In Remembrance: Lance Corporal Ryan Francis — 2 Royal Welsh, Basra, 7 July 2007
Lance Corporal Ryan Lee Francis, 2nd Battalion The Royal Welsh, was killed in Basra on 7 July 2007. He was 23, from Llanelli, and was known as “Franky” to his friends and comrades.
Ryan was a personal friend of mine. I do not need to make that relationship more dramatic than it was, and I am not going to invent stories simply to make this page more emotional. It matters to me that he is remembered here as a person I knew, as well as a soldier whose death sits inside the TELIC 10 history.
Recce Platoon and TELIC 10
Ryan joined the 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Wales in 2003 and was serving in the merged Royal Welsh by TELIC 10. The MOD record states that this was his third Iraq tour. He had previously served in Sniper Platoon and was promoted to Lance Corporal in December 2006.
On TELIC 10 he deployed with A Company as a Warrior driver and was a member of the battle group’s Recce Platoon. His officers remembered a junior commander who worked hard, took responsibility easily and used humour to keep morale up around him.
7 July 2007
Shortly after midnight, Ryan was taking part in a large-scale operation in Basra aimed at detaining insurgents who had been attacking British and Iraqi security forces. He was driving a Warrior when an improvised explosive device detonated against the patrol in northern Basra.
Ryan was killed in the blast. The operation continued amid several separate contacts and attacks that night. From my own TELIC 10 memories, that relentless pattern of threat is what made Basra feel so different by then. You could come through one contact or one attack and still know the day was nowhere near finished.
Remembering Franky
The official tributes repeatedly return to the same qualities: loyalty to the team, an easy manner, hard work and a humour that could lift a platoon when conditions were difficult. His platoon commander described him as one of the people who could communicate how the soldiers around him were feeling while still making them laugh.
For me, this one is simpler. Ryan was my friend. His death is part of the TELIC 10 story, but it is also one of the reasons that story can never be just a sequence of operations, dates and maps. There were people inside it, and some of them did not come home.
Return to Log 047 — Operation TELIC campaign guide →
Official remembrance record
Ministry of Defence — Lance Corporal Ryan Francis, 7 July 2007 →
Image note: The official MOD remembrance page contains Ryan’s portrait, but the photograph is marked “All rights reserved”, so I have not reproduced it here without permission.
