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

My visits to the battle fronts, and to Tehran and Baghdad, seemed to have a ‘story-so-far’ quality about them. Statistics lost their power to shock. In 1985 alone, Colonel Heikki Holma of the UN’s inspection team in Iran estimated that 4,500 Iranians had been killed or wounded by chemical weapons. In two years, there had been at least sixty major chemical attacks by Iraq. The casualty figures were obviously on a Somme-like scale – again, I found myself unwillingly using the parallels of my father’s war – but neither side would admit the extent of its own losses. By 1986 alone, a million had perished in the war, so it was said by the Western diplomats who rarely if ever visited the war front, 700,000 of them Iranian. The Iranians said that 500,000 Iraqis had been killed. There were – and here the figures could be partly confirmed by the International Red Cross – 100,000 Iraqi POWs in Iran and around 50,000 Iranian POWs in Iraq. Both sides were together spending around $1.5 billion a month on the war.

In Iran, the conflict had changed the mood of the theologians trying to conduct the battle with Iraq. Only a year earlier, there were daily reports of torture and mass rape coming out of the grey-walled confines of Evin prison. But in April 1985, Hojatolislam Ali Ladjevardi, the Tehran prosecutor, was dismissed from his post together with many of his murderous henchmen; executions were now carried out almost exclusively on common criminals rather than enemies of the state. ‘The executions have been toned down,’ an Iranian businessman put it with mild sarcasm. ‘Now they only kill murderers and narcotics men. The worst they do to a girl who offends Islamic law is to cut her hair off.’ There was a growing acquiescence – rather than acceptance – of the Khomeini regime that produced an irritable freedom of speech; shopkeepers, businessmen, Iranian journalists, even conservative religious families could complain about the government without fear that they would be betrayed to the Revolutionary Guards.

It was part of an illusion. The Islamic Republic had not suddenly become democratic; it had cut so deeply into its political enemies that there was no focus of opposition left. In 1984 at least 661 executions were believed to have been carried out in Tehran, a further 237 up to Ladjevardi’s dismissal. The figures were Amnesty International’s, but the Iranians themselves admitted to 197 judicial killings between March 1984 and April 1985, claiming that they were all for drug offences. The introduction of a machine specially designed by Iranian engineers to amputate fingers was proudly announced by Tehran newspapers, proving that the revolution was as anxious as ever to exact punishment on those who contravened its laws.

Such public freedom of expression as still existed could be found in the Majlis, the institution that so many critics had once predicted would provide only a rubber-stamp parliament for Khomeini’s decrees. There was a confrontation in parliament over a series of laws on land reform, trade and the budget. Conservative members led by Rafsanjani, the speaker, wanted to preserve the power of the clergy and the bazaaris, arguing for a liberal economy and no changes in land ownership. More radical members who claimed to follow ‘the line of the Imam’ were demanding full government control of trade, land distribution and a number of social reforms that sounded like socialism. The result was government paralysis. Landowners refused to till their fields lest their property became profitable and was taken away by the state.

Khomeini had a final veto over all legislation, but his chief function now was to be a presence; he was the patriarch, produced for the relatives of martyrs or, more rarely, for foreign diplomats, a figure of solidity but no movement, of image rather than content, a mirror to past victory and what had gone before rather than to the future. His last meeting with diplomats was typical. More than sixty ambassadors, chargés and first secretaries were crammed into a minuscule room at the Ayatollah’s residence and obliged to sit cross-legged on a slightly grubby carpet, a French embassy attaché suffering severe cramp as he perched on top of a Scandinavian chargé. In due course, Khomeini entered the room and delivered himself of a fifteen-minute speech in Farsi, without translation. ‘It didn’t matter what he said,’ one of the ambassadors remarked acidly. ‘The old man sat there on a sheet on a raised dais and he was making only one point: that the Shah had received his guests in regal magnificence in his palace but that he, Khomeini, would receive us in humble circumstances.’

But each night now, Khomeini was taken off to the bunkers beneath the Shah’s old palace at Niavaran, the only air-raid shelter in all Tehran, to protect him from the war that was now his enduring legacy. As the Iraqi fighter-bombers soared unmolested over the capital, tens of thousands of his people would flee into the mountains by road. While Khomeini still demanded the overthrow of Saddam, his mullahs appeared on national television, begging the people of Isfahan, Shiraz, Ahwaz, Dezful and Tehran itself to contribute food and clothing for their soldiers at the front. Individual home towns were asked to resupply front-line units that came from their areas. In the marshes of southern Iraq, the Iranian Basiji clung on amid the hot mud and Iraqi counter-attacks.

The Iranians were now freighting their 600-kilo ground-to-ground missiles up to a new base at Sarbullzaharb in Kurdistan where North Korean engineers calibrated them for the flight to Baghdad. When they knew the rocket was approaching its target just over fifteen minutes later, the Iranians would announce the impending strike over national radio. For reporters, this could have a weird journalistic effect. ‘I’d be sitting in the bureau in Baghdad when Nabila Megalli would come through on my telex from Bahrain where she’d been listening to the radio,’ Samir Ghattas, Mohamed Salam’s AP successor in Iraq, would recall. ‘She would say that the Iranians had just announced they’d fired a missile at Baghdad. I stayed on the telex line – we had no fax then – and the moment I heard the explosion in Baghdad, I’d write ‘Yes’. The Iraqis would pull the plug five minutes later. It took twenty minutes for the rocket to travel from the border to Baghdad.’

The Iraqi raids often provoked little more than a fantasy display of antiaircraft fire from the guns around Tehran. The pilots could not identify any targets now that the Iranians had acquired new German SEL aircraft warning radar and switched off the electricity. On 2 June 1985, however, two bombs dropped by an Iraqi high-altitude Ilyushin 28 exploded on a large civilian housing complex in the Gishe suburb of the city, collapsing five entire blocks of apartments. From my hotel window – from where I had been watching the lights of the distant bomber – I saw two huge flashes of crimson light and heard a terrific roar of sound, the detonation of the bombs becoming one with the sound of crashing buildings. Hitherto, the Iraqis had fired rockets onto Tehran, so this was a new precedent in the War of the Cities. At least 50 civilians were killed and another 150 wounded in the raid. When I arrived there, it was the usual story: the cheaply-made bricks of the walls had crumbled to dust and a four-storey building – home to sixteen families – had been blown to pieces by one of the bombs. A little girl in the block had been celebrating her birthday during the evening and many children were staying the night with her family when the bombs destroyed the girl’s home. Angry Iranians gathered at the site next morning and the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guards were forced to fire into the air to clear the road.

In all of March and April of 1985, there were thirteen air raids on Tehran. Now there were thirteen a week, sometimes three a night. Only one Iraqi jet had been shot down – during a daylight raid in March – when an Iranian F-14 intercepted it over the capital. The Iraqi plane crashed into the mountains above Tehran, its pilot still aboard. Yet the Iranians could be forgiven for believing that the world was against them. In July, Iraq began to take delivery of forty-five twenty-seater Bell helicopters from the United States, all capable of carrying troops along the war front. The Reagan administration said, in all seriousness, that the sale of the Super Transports did not breach the US arms embargo on the belligerents because ‘the helicopters are civilian’ and because the American government would ‘monitor’ their use. The sale had been negotiated over two years, during which the United States had been fully aware of Iraq’s use of poison gas and its ‘cleansing’ of the Kurds. I would later see eight of these same Bell helicopters near Amara – all in camouflage paint and standing on the tarmac at a military air base.

Yet still the martyrology of war could be used to send fresh blood to the front; the child soldiers of Iran, it seemed, would be forever dispatched to the trenches of Kerman and Ahwaz and Khorramshahr, each operation named Val Fajr – ‘Dawn’ – which, for a Muslim, also represents the dawn prayer. We had Val Fajr 1, all the way up to Val Fajr 8. I would walk down to the Friday prayers at Tehran University during the war and I would often see these miniature soldiers – every bit as young and as carefree of life and death as those I had met in the trenches outside Dezful. The inscription on the red bands round the little boys’ heads was quite uncompromising. ‘Yes, Khomeini, we are ready,’ it said. And the would-be martyrs, identically dressed in yellow jogging suits, banged their small fists against their chests with all the other worshippers, in time to the chants. This cerebral drumbeat – at least ten thousand hands clapping bodies every four seconds – pulsed out across the nation, as it did every Friday over the airwaves of Iranian radio and television. The audience was familiar, even if the faces changed from week to week: mullahs, wheelchair veterans of the war, the poor of south Tehran, the volunteer children and the Iraqi POWs, green-uniformed and trucked to the prayer ground to curse their own president.

Friday prayers in Tehran were a unique combination of religious emotion and foreign policy declaration, a kind of Billy Graham crusade and a weekly State of the Nation address rolled into one. A stranger – especially a Westerner – could be perplexed at what he saw, even disturbed. But he could not fail to be impressed. It was not the prayer-leader who acted as the centrepiece of this great theatre. Often this was Rafsanjani. He could discourse to his ten thousand audience on the origins of the revolution, superpower frustration in Lebanon and further Iranian military successes outside Basra. But this was almost a rambling affair. His hair curling from beneath his amami turban and his hand resting on an automatic rifle, Rafsanjani did not stir his audience to any heights of passion.

The congregation that June provided their own sense of unity, their voices rising and falling in cadence with a long chant in Farsi that attempted to integrate Islamic history with the struggle against Iraq, the little boys – some as young as ten – still banging their fists on their heads. Much Farsi verse rhymes and – by rhyming the English translation – these calls to war come across with an archaic, almost Victorian naivety:

We are ready to give our lives, we are ready to go,

And fight as at Kerbala against our foe.

Imam Hossein said those around him were the best;

Now you see with Khomeini we attest

That Hossein and those around him are with us.

In our way lies the honour of Islam

As we follow the word of our Imam.

There were some, the more youthful Basiji, who had already been chosen for martyrdom, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds kitted out in tiny bright camouflage uniforms. They stood on each side of Rafsanjani’s dais holding trays of toffees, each sweet wrapped in crimson cellophane. At a signal, they stepped among the rows of mullahs and war-wounded, the Revolutionary Guards in parka jackets and the elderly, unshaven, dark-suited men from south Tehran, and presented their trays of toffees. Each man carefully took a sweet without looking at the child in front of him, aware of the significance; for this was no interlude between prayers. It was a communion with doomed youth.

Then the boys walked soulfully back to their places on each side of the dais, hair cut short, large dark eyes occasionally turning shyly towards the mass of people. They were, the worshippers were told, aware of their mission. And they stood there, fidgeting sometimes, headbands slightly askew, but feet together at attention as any child might play at soldiers in his home. Rafsanjani made no reference to them. His message was more temporal and the formula was an old one. Iraq was losing many men at the front. It was also losing much territory. To save the land, it had to lose more men. To save the men, it had to lose more land. So Iraq was losing the war. In just one week, Rafsanjani said, Iraq had lost six more brigades. The worshippers chanted their thanks to their army at the front.

Friday prayers were broadcast through loudspeakers along those very trench lines opposite Basra, piped through loudspeakers so that the Iranian soldiers could hear these ten thousand voices above the shellfire. They called for revenge against Iraq for its air raids on Iranian cities. Rafsanjani added a pragmatic note. ‘If you want to make yourselves useful,’ he told his nationwide audience, ‘you can dig air-raid shelters at home.’ The young boys stood listlessly on either side of him, perhaps aware that their homes were no longer their immediate concern.

Yet still Iraq hoovered up Iranian prisoners – by the thousand now, just as the Iranians had done before – and ostentatiously presented them to the world’s press. Iraq opened a huge prison camp complex for its new POWs in the desert west of Baghdad, around the hot, largely Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, where there would be no Shia community to offer comfort and help should any of them escape. This was every man’s Stalag, complete with a jolly commandant called Major Ali who wanted to introduce us to his model prisoners. The Iranian inmates crowded round us when we arrived, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, still in their drab, desert-yellow uniforms, happy prisoners according to the senior Iranian officer at Ramadi, Anish Tusi. How could they be otherwise, the camp’s doctor asked? Why, look, they had schools, a library, a tuck shop, table tennis, basketball.

A portrait of Saddam Hussein smiled down benevolently upon them. ‘If you obey the camp rules, it will be better for you and for everybody else,’ a poster advised the prisoners in Farsi. ‘Obey the rules of the camp and the commander of the camp, and you will be treated as friends.’ Major Ali, smiling in the midday sun, gestured magnanimously towards the canteen. ‘Just see how well our prisoners eat,’ he said. We pushed inside a small hut where four Iranian Basiji – captured in the Howeiza marshes a year earlier – gently stirred two cauldrons of fish and roast chicken. ‘This camp is Ramadi Two,’ the jolly major said, ‘and all our camps at Ramadi are the same. The prisoners here are in such good conditions that they don’t feel the need to escape.’

A sharp eye detected an element of hyperbole. Ramadi One, for example, was surrounded by so much glistening barbed wire, 9 metres deep and 5 metres high, that there was scarcely room for the prisoners to lean out of their hut windows, let alone play basketball. Ramadi Three appeared to have none of those friendly tuck shops and prison libraries. Perhaps, too, the inmates of the other camps did not speak in quite such scathing tones of Ayatollah Khomeini. For the boy soldiers in Major Ali’s Ramadi Two condemned Khomeini’s regime with an enthusiasm that had the Baath party officials nodding sagely and the military police guards grinning with satisfaction.

Mohamed Ismaili, a twenty-year-old from Kerman, for example, admitted he had broadcast over Iraq’s Farsi-language radio, telling his parents on the air that ‘this war is not a holy war’. Ahmed Taki, who was only seventeen, was even more specific. A thin, shy youth with his head totally shaved, he was a Basij volunteer sent to the battle front a year ago. ‘I was in school when a mullah came to our class and told us we should fight in the battle against Iraq,’ he said. ‘I heard Khomeini say that all young people should go to the front. But now I know it is not a holy war.’ The stories were all similar, of schoolboys told that God would reward them if they died in battle, a spiritual inspiration that underwent a swift transition once they entered Ramadi Two.

For after uttering such statements, few of these Iranian prisoners could return home under the Khomeini regime, even if the war suddenly ended. Some of them admitted as much. The Iranians, of course, had persuaded hundreds of Iraqi POWs to speak with an identically heretical tongue about Saddam. Perhaps that is what both sides wanted: prisoners who could not go home.

Major Ali seemed unperturbed. ‘There are maybe sixty or seventy prisoners who still support Khomeini,’ he said. ‘That’s not many – a very small percentage. Sometimes they mention him at their prayers – we never interfere with their religion.’ But the major did interfere with their news. The POWs could listen only to the Farsi service of Iraqi radio and television – hardly an unbiased source of information on the war – and the only outside information they were permitted to receive were the letters sent to them by their families through the International Red Cross. ‘Come and see the barracks,’ the major insisted. We walked into a hut containing a hundred teenagers, all in that same pallid, greyish-yellow uniform. They stood barefoot on the army blankets that doubled as their beds and the moment an Iraqi army photographer raised his camera, half of them bowed their heads. Their identity concealed, perhaps they could one day go home.

Each military setback for Iraq provided an excuse to break the rules of war once more. Faced with human-wave attacks, there was gas. Faced with further losses, there was a sea war to be commenced against unarmed merchantmen. A new and amoral precedent was set in early 1986 – just after the Iranian capture of the Fao peninsula – when Iraq shot down an Iranian Fokker Friendship aircraft carrying forty-six civilians, including many members of the Majlis and the editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan, Sayad Hassan Shah-Cherghi.

The Iranians wanted to take journalists to Fao, but I for one refused to take the usual night-time C-130 Iranian military transport plane to the front. If the Iraqis were prepared to attack civilian aircraft, they would certainly shed no tears if they destroyed the international press as it travelled to witness Iraq’s latest humiliation. So we took the train again, back down to Ahwaz and the war I had been covering for five and a half years.

Fao had a special meaning for me. It was at Fao that I first saw the Iran – Iraq war with my own eyes. It lay on a spit of land at the bottom of the Shatt al-Arab river, from which the Iraqi army had shelled Abadan. In those days, the Iraqis planned to take the eastern bank of the river and secure it for all time for Iraq. They had not only failed to capture the eastern bank; now they had lost part of the western bank – they had lost the port of Fao itself to the Iranians. The next target for the Iranians would be the great port of Basra with its Shia Muslim population and its straight roads north-west to the holy Shia cities of Kerbala and Najaf. I would be reporting if not from Basra itself, at least from the city in which I started off in this war.

But I wasn’t happy. There were frequent allusions in Tehran to ‘setbacks’ in the Fao battle. Rafsanjani made a disturbing reference to Iran’s need to hold on to Fao, while announcing that there were no plans to advance on Basra – which was odd because, if this was true, why bother to capture Fao in the first place? The Tehran newspapers described how the Iranian forces in Fao were ‘consolidating’ their positions – always a sign that an army is in difficulties. Then when we arrived in Ahwaz and were taken to the nearest airbase for a helicopter ride to the front line, the two American-trained pilots packed the machine with journalists and mullahs – and then aborted the flight. There was too much wind on the river, one of them claimed. There was a bad weather forecast for the afternoon. A cleric arrived to order the men to fly. Gerry ‘G. G.’ Labelle of the Associated Press, with whom I had spent years in Beirut during the war, was sitting beside me on the floor of the chopper and we looked at each other with growing concern as the helicopter lifted off the apron, hovered 2 metres above the ground, turned to face due west – and then gently settled back onto the tarmac. Like so many journalists in time of war, we had been desperate to get to the front line – and even more desperate to find a reason to avoid going.*

Part of me – and part of Gerry – was of the ‘let’s-get-it-over-with’ persuasion. Hadn’t I sped around the Dezful war front on an identical Bell helicopter scarcely a year before? Didn’t John Kifner and I admit that we had enjoyed those heart-stopping, shirt-tearing, speed-gashing rides up the wadis and over those hundreds of burned-out tanks? Wasn’t that what being a foreign correspondent in war was all about? Going into battle and getting the story and arriving home safe and sound and knowing you wouldn’t have to go back next day? We climbed off the helicopter and I could see the relief on the pilots’ faces. If they hadn’t wanted to go, then there was something very, very wrong with this journey to Fao.

In the grotty hotel in Ahwaz that night, I didn’t sleep. Mosquitoes came whining around my face and I ran out of bottled water, and the chicken I’d had for supper made me feel sick. ‘See you in the morning, Fisky,’ Labelle had said with a dark smile. Labelle was a New Yorker brought up in Arizona, a fast, tough agency man with a vocabulary of expletives for editorial fools, especially if they pestered him on the wire with childish queries about his reports. ‘How the fuck do I know if Saddam’s fucking son is fighting in this fucking war when I’m on the Iranian front line getting shelled by the fucking Iraqis?’ he was to ask me one day. ‘Sometimes I ask myself why I’m fucking working for this fucking news agency.’ But Labelle loved the AP and its deadlines and the way in which the wire bell would go ding-ding-ding-ding for a ‘bulletin’ story. ‘I imagine you know, Fisky, that old AK has bitten the dust at last,’ he told me over the phone in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini died. ‘I guess that means no more war.’

But on that hot and blasted morning in Ahwaz, after the mosquitoes and the sleepless night, I probably needed some of Labelle’s saturating humour. As the ministry minders called us to return to the airbase, he gave me one of his mirthless Steve McQueen smiles. ‘Well, Fisky, I’m told it’s a briefing at the usual bunker then a little mosey over the Shatt and a tourist visit to Fao. Lots of gunfire and corpses – should be right up your street.’ A few days earlier, a German correspondent had suffered a fatal heart attack during an Iraqi air raid on Fao. He and his colleagues had jumped for cover when the planes came in, but when they climbed back on to the truck on which they were travelling, the German had just stayed lying on the ground. The Iranians would later call him a ‘martyr’ of the ‘Imposed War’.

Labelle was right about the bunker. At the airbase, two Bell choppers with Iranian insignia on their fuselages were bouncing on the apron, their rotors snapping at the hot air, and into one of them we bundled, Labelle and I and maybe four other journalists and the usual crop of divines and, nose down, pitching in the wind, we swept over a date-palm plantation and flew, at high speed but only a few metres from the tree tops, towards that front line which all of us – save, I suppose, for our clerical brethren – had by now imagined as a triptych of hell. It was like a switchback, the way we cornered granaries and rose over broken electrical pylons and then fell into troughs of wind and sand and dust and turned like a buzzard over long military convoys that were moving down to the river. Labelle and I gazed down in a kind of wonderment. The sensation was so powerful, the act of flying in such circumstances such madness, that we were slipping into the same syndrome I had experienced at Dezful: To hell with the danger – just look at the war.