combat.

The IRGC worked out that they don’t have to kill us on the battlefield to keep us away; they just need to turn our own laws against us. Nothing kills martial spirit more than an ever-present threat of legal action. Again, I say all this not as an ill-­considered attempt to stir a cry for vengeance, nor as armchair wisdom, but to point out just how lethal the Iranian regime has been.

As a former commanding officer of 22 SAS Regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan, I witnessed the sinister Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at work close-hand, writes Richard Williams

While our leaders debate international law, pontificate about the contractual definition of alliances or huff and puff about President Trump and his unique and challenging style, the truth is Iran had to be confronted sooner rather than later.

This is an utterly ruthless enemy that seeks now to develop nuclear weapons for the express purpose of destroying other nations; a regime that routinely stops by bloody massacre any dissent from within its own population; and a theocracy that sees our naive tolerance as an opportunity for state- sponsored subversion.

If you don’t believe me, just ask any of those Iranians who fled their country and have suffered the soul-twisting, bloody loss of so many friends and family.

As I watch the events unfold in the Middle East and the reaction to the predictable weaponisation of the oil price, and listen to the red-faced, wet-palmed performances in Westminster, I recall the raised voice of the then-UK Defence Secretary Des Browne in 2007, when he insisted to me as Commanding Officer 22 SAS that, in spite of all the intelligence and evidence to the contrary, ‘Iran is not Britain’s enemy in southern Iraq’.

He was wrong about that then, just as those are today who still maintain that the IRGC is not a terrorist organisation. Or who insist that negotiating with Iran will deliver anything other than further death and more humiliation. Or indeed that failing to support the US does anything other than strengthen Tehran’s hand.

Sometimes, the pearl- clutching international ‘conflict resolution’ experts are wrong. And the only way to salve any dignity as a nation or as an individual is to face the evil and fight.

Richard Williams is a former SAS commanding officer.