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

Two more mines were found by, of all people, an NBC crew. Steve O’Neil, flying low over the sea in our usual chopper, was looking through his view-finder when he glimpsed a large, spherical black shape disappearing past the helicopter’s left skid. He was only a few metres from the water, flying at more than 150 kilometres an hour, but the object was too sinister – too familiar from a dozen war movies – to be anything other than a mine. A few hours later and in almost identical circumstances, a CBS crew found another mine, black-painted like the first but weighted down by a chain. Chinese military technicians working with the Iranians reported that Iran had built a factory near the port of Bandar Abbas to upgrade the old mines they were buying, mines that were originally manufactured – a short pause for imperial reflection here – in Tsarist Russia.

In April, the American warship USS Samuel Bo Roberts was almost sunk when it struck a mine while on Gulf patrol. On 21 September, Rear Admiral Bernsen, the same officer who had meekly agreed that his ships were better off using supertankers for their own protection, decided that sonar-equipped ‘Seabat’ helicopters aboard the USS Jarrett – by historic chance, a sister ship of the Stark – should attack the Iranian naval vessel Iran Ajr after it was observed for thirty minutes laying mines in the Gulf 80 kilometres north-east of Bahrain. Reporters later taken aboard the 180-foot Iranian vessel – an unromantic nine-year-old Japanese roll-on-roll-off landing craft – saw ten large black-painted mines bearing the serial number ‘M08’ near the stern of the boat with a special slide attached to the deck so that the crew could launch them into the sea. Bullet holes riddled the deck, cabins and bridge structure, with trails of blood running along the galleyways. Three of the thirty-man Iranian crew were killed in the attack, two more were missing believed dead and another four wounded, two seriously. Rafsanjani said that the American claim of minelaying was ‘a lie’, but it clearly was not, and the Iranians finally retracted their assertion that the Iran Ajr was an innocent cargo vessel. Saddam Hussein now had the satisfaction of knowing that the United States had aligned itself with Iraq as an anti-Iranian belligerent.

The United States followed up on its success against the Iranian minelayer just over three weeks later with a naval strike against two Iranian oil platforms 130 kilometres east of Qatar. Four US guided missile destroyers firing 5-inch guns demolished the Rustum and Rakhsh platforms. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger called it a ‘measured response’ to an Iranian missile attack on an American-flagged tanker the previous week. All that initially came from the Iranians was a distant Iranian voice pleading over a crackling radio for a naval ceasefire so that wounded men could be evacuated from one of the burning rigs. The two platforms had been used as military bases by Revolutionary Guards, the Americans claimed. Tehran warned, not very credibly, that the United States would receive a crushing response from Iran.

Because these military actions involved the Western powers, little attention was paid to the far more serious casualties still being inflicted in the land war, even when the victims were clearly civilians. On 12 October, for instance, an Iranian ground-to-ground missile allegedly aimed at the Iraqi defence ministry in Baghdad struck the Martyrs Place Primary School, 20 kilometres from the ministry, as children were gathering for morning class. The explosion killed 29 children and wounded 228 other civilians, a hundred of them critically. Iraq had just recommenced the use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces outside Basra, but this did not prevent the Iraqis capitalising on what they immediately condemned as an example of Iranian ‘bestiality’.

Basra had come to define this last and savage stage of the war. For the Iranians, it remained the gateway to southern Iraq, the very roads to the shrines of Kerbala and Najaf and Kufa beckoning to the Iranian soldiers and Pasdaran who were still boxed into the powdered ruins of Fao. Iraq was still able to maintain an army of 650,000 men spread through seven brigades from Suleimaniya down to the front line outside Fao. Presidential guards and special forces made up 30,000 of these troops and the ‘popular army’ of conscripts and ‘volunteers’ at least 400,000. An ‘Arab army’ of 200,000, many of them Egyptians, constituted the rest of Iraq’s strength. But by early 1987 the Iranians had massed a force of 600,000 just opposite Basra. It seemed inevitable that Field Marshal Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, Prime Minister, Secretary General of the Regional Command of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and friend of America, would have to make another of his famous retreats.

And when the Iranians did break through in January 1987 and made their dash for Basra, they wanted to show us. At night, we were taken up behind the Iranian lines, our bus crunching through wadis as the skyline was lit by artillery fire, hour after hour of grinding through the dark amid thousands of troops moving up to the line, the same old approaching fear of death and wounds settling over us. Several years earlier, a ministry minder had led a Reuters reporter into a minefield. Both were blown to pieces. The Iranians proclaimed the Reuters man a ‘martyr’ and were only just prevented from sending his widow a glossy book of coloured photographs depicting other martyrs in various stages of dismemberment and putrefaction.

I spent the night on the sand floor of a deep, white-washed underground bunker. We were given juice and dooq – cold drinking yoghurt – and nan bread and cheese and tea, and I lay, as usual, sleepless beneath my blanket. Before six next morning, the Revolutionary Guards arrived to take us all to visit ‘the front’ and I climbed wearily up the steep steps towards the sun and heat and the roar of gunfire and the heavy crumping sound of incoming shells. Dezful was cinemascope. Fao was devastating. But this was an epic with a cast of thousands. Tanks and trucks and heavy guns were pouring westwards with hundreds of Iranian troops sitting on armour and lorries or marching alongside them. To my horror, I noticed that our escort would be none other than Ali Mazinan, the crazed and bespectacled Revolutionary Guards officer with an obsession about Iraqi date exports who had sent me off on the lunatic helicopter flight to Fao. He advanced towards me now with the warmest of smiles, embraced me in a grizzly-bear hug and kissed me on both cheeks. Never was Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ more necessary to a correspondent. Poetic faith was about the best there was to cling on to in the next few hours.

The Fish Lake was a stretch of desert north of the Karun river but west of Shalamcheh – the border post where I had been partially deafened by the Iraqi gun batteries shelling Khorramshahr more than six years earlier – but now Shalamcheh was back in Iranian hands and its vast army was moving towards the Shatt al-Arab river and the city of Basra. Once more, I was in ‘Iranian-occupied Iraq’, but in a desert that the Iraqis had flooded as they retreated. The Iranians were now advancing on a series of dykes above the waterlogged desert, under intense and constant shellfire from Iraqi artillery whose gunners quickly worked out their trajectories to hit the dykes.

The Iranians provided another army truck for the press, a Japanese open-top lorry with a pile of old steel helmets in one corner that we could wear when we reached the battlefield. Between earthworks and dugouts and lines of trenches we drove, the marching soldiery of the Islamic Republic walking beside us, grinning and making victory signs and holding up their rifles like conquering heroes. I suppose that’s what they were, the victims at last overcoming their aggressors, the winners – or so they thought – after so many years of pain and loss. Over to my left, as we climbed onto a plateau of rock and sand, I suddenly saw the shining white warheads and fuselages of a battery of Hawk missiles, gifts from Oliver North, along with the spare parts which had now turned them into a new and formidable air defence for the victorious Iranian army.

And then we were on the causeway, a long, narrow, crumbling embankment of sand surrounded by lagoons of water filled with still-burning Iraqi tanks, overturned missile launchers, half-submerged Iraqi personnel carriers and dozens of bodies, some with only their feet protruding above the mire. Far more fearful, however, were the whine and crash of incoming shells as the Iraqis directed their artillery onto the dykes. I squeezed the old Russian helmet the Iranians had given me onto my head. In front of us, an Iranian truck burst into pink fire, its occupants hurling themselves – some with flames curling round their bodies – into the water. The convoy backed up and our lorry came to a halt. We would hear the splosh in the water beside us as the next shell hit the lagoon, sending a plume of water into the sky, cascading us with mud and wet sand.

Ian Black of the Guardian, one of the sanest reporters with whom one could go to war, was sitting opposite me on the truck, looking at me meaningfully through his big spectacles. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is bloody dangerous.’ I agreed. Around us, on little hillocks amid the great green-blue lakes of water, Iranian gunners fired off 155-mm shells towards Basra, shouting their excitement, throwing their arms around each other. The young Iranian boys did not even bother to keep their helmets on amid the shellfire. They lounged around the earthworks of the captured Iraqi front lines, smoking cigarettes, hanging out their washing, waving good-naturedly at us as the Iraqi artillery rounds hissed overhead. The explosions even made them laugh. Was it contempt for death or merely their reaction to our fear?

Another big splosh and Black and I hunched our shoulders, and sure enough there was an eruption of water and earth behind me and a downpour of muck and brackish liquid descended on us. The shells came five at a time, zipping over the breakwaters. On a similar trip a few hours earlier, the British correspondent of US News and World Report had summed up his feelings under fire along the dykes with eloquent understatement. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that I could take more than a day of this.’ The road surface was only a few feet above the water but the causeway seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, a dwindling taper of sand that reached a horizon of fire and smoke. The strap of my helmet suddenly snapped and it slid off my head and bounced onto the floor of the truck. I picked it up and stuck it back on my head, holding it on with my left hand. But what was the point? If I was hit on the head, my fingers would be chopped off. Black was frowning. We were all concentrating. The idea of instant death was indeed a concentrating experience. And all the while, the army of boys and elderly volunteers and Revolutionary Guard commanders tramped past us in the sun as we ground slowly towards the battle front.

‘War till victory,’ they kept screaming at us from the mud. Would I never hear the end of this? And when we had driven for perhaps 3 kilometres along those earthworks and reached and passed Shalamcheh, the ghastly Mazinan suddenly appeared beside our truck, pointing in a demented way towards the north-west. ‘Basra,’ he kept shouting. ‘BASRA! BASRA! BASRA!’ Black and I peered through the smoke and flames and the waterspouts that were now rising eerily around us, volcanic eruptions that would carry the dark brown mud high into the sky, where it would hover for a second before collapsing on us. Black was looking at me again. A bit like The Cruel Sea, I said stupidly. ‘Much worse,’ he replied.

Mazinan was obsessed. ‘Come, come,’ he kept ordering us, and we crawled up to an embankment of mud that physically shook as the Iranians fired off their 155s from the waterlogged pits behind me. I peered over the lip and could see across an expanse of bright water the towers and factory buildings of Basra’s suburban industrial complex, grey on the horizon, silhouetted for the gunners by the morning sun. A mob of boys stood around us, all laughing. ‘Why be afraid?’ one asked. ‘Look, we are protected. Saddam will die.’

A few hours earlier, Saddam Hussein had declared that the causeway here would be turned into a ‘furnace’ – Black and I had a shrewd suspicion he meant what he said – in which the Iranians would perish. Yet this boy’s protection consisted of just one red bandanna wound tightly round his head upon which was inscribed in yellow God’s supposed invocation to destroy the Iraqi regime. Good God, said God, I remembered God saying in John Squire’s poem, ‘I’ve got my work cut out.’ Nor was the First World War a cliché here. With at least a million dead, the battle of Fish Lake was the Somme and Passchendaele rolled into one but with the sacrifice turned maniacally cheerful by Mazinan and his comrades. One small boy – perhaps thirteen or fourteen – was standing beside a dugout and looked at me and slowly took off his helmet and held a Koran against his heart and smiled. This was the ‘Kerbala 5’ offensive. And this boy, I was sure, believed he would soon be worshipping at the shrine of Imam Hossein. It was, in its way, a sight both deeply impressive and immensely sad. These young men believed they were immortal in the sight of God. They were not fearless so much as heedless – it was this that made them so unique and yet so vulnerable. They had found the key, they had discovered the mechanism of immortality. We had not. So he was brave and laughing, while I was frightened. I didn’t want to die.

The mudfields around us were littered with unexploded bombs, big, grey-finned sharklike beasts which had half-buried themselves in the soggy mass when the Iraqi air force vainly tried to halt ‘Kerbala 5’. ‘We are winning,’ a white banner proclaimed above a smashed dugout whose walls were built with empty ammunition boxes and shell cases. Who could doubt it? The Iraqis had five defensive lines before Basra and the Iranians had overrun the first three. The Iraqi T-72s that had been captured by the Iranians were being dug back into their own revetments but with the barrels traversed, firing now towards Basra.

Mazinan claimed – truthfully – that the Revolutionary Guards had won this battle, that the regular Iranian army provided only logistics and fire support, that Iraq had lost 15,000 dead and 35,000 wounded, that 550 tanks had been destroyed and more than a thousand armoured vehicles. But the Iranians, I unwisely protested, were still a long way from the centre of Basra. Mazinan’s eyes widened behind his giant spectacles. ‘Come,’ he said. And I was propelled by this idiotic giant – who was in reality rather too rational when it came to religious war – towards another vast embankment of mud. We struggled towards the top of it. And down the other side. It was the third Iraqi line and we were now in front of it. Bullets buzzed around us. I remember thinking how much they sounded like wasps, high-speed wasps, and I could hear them ‘put-putting’ into the mud behind me. Mazinan clutched my right arm and pointed towards the pillars of black smoke that hung like funeral curtains in front of us. ‘Do you see that building?’ he asked. And through the darkness I could just make out the outline of a low, rectangular block. ‘That,’ Mazinan cried, ‘is the Basra Sheraton Hotel!’

The Iranians were using their artillery at three times the Iraqi rate of fire, the muzzle flashes streaking out across the water. Still the boys and the bearded old men lounged along the causeway, sometimes playing taped religious music from loudspeakers. Back on the truck, Black and I looked at each other. Brent Sadler and a crew from ITN had been taken to view a pile of Iraqi bodies in a swamp churned up by shells. ‘Very dangerous but I’ve got no option,’ Sadler told me with just a twinkle of death in his eye. ‘It’s television – you know, we’ve got to have pictures.’ Sadler would survive, he always did. But Black wasn’t so sure. Nor was I. ‘We would like to go now,’ I hollered at Mazinan. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Go,’ Black shouted at him. ‘We want to go, go, go.’ Mazinan looked at us both with something worse than contempt. ‘Why?’ he roared. Because we are cowards. Go on, say it, Fisk. Because I am shaking with fear and want to survive and live and write my story and fly back to Tehran and go back to Beirut and invite a young woman to drink fine red wine on my balcony.

Mazinan nodded at the driver. Then he raised his right hand level with his face and closed and opened his fingers, the kind of wave one gives to a small child. Bye-bye, bye-bye, he said softly. He was mimicking the mother taking leave of her babies. And so our truck turned left off the dyke and chuntered down a long causeway towards the ruins of Khorramshahr.

In a factory warehouse, a thousand Iraqi prisoners were paraded before us, including Brigadier General Jamal al-Bayoudi of the Iraqi 506th Corps, who described how the Pasdaran and the Basiji clawed their way through swaths of barbed wire 60 metres deep to reach their third line of defence.* The Iraqis half-heartedly chanted curses against the very Iraqi leader for whom they had been fighting only a few days before. Several smiled at us when the guards were not looking. One of them muttered his name to me. ‘Please tell my family I am safe,’ he said softly. ‘Please tell them I did not die in the battle.’ A week later, I gave his name to the International Red Cross, who promised to relay his message to his parents.*

I returned from the battle of Fish Lake with a sense of despair. That small boy holding the Koran to his chest believed – believed in a way that few Westerners, and I include myself, could any longer understand. He knew, with the conviction of his own life, that heaven awaited him. He would go straight there – the fast train, direct, no limbo, no delays – if he was lucky enough to be killed by the Iraqis. I began to think that life was not the only thing that could die in Iran. For there was, in some indefinable way, a death process within the state itself. In a nation that looked backwards rather than forwards, in which women were to be dressed in perpetual mourning, in which death was an achievement, in which children could reach their most heroic attainment only in self-sacrifice, it was as if the country was neutering itself, moving into a black experience that found its spiritual parallel in the mass slaughter of Cambodia rather than on the ancient battlefield of Kerbala.

I would spend days, perhaps weeks, of my life visiting the cemeteries of Iran’s war dead. Less than a year after the capture of Fao – the offensive that was supposed to lead Iran into Basra and then to Kerbala and Najaf – I was standing in the little cemetery of Imam Zadeh Ali Akbar on the cold slopes of the Alborz mountains at Chasar, where they had been preparing for the next Iranian offensive. The bulldozers had dug deep into the icy graveyard and there was now fresh ground – two football pitches in length – for the next crop of martyrs.

The thin, dark-faced cemetery keeper was quite blunt about it. ‘Every time there is a new Kerbala offensive, the martyrs arrive within days,’ he said. ‘We have three hundred already over there and twelve more last week. The graves of ordinary people we destroy after thirty years – there is nothing left – but our martyrs are different. They will lie here for a thousand years and more.’ His statistics told a far more apocalyptic story than might have appeared; for Chasar – distinguished only by an ancient, crumbling shrine – merely contained the war dead of one small suburb of north Tehran. Spread across the country, those 312 bodies become half a million, perhaps three-quarters of a million, perhaps far more. In the Behesht-i-Zahra cemetery outside the city, they lie in their tens of thousands.

They are nearly all young and they are honoured, publicly at least, with that mixture of grief and spiritual satisfaction so peculiar to Shia Islam. Take Ali Nasser Riarat. He was only twenty-one when he was killed at the battle of the Majnoon Marshes west of Howeiza in 1986; his photograph, pinned inside a glass-fronted steel box above his remains, shows him to have been a slim, good-looking youth with a brush moustache. His gravestone contains a message to his father Yussef, and to his mother:

Don’t cry mother, because I am happy. I am not dead. I remember all that you have done for me. You gave me milk and you wanted me to sacrifice my life for religion. Dear father, don’t cry and don’t beat yourself because you will be proud when you realise I am a martyr …

Several other inscriptions express similar sentiments. Even the flowers laid on the grave of a young soldier called Zaman near the cemetery-keeper’s hut carry such a declaration. ‘We congratulate you upon your martyrdom,’ it says, signed by ‘students and staff of the Tehran University of Science’. Could there really be such joy amid the graves of Chasar? Those cruel steel boxes above the dead contain fresh flowers and plastic doves and real steel-tipped bullets, but the snapshots show the young men who die in every war, laughing in gardens, standing with parents outside front doors, perched on mountain tops, holding field binoculars. Lutyens would have understood the waste of 25-year-old Sergeant Akbazadeh, who died in 1982 in Khorramshahr; of Mehdi Balouoch – a hand grenade carved on his gravestone – who was twenty-three when he was killed in Zakdan; of Mehrdrodi Nassiri, aged twenty-five, who was shot at Mehran in July of 1986. A 24-year-old who died outside Basra a few days before – perhaps in the same Battle of Fish Lake which I had witnessed – was pictured with his two little girls, one with her hair in a bow, curled up in his arms before he went to the front.

Was there no sense of waste? A man in his forties, bearded, unsmiling, shook his head. What of Owen’s question about doomed youth? What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ‘I only met one man who spoke like that,’ the Iranian said. ‘He was an old man in hospital. He had his legs and one arm blown off by a bomb near Ahwaz. He had lost an eye. The bomb had killed his wife and children, his sisters and his brothers. He said he thought Saddam and Khomeini were both out for what they could get and did not care about their people. But he was the only man I ever heard who said those things.’

Outside the chilly, intimate cemetery, there stood a shop selling books about martyrdom. Inside was a young Revolutionary Guard who had that day returned from the southern front. His name was Ali Khani. What did his parents feel when he was away? ‘I have three brothers as well as me at the front,’ he replied. ‘My mother and father know that if I am martyred, I will be still alive.’ But did his parents not wish him luck – not tell him to ‘take care’ when he left for the war? ‘No,’ he said, a slight smile emerging at such Western sentiment. ‘They believe it is God’s wish if I die.’ But would his parents not cry if he died? Ali Khani thought about this for a long time. ‘Yes, they would,’ he said at last. ‘And so did the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him, when his baby son Ibrahim died. But this is not a sign of weakness or lack of faith. It is a human thing.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Drinking the Poisoned Chalice

It is a long way from Washington to the Mossan Food and Fruit Cold Store in Bandar Abbas. The Pentagon’s clinical details of the last flight of Iran Air IR655 on 3 July 1988 cannot reflect the appalling human dimension of the charnel house in which I am standing, where three-year-old Leila Behbahani lies in her cheap, chipboard coffin. She was a very little girl and she still wears the small green dress and white pinafore in which she died three days ago when the United States Navy missile struck the Iranian Airbus over the Gulf, killing Leila and her 289 fellow passengers. She was pulled from the water only minutes after the explosion and she looks as if she has fallen asleep, her left wrist decorated with two bright gold bangles, her feet still in white socks and tiny black shoes. Her name is scrawled in crayon on the coffin lid that is propped up beside her. Her equally small brother – a dark-set, handsome boy with very short black hair – lies a few inches from her, cradled inside another plywood coffin.