The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

The forward dressing station of the Iraqi army’s southern front was a grim little place and the long smears of dried blood on the floor were witness to the sacrifice the Iraqi army was having to make for ‘the whirlwind war’. The senior medical orderly was quite matter-of-fact about it. ‘This is an old building and the Iranians have it on all their maps,’ he said. ‘They will fire at it and there will be more casualties.’ He gave me a mirthless grin. Three minutes later, the Iranian shells began coming in, sending the Iraqi gunners jumping into their pits.

The driver of an army jeep on the Khorramshahr-Shalamcheh highway – supposedly safe and long secure in Iraqi hands – was burned to death when Iranian shells rained down on his convoy. Not one major Iranian city had fallen to Baghdad and, with the exception of Qasr-e Shirin to the north, all that the Iraqis had so far captured was 3,000 square kilometres of brown, waterless desert, a shabby landscape of rock and sand from which the Iranians very sensibly withdrew to fight on from the hills.

When Gavin Hewitt and I asked to visit the military hospital in Basra, we were given permission within two minutes and nobody tried to prevent us talking to the wounded soldiers inside. All the casualties told the same stories, of surprise attacks by Iranian helicopter gunships – the Cobras sold to the Shah by the Americans – and Phantom jets suddenly swooping from the east. A badly burned tank crewman described how he heard the sound of jet engines only a second before a rocket hit his tank, covering a quarter of his body in blazing petrol. A private in the Iraqi army’s transport command was blown from his jeep south of Ahwaz by a rocket fired from an Iranian helicopter; as he lay in the road, a Phantom appeared from the sun and bombed his colleagues who were staggering from the wrecked vehicle.

By 5 October, the Iraqis entered Khorramshahr at last, and we went with them. We found a burning, smashed city and just one old Arab Iranian – sole representative of the millions of Arabs of ‘Arabistan’ whom Saddam was seeking to ‘save’ – squatting on the stone floor of his mud home, a man with deep lines on his face and a white beard, brewing tea for an Iraqi soldier and ignoring the questions of strangers. He had been ‘liberated’. This, after all, was the city where the representative of the Iranian embassy siege gunmen in London came from, the city he called al-Mohammorah. This was to be Saddam’s Danzig, the desert beyond was his Sudetenland. The Iraqis were going to rescue the Arabs of Iran, but we could only walk down one main street of the city, a battered thoroughfare of broken telegraph poles and blackened, single-storey shops where tired Iraqi troops, their faces stained with mud, sat on doorsteps and talked under the cover of sheets of corrugated iron.

General Adnan Khairallah, the Iraqi defence minister and Saddam’s first cousin, had offered a ceasefire to the Iranians – to show Iraq’s ‘peaceful intentions’ in front of the world rather than any Iraqi desire to withdraw from Iranian territory – but six and a half hours after the unilateral truce came into effect, the Iranians opened fire on occupied Khorramshahr. We had been sitting in the courtyard of a broken villa near the Karun river, listening to a Colonel Ramseh of the Iraqi army – his eyes bloodshot, head hanging with fatigue – as he claimed that his troops had taken control of the city and its harbour, when shells showered down onto the houses and orchards around us.

‘Please go now because it is not safe,’ a brigadier pleaded as explosions began to crash around the bridge at the end of the street. An Iraqi commando was led through the gate, blood dribbling down his right cheek from a shrapnel wound. The Iraqi Special Forces soldiers – no longer laughing and making their familiar victory signs at journalists – sat round the edge of an empty fish pond and stared at us glumly. Iranian Revolutionary Guards were still holding out in the heavily damaged buildings on the western side of the Karun and they drove six Chieftain tanks past the central post office, firing shells at the nearest Iraqi command post until one of them was hit by a rocket. Running from the villa, I had just enough time to see an Iraqi tank, its barrel traversing wildly and its tracks thrashing through the rubbish along the street as it drove towards the centre of the city.

The Iraqis now had tanks positioned along the Khorramshahr waterfront. They must have entered the port very suddenly, for the docks were still strewn with empty goods wagons, half-empty crates and burning containers hanging from damaged cranes. From some of the containers, Iraqi soldiers were stealing the contents, making off with a bizarre combination of Suzuki motorcycles, footballs, Dutch cattle-feed and Chinese ping-pong bats.

The ships along the quayside had been under fire for days. The chief officer of the Yugoslav freighter Krasica leant over the after-deck of his bullet-flecked ship and grinned broadly. ‘Both sides shelled us all the time – for fifteen days,’ he shouted. ‘We sat down below, played cards and drank beer – what else could we do?’ It must have been bad, because the man did not even look eastwards along the waterfront where smoke poured from a burning ship. The Italian freighter Capriella had had its bridge, funnel and superstructure gutted by fire. The crew of another Italian vessel had quenched the fires of a first bombardment but then fled to a Korean freighter whose crew refused to let them aboard; they were eventually given sanctuary on a Greek ship. The Chinese Yung Chun had rocket and bullet holes in its hull. Further east, there were larger vessels, all burning furiously.

None of these ships would ever sail again. They would remain, charred wrecks along the harbour-side, for eight more years. But in Basra, the ninety big freighters moored along the quays, their crews still aboard and keeping steam up for a quick escape if a real ceasefire took hold, would still be rotting away at the harbour almost a quarter of a century later. It was a mournful development for a port city founded by the Caliph Omar Ibn Khattab in 638, a harbour occupied by the British in 1914 and 1941 and 2003. British mercantile interests had been here since 1643, and behind the city’s six stinking canals it was still possible to find the carved wooden façades and elaborate shutters of Ottoman houses. The Caliph Omar had decreed that no one should be permitted to cut down the city’s date palms, although thousands of them now stood, decapitated or blackened by fire in plantations ribbed by streams into which nineteenth-century steamships had long ago been secreted, rotting museums of industrial technology which were no doubt launched with appropriate triumph when they went down the slipways of Birkenhead and Belfast two generations earlier. In what the Basra tourist office, in a moment of unfortunate enthusiasm, dubbed ‘the Venice of the East’, it was still possible to come across the relics of empire. The Shatt al-Arab Hotel had been a staging post for the British Imperial Airways flying boats that would set down on the Shatt and deposit their passengers in a lounge still decorated with scale models of British-built ships.

Every day now, the Iraqis were learning that victory would not be theirs – not at least for weeks, maybe months, even years. The Iraqi army around Khorramshahr moved forward only 8 kilometres in ten days. In the city, an Iraqi army colonel in a paratrooper’s red beret and carrying a swagger stick agreed with us that the Iranians were still fighting hard. Even as he spoke, a young soldier covered in blood was carried past us, the wounded man screaming that he was dying. ‘We thought the Iranians would not fight,’ another officer said to me that day. ‘But now I believe they will fight on, whatever happens.’

Officially, no one would suggest such a thing. ‘You must come – you must come,’ a ministry of information minder shouted to us in the lobby of the Hamdan Hotel. ‘You must see the Iranian prisoners.’ It was to be the first display of prisoners by both sides in the war, a theatrical presentation that would eventually involve thousands of captured soldiers, a press ‘opportunity’ which was a gross breach of the Geneva Convention. But we went along that bright October morning to see what the Iranians looked like. ‘Animals in a cell’ was Gavin’s apt comment.*

They were sitting in the far corner of a concrete-walled barrack hut, a dishevelled group of dark-haired young men, some in bandages and all in the drab, uncreased khaki uniform of the Iranian army. Unshaved, the seventeen men gaped at the television cameras as they sat on the bare mattresses that had been their beds for the past three days. ‘You are not permitted to talk to them,’ an Iraqi army major announced, and the Iranians looked again at the lenses and microphones that were thrust expectantly towards them. Asked by a journalist if any of the prisoners spoke English, a young bearded man below the latticed window said that he spoke German but the major shut him up. ‘They were taken prisoner at Ahwaz and Mohammorah,’ the major said. ‘What more do you want to know?’

But the prisoners talked with their hands and faces. About half had been injured, their heads and arms in bandages. A thin young man by the wall slyly made a victory sign with his fingers. Five prisoners had been told to hold copies of a Baghdad newspaper that pictured Saddam Hussein on the front page, but they had folded the paper in such a way that the portrait was no longer visible. The Iranian soldier who spoke German smiled and nodded at us as we were herded from the barracks hut. Then the Iraqi major announced that two prisoners would talk to us if we promised to take no pictures. Two sad, drawn young men, one with his chest bandaged in plaster, were eventually led into a messroom where a picture of Saddam, a Gainsborough reproduction and a bunch of pink plastic flowers vied for space along the wall.

The two soldiers were seated on steel chairs in the centre of the room while government officials and the major stood round them in order to ‘translate’. The wounded prisoner clutched his hands nervously and began to shake. The major wagged his finger in front of the first soldier. ‘They are asking about your casualties,’ he said. The man shrugged and proclaimed his ignorance. ‘I am an Iranian soldier,’ he said quietly. Were the Iranian mullahs in charge of the Iranian army, journalists asked, and the major translated this question as: ‘Aren’t religious people influencing your officers?’ It was true, the prisoner said sullenly. ‘The spirit of our soldiers is not what it used to be.’

And what, the world’s press wanted to know, did the two prisoners think of Ayatollah Khomeini? The major mistranslated the question thus: ‘Now that things have gone so badly for you, what do you think of Khomeini?’ The first prisoner replied that ‘opinion’ of the Ayatollah would not be the same after the war. But the wounded man glanced quickly at us and said that ‘if Ayatollah Khomeini brought on a war between two Muslim countries, this was wrong.’ The conditional clause in this reply was lost on the Iraqi major who then happily ordered the removal of the prisoners.

The Iraqi army, it seemed, would go to any lengths to display proof of victory and it spent a further hour showing off Iranian hardware captured in Khorramshahr. There was an American-made anti-tank launcher – made by the Hughes aircraft company and coded DAA-HOI-70-C-0525 – a clutch of Soviet-made armoured vehicles and an American personnel carrier on which the Iraqis had spray-painted their own definitive and revealing slogan for the day. ‘Captured,’ it said, ‘from the racist Persian Asians.’ Captured armour was to become a wearying part of the now increasingly government-controlled coverage of the war.

They bussed us up to Amara, 160 kilometres north of Basra and only 50 kilometres from the Iranian border, to show us twenty Chieftain tanks seized on the central front around Ahwaz, a fraction of the 800 Chieftains that Britain had sold to the Shah. Some had been hit by shells or grenades but we clambered onto them. A partly damaged hulk was lying in a field with its hatch open, and in I climbed to sit in the driver’s seat. A pouch on the wall to my left still contained the British Ministry of Defence tank manual – marked ‘Restricted’ and coded WO 14557–1 – although how the Iranian crews were supposed to translate the English was a mystery. I had sat there for a minute when it occurred to me that the crew probably did not survive their encounter with the Iraqis and I turned my head slowly to the gunner’s seat to my right. And there, sure enough, lay the grisly remains of the poor young Iranian who had gone into battle a few days ago, a carbonised skeleton with the burned tatters of his uniform hanging to his bones like little black flags, the skull still bearing the faint remains of flesh.

But the Iraqis could not conceal their own losses. North of Basra I came across an orange and white taxi standing at a petrol station, the driver talking to the garage hand, not even bothering to glance at the long wooden box on top of his vehicle. Coffins in Iraq are usually carried on the roofs of cars, and all that was different in this case was that an Iraqi flag was wrapped around the box. A soldier was going home for burial.

According to the Baathist Al-Thawra, there had been only two Iraqi soldiers killed in the previous twenty-four hours, which meant that I had – quite by chance – come across 50 per cent of the previous day’s fatalities. But there were four other taxis on the same road, all heading north with their gloomy cargoes, the red, white and black banner with its three stars flapping on the rooftop coffins. We did not see these cars in the early days of the war, nor the scores of military ambulances that now clogged the roads. On just one day in the first week of October alone, the army brought 480 bodies to the military hospital mortuary in Baghdad. If these corpses came from just the central sector of the battle front, then the daily toll of dead could be as high as six or seven hundred. Even the Iraqi press was now extolling the glory that soldiers achieved when ‘sacrificing’ themselves in battle, and Saddam Hussein, visiting wounded civilians in Kirkuk on 12 October, described their injuries as ‘medals of honour’.

Iraqi television’s lavish coverage of the conflict – the ‘Whirlwind War’ theme music had now been dropped – was filled with tanks and guns and smashed Iranian aircraft, but there were no photographs of the dead of either side. When the station entertained its viewers with Gary Cooper in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the authorities clumsily excised a sequence showing the bodies of Spanish Republican troops lying on a road. Later the Iraqis would show Iranian corpses in large and savage detail.

Among the other British reporters in Basra was Jon Snow of ITN, whose courage and humour made him an excellent colleague in time of great danger but who could never in his life have imagined the drama into which he would be propelled in mid-October 1980. ‘Snowy’, whose imitations of Prince Charles should have earned him a place in vaudeville,* was regularly reporting to camera from the bank of the Shatt al-Arab south of Basra. However, watching his dispatches in London was the owner of the Silverline Shipping Company, who had been desperately searching for six weeks for the location of his British-captained 22,000-ton soya bean oil carrier Al-Tanin.

And suddenly, there on the screen behind Snow’s shoulder, he spotted his missing vessel, still afloat but obviously in the middle of a battle. The Foreign Office could do nothing to help, so the owner immediately asked Snow to be his official shipping agent in Basra and telexed his new appointment to him for the benefit of the Iraqi authorities. There were fifty-six souls aboard, nine of them British, and they had only one way of contacting the outside world; among the dozens of ships marooned in the city’s harbour was a vessel captained by a Norwegian who was in daily contact with the Al-Tanin and who confirmed to Snow that the trapped captain and his crew were anxious to be rescued.

Snow decided to enlist the help of the Iraqi military and swim out to the ship at night to arrange the rescue of the crew. But neither the navy nor the Iraqi authorities in Basra could provide him with anything but a tourist map of the all-important waterway for which Saddam had partly gone to war. This, of course, was Snow’s exclusive story – a ‘spectacular’ if he brought it off, a human and political tragedy for the crew, Snow and ITN if it ended in disaster – but he told me privately of his difficulty in obtaining a map of the river. ‘Now listen, Fisky, old boy, if you can find a decent map, I’ll let you come along,’ he said. I immediately remembered my grandfather Edward, first mate on the Cutty Sark, and all that I had read about the merchant marine. Every ship’s master, I knew, was required to carry detailed charts of the harbours and waterways he used. So I hunted down a profusely bearded Baltic sea-captain whose freighter lay alongside in Basra docks, and he agreed to lend me his old British Admiralty survey of the Shatt al-Arab. This magnificent document – a work of oceanographic art as much as technical competence – was duly photocopied and presented to the frogmen of the Iraqi navy.

All the elements of high adventure were in place: the Al-Tanin’s captain with the splendidly nautical name of Dyke, who thought up the rescue mission in the first place; Jack Simmons, the British consular official with a round face and small rimless spectacles who arrived unannounced in Basra but could get no help from the Iraqis. There was even a handsome major in the Iraqi navy, a grey-haired, quiet man who gallantly risked his life for the crew of the British ship. He never gave us his name, so Snow always referred to him warmly as ‘our Major’. Then there was 32-year-old Snow, his crew – cameraman Chris Squires and soundman Nigel Thompson – and Fisk, who would come to regard this as the last journalistic Boy’s Own Paper story of his life. The rest of my reporting would be about tragedy.

The Al-Tanin had moored in the Shatt five weeks earlier to unload its cargo of cooking oil by lighter. But when the war began, it found itself – like all the other big ships in the river – trapped between two armies; machine-gun and rifle fire raked the waterway and on several days the crew watched low-level rockets skim the surface of the river around the Al-Tanin’s hull. Captain Dyke talked to Snow over the Norwegian captain’s radio and suggested Snow should try a rescue attempt on 15 October. This would be ’Operation Pear’; if it failed or was postponed, Snow could try again on 16 October when the rescue would become ’Operation Apple’. ‘Our Major’, however, wanted to visit Dyke aboard the Al-Tanin to discuss the escape. Dyke agreed to what he called a ‘fibre ascent’ – assuming any Iranian listeners to his conversation would not know this meant a rope – if they swam out to his ship.

At nine o’clock at night on 15 October, therefore, a strange band wound its way through the soggy, waterlogged plantation of an island on the Shatt al-Arab – not far from Um al-Rassas, from which Pierre Bayle and I had made our own escape just a few days earlier. The major and two of his frogmen, Snow – in black wet suit with flippers in hand – Squires, Thompson and myself. We must have made a remarkable spectacle, clopping along through the darkness of the tropical island to the stretch of river where we knew the Al-Tanin was at anchor, dragging with us a rubber boat for Snow’s rescue attempt. In the darkness, we slipped off mud tracks into evil-smelling lagoons, slithered into long-forgotten dykes and lumbered over creaking, rotten bridges. Once, when we set the abandoned village dogs barking, Iranian snipers opened up on the plantation and for more than a minute we listened to the bullets whining around us at hip height as the Iranians tried to guess where the intruders were.

Even before we reached the river bank, we could see the Al-Tanin, her superstructure fully lit up, her riding lights agleam, just as Captain Dyke had promised they would be. The ship’s generators echoed through the hot palm forest and her bright orange funnel appeared surrealistically through the shadows of the tree trunks. Snow and the major were the first to see what was wrong. Dyke had told them to board his ship at 9.30 p.m. on the starboard side of the vessel, when the tide would have turned it towards the western, Iraqi bank of the river. He had illuminated the starboard hull for this reason. But it was the darkened port side of the Al-Tanin that faced us. Every Iranian could see the brightly-lit starboard of the ship right in front of the Iranian lines. Snow sat on the bank, squeezed into his flippers and stared at the ship. ‘Bugger!’ he said. We all looked at Snow. He looked at the major. So did the frogmen. Snow would later come to regard the episode as ‘an act of unparalleled insanity’. Squires, Thompson and I were all profoundly grateful we would not be part of this shooting match.

Then Snow slid into the muddy waters, the major and the two other naval frogmen beside him, clambering into their rubber boat, pushing and paddling it out into the river. So strong was the current – the tide was now at its height – that it took them twenty minutes to travel the 200 metres to the ship and at one point, staring at them through binoculars, I could see they were in danger of being taken right past the vessel and out into the open river. But they caught a ladder on the darkened port side and climbed aboard.

Snow first encountered members of the Filipino crew who appeared ‘terrified of the apparition’ of the television reporter in black wet suit and flippers. But it was only when he met a surprised but otherwise exuberant Captain Dyke that Snow discovered he had not been expected for another three hours. Ships worked to GMT, not to local time, in their ports of call, and Iraqi time was three hours ahead of GMT. Had Snow and his Iraqi major turned up at half-past midnight according to Iraqi clocks – 9.30 p.m. GMT – the illuminated starboard side of the ship would have faced Iraq.

Snow, the major and Dyke agreed that twenty-three of the ship’s crew would head for the shoreline in a lifeboat at 3.30 a.m. and we watched Snow’s rubber boat moving silently back across the river towards us. So we all sat through the long hours of darkness, watching the Al-Tanin’s riding lights reflecting on the fast-moving water as the big ship at last turned on the tide, and seeing – behind the vessel – the fires of Abadan. Distant guns bellowed in the night as the mosquitoes clustered round us for greedy company. At one point, Snow looked at me. ‘One does feel this tremendous sense of responsibility,’ he said. I was wondering how the Prince of Wales would pronounce that – the phrase was pure Prince Charles – when two red torch flashes sparkled from the ship’s deck. ’Operation Pear’ had begun. Snow sent two lamp flashes back. A hydraulic winch – painfully loud over the river’s silence – hummed away, followed by a harsh, metallic banging. The gate to the lifeboat had jammed. We could see the crew waiting on deck to disembark and we shared their feelings as the tell-tale hammer-blows echoed over the river towards the Iranians.

Then the lifeboat was down, its gunwales dipping towards us, carving ripples of water which the Iranians really should have seen. But when the boat thumped into the mud of our riverbank at 4 a.m., even the Iraqi frogmen lost their edge of fearful expectation as an English girl appeared on the slippery deck and asked: ‘Will someone help me ashore?’ It was one of those quintessential moments so dear to Anglo-Saxons. The British were cheating danger again, landing on a tropical shore under a quarter moon with the possibility of a shell blowing them all to pieces and three young women to protect. And so delighted were we to see the little lifeboat that we tugged its crew onto the river bank with enough noise to awaken every dozing Iranian on the other side. The Iraqi naval men grinned with happiness.

Thirteen crewmen had remained behind to guard their ship, and true to the traditions of what we thought then was a post-colonial world, only seven of the twenty-three crew who were rescued were actually British. The rest were a tough but cheerful group of Filipinos, small men with laughing eyes who hooted with joy when, with the British, we tugged them ashore and pushed them unceremoniously into an Iraqi army entrenchment behind us. Many of the Filipinos handed up to me their duty-free treasures, radios and television sets and – in one case – a washing machine which I dumped in the mud. They were hastily led off by Iraqi troops into the forest.