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

The first officer expressed his concern for those crewmen left aboard, the engineer announced that he would take a long holiday. Teresa Hancock, a crewman’s bride from Stoke-on-Trent, had been honeymooning aboard and had celebrated her twenty-first birthday on the Shatt al-Arab three days earlier with a small party. But if ever there was a happy story, this was it. The Iraqi navy had acquitted itself with some glory – performing a genuinely humanitarian act with courage and professionalism – and ‘Snowy’ got his scoop. Indeed, Snow announced that he would henceforth be known as Al-Thalaj – Arabic for ‘snow’. As for ‘our Major’, we went to thank him later and found him in his air-conditioned office, sipping yoghurt and grinning from ear to ear, knowing full well that he had – in the tradition of Sir Francis Drake – singed the Ayatollah’s beard.

Snow packaged his film and gave it to me to take to Kuwait, where a private jet had been hired by America’s NBC to take both their own and ITN’s news film to Amman for satelliting to New York and London. As the Learjet soared into the air, the purser offered me smoked salmon sandwiches and a glass of champagne. From Amman I filed the story of the Al-Tanin to The Times. Then I sank into the deepest bed of the Intercontinental Hotel and woke to find a telex with a nudge-in-the-ribs question from the foreign desk in London: ‘Why you no swam shark-infested Shatt al-Arab river?’

But here the sweet stories must end. By the end of October, the Iraqis – realising that they were bogged down in the deserts of Iran with no more chance of a swift victory – were firing ground-to-ground missiles at Iranian cities. Early in the month, 180 civilians were killed in Dezful when the Iraqis fired a rocket into the marketplace. On 26 October, at least another hundred civilians were killed when the Iraqis fired seven Russian Frog-7 missiles at Dezful. The War of the Cities had begun, a calculated attempt to depopulate Iran’s largest towns and cities through terror.

The outbreak of war in Iran had been greeted even by some of the theocratic regime’s opponents with expressions of outrage and patriotism. Thousands of middle-class women donated millions of dollars’ worth of their jewellery to Iran’s ‘war chest’. Captive in the Iranian foreign ministry, US chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen ‘knew something was happening when I heard a loudspeaker outside the foreign ministry playing American marching tunes – which the Iranians used on military occasions. I heard later that the Iraqis used them too. That night, there were anti-aircraft guns being used and the sky was full of tracer. They never seemed to hit anything. In fact, when we heard the air-raid sirens, we used to relax because we knew that the Iraqi planes had already been, bombed and flown away.’

The Iranians, like Saddam, had to fight internal as well as external enemies during the war, knowing that groups like the Mujahedin-e-Qalq had the active support of the Iraqi regime. The strange death of the Iranian defence minister Mustafa Chamran on the battle front has never been fully explained. But there could be no doubt what happened when, just before 9 p.m. on 28 June 1981, a 60-pound bomb exploded at a meeting of the ruling Islamic Republican Party in Tehran, tearing apart seventy-one party leaders as they were listening to a speech by Ayatollah Mohamed Beheshti, chief justice of the supreme court, secretary of the Revolutionary Council, head of the IRP and a potential successor to Khomeini. When the bomb destroyed the iron beams of the building and 40-centimetre-thick columns were pulverised by the blast, the roof thundered down onto the victims. Among them were four cabinet ministers, six deputy ministers and twenty-seven members of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis.

Beheshti, who died with them, was an intriguing personality, his thin face, pointed grey beard and thick German accent – a remnant of his days as a resident Shiite priest in Germany – giving him the appearance of a clever eighteenth-century conspirator. When I met him in 1980, I noted that he employed ‘a unique mixture of intellectual authority and gentle wistfulness which makes him sound – and look – like a combination of Cardinal Richelieu and Sir Alec Guinness’. He had for months been intriguing against President Bani-Sadr, although the date of the latter’s removal gave Beheshti little time for satisfaction: he was murdered a week later.

He was a man with enemies, unmoved by Iran’s growing plague of executions. ‘Don’t you see,’ he explained to me with some irritation, ‘that there have been very few people sentenced to death because of their failures in the [Shah’s] ministries. Those people who have been sentenced to death are in a different category – they are opium or heroin dealers.’ This was palpably untrue. Most of the executions were for political reasons. ‘When you study the history of revolutions,’ Beheshti said, ‘you will find that there are always problems. This is normal. When people here say they are unhappy, it is because they have not experienced a revolution before. There are problems – but they will be solved.’ Beheshti’s loss was the most serious the revolution suffered – until the death of Khomeini in 1989 – because he had designed the IRP along the lines of the Soviet Communist Party, capable of binding various revolutionary movements under a single leader.

By coincidence, the bloodbath on 28 June cost the same number of lives – seventy-two – as were lost at the battle of Kerbala in 680 by Imam Hossein, his family and supporters, a fact that Khomeini was quick to point out. Saddam and America, he concluded, had struck again through the Mujahedin-e-Qalq. ‘Suppose you were an inveterate enemy to the martyred Beheshti,’ Khomeini asked sarcastically, ‘… what enmity did you bear against the more than seventy innocent people, many of whom were among the best servants of society and among the most adamant enemies of the enemies of the nation?’ But on 5 August, Hassan Ayat, another influential Majlis deputy, was killed. On 30 August a second bomb killed President Mohamed Rajai, who had just replaced Bani-Sadr, and the new Iranian prime minister, Mohamed Javad Bahonar. The prosecutor general, Ayatollah Ali Quddusi, was murdered on 5 September and Khomeini’s personal representative in Tabriz, Ayatollah Asadollah Madani, six days later.

The regime hit back with ferocious repression. Schoolchildren and students figured prominently among the sixty executions a day. One estimate – that 10,000 suspects were hanged or shot – would equal the number of Iranians killed in the first six months of the war with Iraq. Just as Saddam was trying to destroy the Dawa party as a militant extension of Shia Islam, so Khomeini was trying to eliminate the Mujahedin-e-Qalq as a branch of the Iraqi Baath. This duality of enemies would force both sides in the war to take ever more ruthless steps to annihilate their antagonists on the battlefield as well as in their prisons and torture chambers.

When I visited Tehran in the spring of 1982 to make my own investigations into these mass executions, survivors of Evin prison spoke to me of 8,000 hangings and shootings, of fourteen-year-old Revolutionary Guards brutalised by their participation in the killings. Among the 15,000 prisoners who were spared and were now being released – partly, it seemed, because of Amnesty International’s repeated condemnation of Islamic ‘justice’ in Iran – several vouchsafed accounts of quite appalling savagery. At one point after the Beheshti, Rajai and Bahonar murders, inmates were told to demonstrate their repentance by hanging their friends. There were three stages in this purgation: they could actually strangle their fellow prisoners, they could cut them down from the gibbet – or they could merely load their corpses into coffins. Prisoners thus emerged from Evin with souls purified but blood on their hands. Islamic socialism was almost wiped out; only a few leftists escaped death, capable of shooting at Iran’s deputy foreign minister in April 1982. But the Mujahedin-e-Qalq was broken.

Saddam eventually claimed victory over Khorramshahr and the Iranians admitted they had ‘lost touch’ with their forces still in the city. Henceforth the Iranians would call it Khuninshahr – the ‘City of Blood’. The Iraqis never captured Abadan but Saddam invested tens of thousands of troops in Khorramshahr, and Iraq announced that it would become ‘another Stalingrad’. This was an early version of the ‘mother of all battles’ that Saddam always threatened but never fought. Fifteen months after the war began, the Iraqi army found that its supply lines were stretched too far and made a strategic decision to retreat, building a massive defensive line along its border with Iran and leaving behind it a carpet of destruction. Howeiza, with an Arabic-speaking population of 35,000, had been captured by the Iraqis on 28 September 1980, but when Iranian forces re-entered the empty town in May 1982 they found that it had been levelled; only two of its 1,900 buildings were still standing: a damaged mosque used as an observation post and a house that had been a command post. Even the trees had been uprooted. This is what the Israelis had done to the Syrian city of Kuneitra after the 1967 Middle East war. All of ‘Arabistan’ – Khuzestan – whose liberation had been another of Saddam’s war aims, was simply abandoned. The Iranians were winning. And Western journalists would now be welcomed in Iran as warmly as they once were in Iraq during the fictional ‘whirlwind war’.

Dezful was the first major Iraqi defeat. In a blinding sandstorm, 120,000 Iranian troops, Revolutionary Guards and Basiji (mobilised) volunteers plunged through the desert towards the Iraqi lines in late March 1981, taking 15,000 Iraqi soldiers prisoner, capturing 300 tanks and armoured vehicles and recovering 4,000 square kilometres of Iranian territory. When I reached the scene of the Iranian victory, an almost total silence enveloped the battlefield. There were wild roses beside the roads south of Dezful and giant ants scuttled over the desert floor. Iranian artillerymen sat beneath their anti-aircraft gun canopies, glancing occasionally at the empty sky. The smashed tanks of the Iraqi army’s 3rd Armoured Division, disembowelled by rocket fire, their armour peeled back as if by a can-opener, lay in the mid-afternoon heat, memorials already to what the dismissive Iranians insisted on calling Operation Obvious Victory’.

The silence of the desert indicated both the extent of Iran’s success and the extraordinary fact that with scarcely a shot fired in return, the Iranian army had halted its advance along a geometrically straight line about 65 kilometres in length. It stretched from a ridge of hills north-west of Dezful to the swamps of Sendel, where Iraqi tanks and armoured carriers lay axle-deep in mud, driven there in frustration and fear by Saddam’s retreating forces. The Iranians – at one point scarcely 5 kilometres from the Iraqi border – had effectively declared a halt to offensive action in the Dezful sector, forbidden to advance, on Khomeini’s orders, across the international frontier.

Colonel Beyrouz Suliemanjar of the Iranian 21st Infantry Division was quite specific when he spoke to us, baton in hand, in his dark underground command post beneath a ridge of low hills. According to the Imam’s guidance,’ he stated with military confidence, ‘we are not allowed to cross the border.’ He patted a blue, straggling river on his polythene-covered map. ‘Our troops could cross this last river but our Imam will not let them. Our strategic aim is to push the enemy troops back to their territory. But we will not cross the frontier.’ Whenever the colonel spoke – with apparent modesty – about the surprise attack on 22 March, his junior officers along with a mullah, standing at the back of the dugout, chorused, ‘God is great – Down with America – Down with the Soviet Union.’ No military briefing could ever have been quite like this.

Khomeini had already promised that his armies would not invade neighbouring countries. Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the Majlis speaker, had given his word that Iran ‘harbours no territorial ambition against Iraq’. All Iran wanted, according to Rafsanjani, was the satisfaction of four demands: the expulsion of Iraqi troops from all Iranian territory; ‘punishment of the aggressor’; compensation for war damage; and the return of war refugees to their homes. ‘Punishment of the aggressor’, the Iranians made clear, meant the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – something that neither the Arabs nor the Americans would permit. That the Iranians sought an end for Saddam every bit as bloody as that dealt out to the 4,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed at the battle of Dezful made this prospect even less likely.

The Iranians crammed John Kifner of the New York Times and myself into a Bell/Agusta helicopter gunship along with a bevy of mullahs – the pilots were trained in the United States, of course – and flew us across kilometre after kilometre of wreckage and corpses. A Cyclopean view of carnage, the whup-whup of the chopper blades, the sudden ground-hugging rush between hills and into wadis were so frightening that we placed superhuman faith in the pilot and thus became so confident that we almost enjoyed this flying madness. One pile of dead Iraqi soldiers had already been bulldozed into a mass grave – ‘Aggressor cemeteries’, the signs said above these muddy crypts – but others still lay out in the sun in their hundreds. Many lay where they fell, in dried-up river beds, their decomposition clearly visible from our helicopter. Several times, the pilot hovered over a pile of corpses as the odour of their putrefaction wafted into the machine, overpowering and sickening, the mullahs screeching ‘God is Great’ while Kifner and I held our breath. The dead were distended in the heat, bodies bloating through their shabby uniforms. We could see the Revolutionary Guards next to them, digging more mass graves for Saddam’s soldiers.

When we landed behind what had been the Iraqi front line – they ran like ant-hills, catacombed with dugouts and ammunition boxes – there was almost no sign of incoming shellfire, none of the traditional ‘softening up’ by heavy artillery that conventional armies employ. The Iraqi positions lay untouched, as if the occupants had been taken sleeping from their mattresses at night, leaving their trenches and revetments on display for the ghoulish visitors – us – who follow every war. The Iranians even invited us to enter the dugouts of their enemies. It was easy to see why. They were equipped with air conditioners, television sets, videos and cassette films and magazine photographs of young women. One officer maintained a fridge of beer, another had laid a Persian carpet on the concrete floor. This was Khomeini’s ‘saturnalia’ writ large. Saddam didn’t want his soldiers to revolt – as Khomeini had now repeatedly urged them to – so he gave them every comfort. But how could such a pampered army fight when the Iranians stormed towards them in their tens of thousands?

The Iranians had learned that opposing massed Iraqi armour with poorly maintained Chieftain tanks was suicidal – the wreckage of dozens of Chieftains destroyed in the initial battles outside Dezful more than a year earlier still littered the desert. At Ein Khoosh, I padded round the broken Iraqi tanks for more than an hour. I noticed one whose severed turret had been blown clean off the base of the vehicle, landing with its gun barrel intact beside a small field. Around the turret and the decapitated tank stood a cluster of Iranian troops and peasants, all holding handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses.

The dead crew were unrecognisable, burnt paper creatures from another planet who still lay in their positions, the gunner’s body crushed beneath the turret. A carpet of flies lay upon the scorched armour. An Iranian soldier looked to the sky and ran his hand briefly downwards over his short beard, a gesture of respect to God for the bloody victory that He had granted Iran over its enemies. But the tank itself had not been shelled to destruction – there was not a shell crater in the area, just a jagged hole in the armour near the turret plates. It had been destroyed by a hand-launched anti-tank rocket. In the desert, other Iraqi tanks had suffered an almost identical fate; they had ‘brewed up’ on the battlefield after one point-blank round.

It was clear that the Iranians had used scarcely any heavy artillery or tanks in their six-day battle. They simply poured men into the Iraqi lines and caught their enemies off guard. The Iranians had been experimenting with human-wave attacks. The Iraqi front line had been overwhelmed by thousands of young men holding only rocket-propelled grenades and rifles. ‘The West fought two world wars and gave us their military manuals,’ an Iranian officer smugly remarked to me. ‘Now we are going to write tactical manuals for the West to read.’ We noticed the lack of Iranian corpses in the desert, but could not help seeing from our helicopter small tyre tracks across the sand. Could these be the motorcycles of the boy soldiers we had heard about, the fourteen-year-olds and their brothers who were encouraged to wear the sword of martyrdom around their necks as they drove through the Iraqi minefields to clear them for the infantry, dressed in heavy winter coats so that their shredded bodies would be held together for burial in their home villages? Kifner and I asked to see the youngest survivors of the battle, and the Iranians immediately understood what we wanted.

Under shellfire, they took us to a new Iranian front line of earthen revetments on the Dusallok Heights and we ran down these trenches like any soldiers of the 1914–18 war. The Iran – Iraq conflict was increasingly coming to resemble the great mire of death that entombed so many hundreds of thousands on the Somme and at Verdun. The dugout in which we sought shelter was small and a thick dust hung in the air. There were weapons on the mud and wooden-framed walls – a captured Iraqi machine gun and an automatic rifle – and a few steel helmets piled in a corner. The light from the sandbagged doorway forced its way into the little bunker, defining the features of the boys inside in two-dimensional perspective, an Orpen sketch of impending death at the front. There was no monstrous anger of the guns, only a dull, occasional vibration to indicate that the Iraqis had not abandoned all their artillery when they retreated from Dezful.

There, however, the parallels ended. For the youngest soldier – who welcomed us like an excited schoolboy at the entrance – was only fourteen, his voice unbroken by either fear or manhood. The oldest among them was twenty-one, an Islamic volunteer from Iran’s ‘Reconstruction Crusade’, who expounded the principles of martyrdom to us as the guns boomed distantly away. Martyrdom, I was made to understand, was a much-discussed subject in this dugout because it was much witnessed.

Yes, said the fourteen-year-old, two of his friends from Kerman had died in the battle for Dezful – one his own age and one only a year older. He had cried, he said, when the authorities delayed his journey to the battle front. Cried? I asked. A child cries because he cannot die yet? Were we now to have baby-wars, not wars which killed babies – we had specialised in them throughout the twentieth century – but wars in which babies, boys with unbroken voices, went out to kill? The fourteen-year-old’s comments were incredible and genuine and terrifying at one and the same time, clearly unstaged, since we had only by chance chosen his dugout when we took cover from the shellfire outside.

There was no doubt which of these boy soldiers most clearly understood the ideology of martyrdom inside this claustrophobic bunker of sand and dirt. When I asked about the apparent willingness of Iranians to die in battle, the soldiers nodded towards a very young man, bearded and intense with a rifle in his hand, sitting cross-legged on a dirty rug by the entrance. In the West, he said, it was difficult – perhaps impossible – to understand Iran’s apparent obsession with martyrdom. So did he want to die in this war?

The young man spoke loudly, with almost monotone passion, preaching rather than answering our question. Hassan Qasqari, soldier of the volunteer Reconstruction Crusade, was a man whose faith went beyond such questions. ‘It is impossible for you in the West to understand,’ he said. ‘Martyrdom brings us closer to God. We do not seek death – but we regard death as a journey from one form of life to another, and to be martyred while opposing God’s enemies brings us closer to God. There are two phases to martyrdom: we approach God and we also remove the obstacles that exist between God and the people. Those who create obstacles for God in this world are the enemies of God.’

There was no doubt that he identified the Iraqis with these theologically hostile forces. Indeed, as if on cue from God rather than the army of Saddam Hussein, there was a loud rumble of artillery and Qasqari raised his index finger towards heaven. We waited to hear where the shell would fall, fearing that direct hit that all soldiers prefer not to think about. There was a loud explosion beyond the trench, just beyond the bunker, the vibration shaking the dugout. Then there was silence. I could not imagine this speech in an Iraqi dugout. For that matter, I could not have heard it in any other army. Perhaps a British or American military padre might talk of religion with this imagination. And then I realised that these Iranian boy soldiers were all ‘padres’; they were all priests, all preachers, all believers, all – now I understood the phrase – ‘followers of the Imam’. There was another pulsation of sound outside in the trench.

Qasqari seemed grateful for the shell-burst. ‘Our first duty,’ he proclaimed, ‘is to kill the enemy forces so that God’s order will be everywhere. Becoming a martyr is not a passive thing. Hossein, the third Imam, killed as many of his enemies as possible before he was martyred – so we must try to remain alive.’ If we could not understand this, Qasqari explained, it was because the European Renaissance had done away with religion, no longer paying attention to morality or ethics, concentrating only upon materialism. There was no stanching this monologue, no opportunity to transfuse this belief with arguments about humanity or love. ‘Europe and the West have confined these issues to the cover of churches,’ Qasqari said. ‘Western people are like fish in the water; they can only understand their immediate surroundings. They don’t care about spirituality.’

He bade us goodbye with no ill will, offering Kifner and me oranges as we left his dugout for the dangerous, bright sand outside. How should we say goodbye to them? We looked into their eyes, the eyes of children who were, in their way, already dead. They had started on their journey. The next shell landed a hundred metres behind us as we ran the length of the trench, a thunderous explosion of black and grey smoke that blew part of the roadway into the sky and frightened us, not so much for our peril but because it put martyrdom into a distinct and terrible perspective.

We returned to the jubilant city of Dezful just an hour before Saddam’s revenge came screaming out of the heavens, two massive blasts followed by towering columns of black smoke that spurted into the air from one of the poorest residential areas of the city. It was the tenth ground-to-ground missile attack on Dezful since the start of the war, and by the time I reached the impact point the images were as appalling as they were banal. A baby cut in half, a woman’s head in the rubble of her home, a series of arms and legs laid out beside each other next to a series of torsos in the hope that someone might be able to fit the correct limbs onto the right bodies. Hundreds of men dug through the crushed yellow bricks with their hands. Most Iranian homes in Dezful were built of these cheap, thin bricks, without concrete or structural support. They were made for destruction.

By early 1982, the Iranians were threatening to move across the border. Khomeini’s promises of non-aggression – that Iran would not violate Iraqi national territory – had given way to a new pragmatism. If by entering Iraq the war could be ended, then Iranian troops would do what Iraq had done in September 1980 and cross the international frontier. Khomeini spoke repeatedly of the suffering of Iraqi Shiites, releasing their century-old political frustrations. Would he any longer be satisfied with just the head of Saddam? He would surely want an Iraqi regime that was loyal to him, a vassal state of Iran, or so the Arabs began to fear.