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

The Baath had been founded in Syria in 1941 – inspired, ironically, by Britain’s re-invasion of Iraq – as a secular, pan-Arab movement intended to lift the burden of guilt and humiliation which had lain across the Arab world for so many generations. During the centuries of Ottoman rule, Arabs had suffered famine and a steady loss of intellectual power. Education had declined over the years and many millions of Arabs never learned to read and write. Baath means ‘rebirth’, and although its Syrian Christian founder, Michel Aflaq, was himself a graduate of the Sorbonne – and wore an outsize fez – it had a natural base among the poor, the villages and tribes and, of course, within the army. Saddam Hussein was an early adherent, and among the first Baathists to try to kill Qassim; his subsequent flight across Iraq, his own extraction of a bullet in his leg with a razor-blade, and his swim to freedom across the Tigris river – at almost exactly the same location where American Special Forces were to find him in 2003 – was to become an official Saddam legend.

Despite splits within the Baath, Saddam Hussein emerged as vice-chairman of the party’s Regional Command Council after a further coup in 1968. He would remain nominally the second most powerful man in Iraq until 16 July 1979, when President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam’s cousin, retired. There followed the infamous dinner party at the presidential palace at which Saddam invited his own party cadres to denounce themselves. The execution of his Baathist colleagues began within days.

As Saddam slowly took control of Iraq, the Kurdish insurrection began again in the north and President Sadat of Egypt, by his journey to Jerusalem in November 1977, took the most populous Arab country out of the Arab – Israeli conflict. The Camp David agreement made this final. So it was that Saddam would preside over what the Iraqis immediately called the ‘Confrontation Front Summit’ in Baghdad. This involved turning the Iraqi capital – however briefly – into the centre of the Arab world, giving Saddam exposure on the eve of his takeover from President al-Bakr. A vast tent was erected behind the summit palace, five hundred journalists were flown into Iraq from around the world – all telephone calls made by them would be free as well as bugged – and housed in hotels many miles from Baghdad, trucked to a ‘press centre’ where they would be forbidden any contact with delegates and watched by posses of young men wearing white socks. We knew they were policemen because each wore a sign on his lapel that said ‘Tourism’.

The latter was supposed to occupy much of our time, and I have an imperishable memory of a long bus journey down to Qurnah, just north of Basra, to view the Garden of Eden. Our bus eventually drew up next to a bridge where a fetid river flowed slowly between treeless banks of grey sand beneath a dun-coloured sky. One of the cops put his left hand on my arm and pointed with the other at this miserable scene, proudly uttering his only touristic announcement of the day: ‘And this, Mr Robert, is the Garden of Eden.’

Before the summit, a lot of Arab leaders were forced to pretend to be friends in the face of ‘the traitor Sadat’. President Assad was persuaded to forget the brutal schism between his country’s Baath party and that of al-Bakr and Saddam. The Syrians announced that Assad and al-Bakr would discuss ‘a common front against the mad Zionist attack against our region and the capitulationist, unilateral reconciliation of the Egyptian regime with Israel’. Once in Baghdad, Assad, who had maintained an entire army division on his eastern border in case Iraq invaded – he already had 33,000 Syrian troops deployed in Lebanon – and al-Bakr talked in ‘an atmosphere of deep understanding’, according to the Syrian government newspaper Tishrin. Unity in diversity. King Hussein of Jordan would have to travel to the city in which the Hashemite monarchy had been exterminated only twenty years earlier. Baath party officials were sent to the overgrown royal cemetery in Baghdad to scythe down the long grass around the graves of the Hashemites in case the king wanted to visit them. Even Abu Nidal, the head of the cruellest of Palestinian hit-squads, was packed off to Tikrit lest his presence in Baghdad offend the PLO leader, Yassir Arafat.

And so they all gathered, old al-Bakr and the young Saddam and Arafat and Hussein and Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Reporters were banned from the conference chamber but photographers were allowed to view these men much in the way that visitors are permitted to see the embalmed body of Lenin. Masquerading as part of Michael Cole’s BBC television crew, I walked into the chamber and shuffled along the rows of princes and presidents who sat in waxworks attitudes of concern and apprehension, past Arafat, who repeatedly and embarrassingly gave a thumbs-up to the cameras, past a frowning King Hussein and a glowering Saddam. I watched the future Iraqi leader carefully, and when his eyes briefly met mine I noted a kind of contempt in them, something supercilious. This was not, I thought, a man who had much faith in conferences.

And he was right. The Saudis made sure that they didn’t anger the United States, and after three days of deliberation the Arab mountain gave forth a mouse. Egypt would be put under an economic boycott – just like Israel – and a committee would be dispatched to Cairo to try to persuade Sadat to renounce Camp David. To sweeten the deal, they were to offer him $7 billion annually for the next ten years to support Egypt’s bankrupt economy. The unenviable task of leading this forlorn delegation to Cairo fell, rather sadly, to Selim el-Hoss, the prime minister of Lebanon whose own war-battered country was then more deeply divided than the Arab world itself. Sadat snubbed them all, refusing to meet the ministers. The money was a bribe, he accurately announced, and ‘all the millions in the world cannot buy the will of Egypt’.

The nature of the Iraqi regime was no secret, nor was its ruthlessness. The British had already become involved in a trade dispute with the government in 1978 after Iraqi agents in London murdered Abdul Razzak al-Nayef, a former Iraqi prime minister who had been condemned to death by the Baghdad authorities. A British businessman, a representative of Wimpey’s, had been languishing for a month in Baghdad’s central prison without any charges, and a British diplomat, Richard Drew, was dragged from his car in the city and beaten up, apparently by plain-clothes police.

But the search for ‘spies’ within the body politic of Iraq had been established eleven years earlier, and to understand the self-hatred which this engendered in the regime – and Saddam’s role in the purges – it is essential to go back to the record of its early days. After I first saw Saddam in Baghdad, I began to build up a file on him back home in Beirut. I went back to the Lebanese newspaper archives; Beirut was under nightly civil war bombardment but its journalists still maintained their files. And there, as so often happened in the grubby newspaper libraries of Lebanon, a chilling pattern began to emerge. At its congress in November 1968, the Baath party, according to the Baghdad newspaper Al-Jumhouriya, had made ‘the liquidation of spy networks’ a national aspiration; and the following month, the newly installed Baath party discovered a ‘conspiracy’ to overthrow its rule. It accused eighty-four people of being involved, including the former prime minister, Dr Abdul Rahman Bazzaz, and his former defence minister, Major General Abdul Aziz Uquili. The charges of spying, a Lebanese newspaper reported at the time, ‘were levelled in the course of statements made in a special Baghdad radio and television programme by two of the accused, an ex-soldier from the southern port of Basra and a lawyer from Baghdad.’ The interview was personally conducted, according to the Beirut press, ‘by Saddam Tikriti, secretary general of the Iraqi leadership of the ruling Baath party’. According to the same newspaper, ‘the interview was introduced by a recording of the part of the speech delivered by President al-Bakr in Baghdad on December 5th [1968] where he said “there shall no longer be a place on Iraqi soil for spies”.’

The slaughter began within six weeks. At dawn on 27 January 1969, fourteen Iraqis, nine of them Jews, were publicly hanged after a three-man court had convicted them of spying for Israel. They claimed that Izra Naji Zilkha, a 51-year-old Jewish merchant from Basra, was the leader of the ‘espionage ring’. Even as the men were hanging in Liberation Square in Baghdad and in Basra, a new trial began in Baghdad involving thirty-five more Iraqis, thirteen of them Jews. Only hours before the January hangings, the Baath – of which the forty-year-old ‘Saddam Tikriti’ was just now, according to the Lebanese press, ‘the real authority’ – organised a demonstration at which thousands of Iraqis were marched to the square to watch the public executions and hear a government statement which announced that the party was ‘determined to fulfil its promise to the people for the elimination of spies’. The Baghdad Observer later carried an interview with the revolutionary court president, Colonel Ali Hadi Witwet, who said that the court reached its verdicts regardless of the defendants’ religion, adding that seven Jews had been acquitted. When the next batch of ‘spies’ were executed on 20 February, all eight condemned men were Muslims. As usual, their conviction had been secret, although the night before their execution Baghdad radio broadcast what it claimed was a recording of the hearing. The condemned men had been accused of collecting information about Iraqi troop deployment. Their leader, Warrant Officer Najat Kazem Khourshid, was one of the eight, although his ‘trial’ was not broadcast. Baghdad radio later told its listeners that ‘the Iraqi people expressed their condemnation of the spies.’

By May 1969, the Baathist failure to suppress the Kurdish rebellion had led to the arrest of a hundred more Iraqis, including twenty-four who had served in the previous regime. One of these was the lord mayor of Baghdad, Midhat al-Haj Sirri, who was accused of leading a CIA intelligence network. Former ministers arrested included Ismail Khairallah, Fouad Rikabi, Rashid Musleh, Siddik Shansal and Shukri Saleh Zaki. The Baath leadership sought the ‘people’s’ opinion. Delegates to a meeting of farmers’ trade unions roared their support when President al-Bakr declared that he was determined to ‘chop off the heads of the traitors’. The lord mayor was duly brought to the Baghdad television studios to ‘confess’ his role as a CIA agent while another defendant, Dr Yussef al-Mimar – an ex-director general of the ministry of agrarian reform – broke down and implicated former senior ministers in the defection of Mounir Rufa, an Iraqi air force pilot who had flown his Mig-21 fighter-bomber to Israel three years earlier.

Al-Mimar also claimed that he was recruited into the CIA by an Iraqi businessman in Beirut in 1964, and ordered by a CIA front company masquerading as investment brokers first to open an investment business in Libya and then to secure an invitation to Baghdad for President Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury, Robert Anderson. How much of this ‘confession’ bore any relation to the truth it is impossible to know. Four Iraqi civilians – Taleb Abdullah al-Saleh, Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, Abdul Jalil Mahawi and Abdul Razzak Dahab – had been hanged the previous month for spying for the CIA. On 15 May 1969, the Baathist regime hanged another ten men after one of them, Abdul Hadi Bachari, had appeared in a television ‘confession’. They were accused of working for both Israel and the United States and included an army sergeant and an air force lieutenant.

In June, for the first time, a convicted ‘spy’ told Iraqi television he had worked for British intelligence. Named as Zaki Abdul Wahab, a legal adviser to the Iraqi businessman in Beirut, he was accused in the Baghdad press of being ‘a British-American agent’. By July, another eighty prominent Iraqis were on trial for espionage. They were merely the prelude to thousands of hangings, almost all for ‘subversion’ and ‘spying’. Eleven years later, when Saddam Hussein was confirmed in power, Iraqi hangmen were dispatching victims to the gallows at the rate of a hundred every six weeks. In 1980, Amnesty International reported the recent executions of 257 people.

In 1979 came Saddam’s own arrest of five of the twenty-one members of his revolutionary command council, accusing all of them of espionage for Syria, whose president had visited Baghdad only two years earlier for those talks of ‘deep understanding’ with al-Bakr. The revolutionary court condemned the five men to death without appeal, and the very next morning, Saddam Hussein and several of his senior advisers went to the central prison and personally executed them. Saddam himself used his service revolver to blow out one of the victims’ brains.

In those early days of the regime, the names of newly executed Iraqis would be read on state television every afternoon at 4 p.m. An old Iraqi friend of mine would recall for me in 2003 how her relatives were imprisoned and how, each afternoon, she would dose herself with morphine before sitting down in front of the television screen. ‘I don’t know how I survived those broadcasts,’ she said. ‘The man who read the names had a thin face and sharp eyes and he read them out in a very harsh way. His name was Mohamed al-Sahhaf.’ This was the same Mohamed al-Sahhaf who, grey-haired and humorous, was minister of information during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, the ‘Comical Ali’ who provoked President George W. Bush to laugh at his claims that US forces had not reached Baghdad when their tanks were crossing the Tigris river. From brutal apparatchik to friendly buffoon in just thirty years. He was later to record his memories for Al-Arabia satellite television – without recalling his days as spokesman for the hangman of Baghdad.

So what lay behind this ferocious passion for executions that Saddam manifested, this controlled cruelty that became part of the regime’s existence?* I once asked this of Mohamed Heikal, as we sat on the lawn of his farm in the Nile Delta, wildly coloured birds cawing from the palm trees and a servant producing chilled beer in delicate mugs of blue glass.

‘I will tell you a story, Robert,’ he began. Heikal’s stories were always brilliant. With Heikal, you had to remain silent throughout. His recollections were a theatrical performance as well as a feat of memory, his hands raised before his face when he wished to express shock, eyebrows arching towards heaven, Havana cigar brandished towards me if he thought I was not paying sufficient attention; they were stories that usually had a sting in the tail.† Heikal knew Saddam Hussein – in fact, he knew almost every Arab leader and was probably treated with greater deference than most of them – but he had no illusions about the Baath party.

‘On my first visit to Baghdad after the takeover of power, I met the minister of planning. He was a very nice, urbane, cultured man whom I immediately liked. When I returned to Iraq some time later, I asked to see him again. But each time I asked a minister where he was, I would be sidestepped. “You must ask the president this question when you meet him,” they would say. Every time I asked to see the minister of planning, it was the same reply. So when I came to see Saddam, I asked him if I could meet the minister of planning again. Saddam just looked at me. Why did I want to see him? he asked me. I said he seemed a very intelligent and decent man. Saddam looked at me very seriously and said: “We scissored his neck!” I was taken aback. Why? I asked. What had he done wrong? Had Saddam any proof of wrongdoing? “We don’t need proof,” Saddam replied. “This isn’t a white revolution in Iraq. This is a red revolution. Suspicion is enough.” I was speechless. Oh yes, and Robert, that blue beer mug you are drinking from – it was given to me personally as a gift by Saddam Hussein. It is Iraqi glass.’ I put down the beer.

I am in Tehran now, in 1997, in a cheap hotel in the centre of the city and, later, at a cosy restaurant that serves jugs of cold drinking yoghurt, and sitting opposite me is Dr Hussain Shahristani, holder of a doctorate in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto and formerly chief scientific adviser to Saddam’s Iraqi Atomic Energy Organisation, a Shia Muslim married to a Canadian with three children. His story is so frightening, so eloquent, so moving and so terrible that it deserves to be told in full, in his own words, without a journalist’s interruptions. The next pages therefore belong to Dr Shahristani:

In 1979, there was a backlash by the regime in Iraq because of activists in the Shia community. By the summer, the regime had started large-scale executions and mass arrests. I voiced my concern about human rights at atomic energy meetings. I knew I was very crucial to their atomic energy programme – I thought that they would not arrest me for voicing my concern. I wanted Saddam to know what I said. I was wrong. A little earlier, the regime had arrested and executed one of my cousins, Ala Shahristani – he was on his honeymoon and had only been married for fourteen days. He was not associated with any party. He was arrested in the street and taken away and his wife and sister were brought to the torture chamber to see him. They had given him a hideous torture. They had filled him with gas through his rectum and then beaten him. They threatened his young wife in front of him and then they banged his head into the wall, so hard that the wall was shaking. Then they killed him.

By this time, Saddam was president and he came to see us and he told us that he was going to redirect us at the Atomic Energy Organisation, that we were going to work on what he called ‘strategic projects’. Until July 1979, we had been involved on purely peaceful applications of atomic energy. I and my colleague, Dr Ziad Jaafar, were Saddam’s two advisers; we were reputable, internationally trained scientists. We were also close friends. I discussed this with him. I said: ‘If Saddam wants military applications, no way am I going to continue with this organisation.’

At that time, we didn’t take it seriously because we knew Iraq had limitations. I assumed I would be just thrown out of the organisation. They came to the Atomic Energy Organisation when I was talking to the board of directors on December 4th 1979. They said: ‘Could we have a word with Dr Hussain?’ As I stepped outside, they put handcuffs on me, shoved me into a car and took me to the security headquarters in Baghdad. At security headquarters, they took me in to the director of security, Dr Fadel Baraq, who was later executed by Saddam. He said that some people who had been arrested and brought to the headquarters had given my name. I denied any involvement in political parties, I said I was a practising Muslim but that I had never taken part in subversive activities.

Then they brought me to a man I knew, Jawad Zoubeidi, a building contractor. He had been so badly tortured, I hardly recognised him. Jawad said: ‘I know Dr Hussain. He comes to the mosque and takes part in our religious activities.’ For them, ‘religious activities’ meant anti-government activities. They said to me: ‘Better tell us all or you’ll regret it.’ Then they took me to the torture chamber in the basement. They blindfolded me and pushed me down the stairs into the chamber. It was a big room. My hands were tied behind my back and I was pulled up into the air by my hands. After five minutes, the pain was so severe in the shoulders that it was unbearable. Then they gave me shocks on sensitive parts of my body. By the end of the beating you are naked. There were shocks on my genitals and other parts of my body.

After fifteen minutes they came to me and said: ‘Sign.’ I was in a very cold sweat. They know you’ll faint. They brought me down and gave me a short rest. I fell asleep for a few minutes. But this went on day and night, day and night. It went on for twenty-two days and nights. Four of them did it, in shifts. Baraq, who had a PhD in military psychology from Moscow, was standing there. At one point, he said: ‘Look, Dr Hussain, I’ll tell you what your problem is – you think you are smart enough and we are stupid. You may be smart in your own field but we know what we are doing. Just tell us what you know and get this over.’

I knew Saddam. He knew me. But this could happen to me. I remember once, Saddam said to me: ‘You are a scientist. I am a politician. I will tell you what politics is about. I make a decision. I tell someone else the opposite. Then I do something which surprises even myself.’

The torture techniques in Baghdad were routine and varied in severity. The electric shocks could be everywhere. But sometimes they would burn people on the genitals and go on burning until they were completely burned off. They did the same with toes. They sometimes beat people with iron on the stomach or the chest. But with me, they were very careful not to leave any sign on me. I saw one man and they had used an iron on his stomach. They used drills and made holes in bones, arms and legs. I saw an officer, Naqib Hamid, and they dissolved his feet in acid. There was another torture where they would put sulphuric acid in a tub. They would take a man and start by dissolving his hands. Once, the founder of the Dawa party,* Abdul Saheb Khail, was totally dissolved. Baraq said to me: ‘Have you heard about Khail – there is where we dissolved him.’

In the final stages of torture, they have a table with an electrical saw. They can saw off a hand or a foot. The majority talk. The people who have refused to talk are exceptional. Adnan Salman, a head of the Dawa, refused to talk. He was brought in – I saw him – and by that time they had a lot of confessions by other men who had been tortured. Adnan Salman was a teacher. Adnan knew – he was prepared. He told them: ‘My name is Adnan Salman. I am in charge of the Dawa party and none of these people are responsible for our activities. These will be my last words to you. You will never extract a single word from me.’ They brought three doctors and told them that if Adnan died under torture they would be executed. He didn’t utter a single word. Sometimes you would hear the doctors, so scared because they could not bring him back from unconsciousness. I was in another torture room and could hear everything. I was in Abu Ghraib prison when I heard Adnan had been executed. He had not died under torture.

One prisoner told me he was seventeen and was the youngest prisoner and so they made him sweep the corridors of the internal security headquarters every morning at seven o’clock. He saw a peasant woman from the south with tattoos, he said, a woman from the marshes with a girl of ten and a boy of about six. She was carrying a baby in her arms. The prisoner told me that as he was sweeping, an officer came and told the woman: ‘Tell me where your husband is – very bad things can happen.’ She said: ‘Look, my husband takes great pride in the honour of his woman. If he knew I was here, he would have turned himself in.’ The officer took out his pistol and held the daughter up by the braids of her hair and put a bullet into her head. The woman didn’t know what was happening. Then he put a bullet into the boy’s head. The woman was going crazy. He took the youngest boy by the legs and smashed the baby’s brain on a wall. You can imagine the woman. The officer told the young prisoner to bring the rubbish trolley and put the three children in it, on top of the garbage, and ordered the woman to sit on the bodies. He took the trolley out and left it. The officer had got into the habit of getting rid of people who were worthless.

I was taken to the revolutionary court. Mussalam al-Jabouri was the judge and there were two generals on each side of him. They asked me my name and if I had anything to say. The charges were that I was a ‘Zionist stooge’, an ‘Israeli spy’ and ‘working with the Americans’ and ‘a collaborator with the Iranians’. They realised I wasn’t a member of the Dawa party. The court handed down a sentence they had decided before I was taken there – life imprisonment. My own defence lawyer called for my execution. He had only a written statement to make: ‘This person has closed the doors of mercy – give him the severest penalty.’ I said to the court: ‘This Iraqi state which you are governing, we established it with our blood. My father was sentenced by the British, as for me I am president of the Palestinian Association in Toronto. A person with this background cannot be an Israeli agent.’ The lawyer said: ‘So you are a Russian spy.’ I said: ‘I have a family tree – from the Prophet Mohamed’s time, peace be upon him.’