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

if the Islamic nations, especially the noble nation of Iraq, the tribes of the Tigris and Euphrates, the brave students of the universities and other young people turned a blind eye to this great calamity inflicted upon Islam and the household of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, and allowed the accursed Baath party to martyr their eminent personalities one after the other. It would be even more strange if the Iraqi army and other forces were tools in the hands of these criminals, assisting them in the eradication of Islam. I have no faith in the top-ranking officers of the Iraqi armed forces but I am not disappointed in the other officers, the non-commissioned officers or their soldiers. I expect them to either rise up bravely and overthrow this oppression as was the case in Iran or to flee the garrisons and barracks … I hope that God the Almighty will destroy the system of oppression of these criminals.

Oppression lay like a blanket over the Middle East in the early 1980s, in Iraq, in Iran, and in Afghanistan. And if the West was indifferent to the suffering of millions of Muslims, so, shamefully, were most of the Arab leaders. Arafat never dared to condemn the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan – Moscow was still the PLO’s most important ally – and the kings and princes and presidents of the Arab world, who knew better than their Western counterparts what was happening in Iraq, were silent about Saddam’s deportations and tortures and executions and genocidal killings. Most of them used variations of the same techniques on their own populations. In Syria, where the ‘German chair’ torture was used to break the backs of opposition militants, the bloodbath of the Hama uprising lay less than two years away.*

In Iran, the authorities turned brutally against members of the Bahai faith whose 2 million members regard Moses, Buddha, Christ and Mohamed as ‘divine educators’ and whose centre of worship – the tomb of a nineteenth-century Persian nobleman – lies outside Acre in present-day Israel. By 1983, Amnesty estimated that at least 170 Bahais had been executed for heresy among the 5,000 Iranians put to death since the revolution. Among them were ten young women, two of them teenagers, all hanged in Shiraz in June of 1983. At least two, Zarrin Muqimi and Shirin Dalvand, both in their twenties, were allowed to pray towards Acre before the hangmen tied their hands and led them to the gallows. All were accused of being ‘Zionist agents’. Evin prison began to fill with women, some members of the Iraqi-supported Mujahedin-e-Qalq – People’s Mujahedin – others merely arrested while watching political protests. They were ferociously beaten on the feet to make them confess to being counter-revolutionaries. On one night, 150 women were shot. At least forty of them were told to prepare themselves for execution by firing squad by writing their names on their right hands and left legs with felt-tip markers; the guards wanted to identify them afterwards and this was often difficult when ‘finishing shots’ to the head would make their faces unrecognisable. But Bahais were not the only victims.

Executions took place in all the major cities of Iran. In July 1980, for example, Iranian state radio reported fourteen executions in Shiraz, all carried out at eleven at night, including a retired major-general – for ‘making attacks on Muslims’ – a former police officer, an army major charged with beating prisoners, an Iranian Jew sentenced for running a ‘centre of fornication’ and seven others for alleged narcotics offences. One man, Habib Faili, was executed for ‘homosexual relations’. Two days earlier, Mehdi Qaheri and Haider Ali Qayur were shot by firing squad for ‘homosexual offences’ in Najafabad. Naturally, Sadeq Khalkhali presided over most of these ‘trials’.

Amnesty recorded the evidence of a female student imprisoned in Evin between September 1981 and March 1982 who was held in a cell containing 120 women, ranging from schoolgirls to the very old. The woman described how:

One night a young girl called Tahereh was brought straight from the courtroom to our cell. She had just been sentenced to death, and was confused and agitated. She didn’t seem to know why she was there. She settled down to sleep next to me, but at intervals she woke up with a start, terrified, and grasped me, asking if it were true that she really would be executed. I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, and reassure her that it wouldn’t happen, but at about 4 a.m. they came for her and she was taken away to be executed. She was sixteen years old.

A frightening nine-page pamphlet issued by the Iranian Ministry for Islamic Guidance – but carrying neither the ministry’s name nor that of its author – admitted that ‘some believe only murderers deserve capital punishment, but not those who are guilty of hundreds of other crimes … Weren’t the wicked acts of those upon whom [the] death penalty was inflicted tantamount to the spread … of corruption … The people have indirectly seconded the act of the revolutionary courts, because they realise the courts have acted in compliance with their wishes.’ The same booklet claimed that trials of senior officials of the Shah’s government had to be carried out swiftly lest ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements tried to rescue them from prison.

Khomeini raged, against the leftists and communists who dared to oppose his theocracy, and the Great Satan America and its Iraqi ally. Why did people oppose the death penalty, he asked. ‘… the trial of several young men … and the execution of a number of those who had revolted against Islam and the Islamic Republic and were sentenced to death, make you cry for humanity!’ The ‘colonial powers’ had frightened Muslims with their ‘satanic might and advancement’ – Khomeini’s prescient expression for the ‘shock and awe’ that US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld would call down on Iraq almost exactly twenty years later – and now communists were ‘ready to sacrifice [their] lives out of love of the party’ while the people of Afghanistan were ‘perishing under the Soviet regime’s cruelty’.

Here Khomeini was on safe ground. From Afghan exile groups and humanitarian organisations there came a flood of evidence that Soviet troops were now carrying out atrocities in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch was reporting by 1984 that it had become clear ‘that Soviet personnel have been taking an increasingly active role in the Afghan government’s oppression of its citizens. Soviet officers are not just serving as “advisors” to Afghan Khad agents who administer torture – routinely and savagely in detention centres and prisons; according to reports we received there are Soviets who participate directly in interrogation and torture.’ The same document provided appalling evidence of torture. A 21-year-old accused of distributing ‘night letters’ against the government was hung up by a belt until he almost strangled, beaten until his face was twice its normal size and had his hands crushed under a chair. ‘… mothers were forced to watch their infant babies being given electric shocks … Afghan men … were held in torture chambers where women were being sexually molested. A young woman who had been tortured in prison described how she and others had been forced to stand in water that had been treated in chemicals that made the skin come off their feet.’ After Afghans captured a Soviet army captain and three other soldiers in the town of Tashqurghan in April 1982, killed them, chopped up their bodies and threw them in a river, the brother of the officer took his unit – from the Soviet 122nd Brigade – to the town and slaughtered the entire population of around 2,000 people.

An exile publication of the Hezb Islami in Pakistan listed the murder in Afghanistan of twenty-six religious sheikhs, mawlawi and other leaders, often with their entire families, from Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Konar and Ghazni. The Soviets always claimed their village raids were targeted at insurgents, ‘terrorists’ or the ‘remnants’ of the dushman – ironically, they would use the Afghan Persian word for ‘enemy’ – but inevitably most of the victims would be civilians. It was a pattern to be repeated by US forces in Iraq almost a quarter of a century later. Photographs in exile magazines showed the victims of Soviet napalm attacks, their faces burned off by chemicals. One Soviet officer who launched his career amid the Afghan atrocities was General Pavel Grachev, later to be Russian defence minister. He it was who would earn the sobriquet ‘the Butcher of Grozny’, after forgetting the lessons of the Afghan war and the defeat of the Soviets by the mujahedin and Osama bin Laden’s Arab fighters, by launching the Chechnya war on Boris Yeltsin’s behalf and bragging that he could sort out the Chechens in a matter of hours. Wiser counsels had warned that he would unleash a ‘holy war’.

And now, across much of this landscape of horror in Muslim south-west Asia, an epic of bloodletting was about to begin as an obsessive, xenophobic and dictatorial nationalist and secular Arab regime prepared to destroy the Muslim revolutionary forces that were bent on its destruction. As long ago as October 1979, the documents found in the US embassy in Tehran would reveal, the Iranian government feared that the Iraqis were being encouraged to foment further rebellion among Iranian Kurds. Ibrahim Yazdi, the Iranian foreign minister, told American diplomats that ‘adequate assurances had been given to Sadam Husayn [sic] with regard to the Shia majority in Iraq’ to calm his fears of Shia nationalism; but ‘if Iraqi interference continued, Iran would have to consider agitating among the Iraqi Shia community.’ By November, the Americans were reporting that the Iraqi regime was convinced that Iran wished to pursue a claim to the Arab but largely Shia island of Bahrein, which Saddam Hussein had thought he might negotiate with Tehran after meeting Yazdi at a summit in Havana, but that the Iraqis now believed real power lay in ‘the Iranian religious establishment which is hostile to Iraq’.

Just how militarily powerful the two regimes were in 1980 obsessed both sides in the forthcoming struggle. Back in 1978, the Shah, boasting of his ‘very good relations’ with Saddam’s Iraq, claimed that Iraq had ‘more planes and tanks than Iran has’, even though Iran had acquired 80 F-14 Tomcats from the United States – to counter any strikes from the Soviet Union – which could counter Mig high reconnaissance and fighter aircraft. All the Iranian F-14 pilots had been trained in the United States. Before the Shah’s fall, according to one of the documents discovered in the US embassy in Tehran, America believed that:

Iran’s … military superiority over Iraq rests primarily on the strength of its Air Force, which has more high-performance aircraft, better pilot training … and ordnance such as laser-guided bombs and TV-guided missiles that are unavailable to Iraq. The Iranian navy also is far superior to that of Iraq; it could easily close the Gulf to Iraqi shipping … The two states’ ground forces are more nearly balanced, however, with each side possessing different advantages in terms of equipment and capable of incursions into the other’s territory. The disposition of ground forces and the greater mobility of Iraqi forces could in fact give Baghdad a substantial numerical advantage along the border during the initial stages of an attack.

This was an all-too-accurate prediction of what was to happen in September 1980 – and was presumably also known to Saddam Hussein and his generals in Iraq. They would have been comforted to know that, according to the same assessment, Iran’s reliance on US equipment meant that ‘if US support was withdrawn, the Iranian armed forces probably could not sustain full-scale hostilities for longer than two weeks’. But this was a woefully inaccurate forecast, which may have led Saddam to take the bloodiest gamble of his career.

The revolution had certainly emasculated part of the Iranian army. Every general had been retired – more than 300 of the Shah’s senior officers departed in three weeks – and conscription had been lowered from two years to one. As they prepared for a possible American invasion during the hostage siege, the Iranians desperately tried to rebuild their army to a pre-revolution complement of 280,000 men. But pitched battles in Kurdistan meant that every Iranian army unit had been involved in combat by the autumn of 1980. The Revolutionary Guards, who would provide the theological military muscle in any defence of Iran, were – or so I wrote in a dispatch to The Times from Tehran on 26 November 1979 – ‘zealous, overenthusiastic and inexperienced’, while the army’s firepower might have been considerably reduced. Its 1,600 tanks, including 800 British-made Chieftains and 600 American M-60s – all purchased by the Shah – sounded impressive, but the Chieftains, with their sophisticated firing mechanism, may have been down to half strength through lack of maintenance. The M-60s were easier to maintain. The new army was commanded by Major-General Hussain Shaker, who had been trained by the Americans at Fort Leavenworth.

The Islamic government in Tehran put more faith in its air force, mainly because air force cadets had played a leading role in fighting the imperial army during the revolution. In the days after the Shah’s fall, the air force was the only arm of the services permitted to appear in uniform outside its bases. But the F-14s were in need of US maintenance, and although pilots could still fly the older F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers, much of the US and British radar system had broken down and the US technicians who serviced it had long ago left Iran.*

For months in early 1980, there had been violent incidents along the Iran – Iraq border. Tony Alloway, our stringer in Tehran – increasingly isolated but still doggedly filing to us – was now reporting almost daily artillery duels between Iraqis and Iranians. In The Times on 10 April, he reported on tank as well as artillery fire across the border near Qasr-e Shirin. Sadeq Qotbzadeh, now the Iranian foreign minister, was quoted as saying that his government was ‘determined to overthrow the Iraqi Baathist Government headed by that United States agent Saddam Hussein’. On 9 April alone, 9,700 Iraqis of Iranian origin were forced across the border into Iran with another 16,000 soon to be deported. Four hundred of the new arrivals were businessmen who complained that they had been falsely invited to the commerce ministry in Baghdad and there stripped of their possessions, loaded onto lorries and sent to the frontier.

In April, I got a taste of what was to come when pro-Iranian militiamen in Beirut fought street battles with pro-Iraqi gunmen. At the American University Hospital, I counted fifty-five dead, some of them civilians, as armed men, bloodstained bandages round their faces and arms, were brought to the hospital on trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns. Clouds of smoke billowed up from the Bourj el-Barajneh Palestinian camp where six charred corpses were found inside an Iraqi Baath party office.

Often, the Iranians would complain that Iraqi aircraft had entered Iranian airspace; in early July 1980, Iraqi jets passed above Kermanshah province on two separate days, coming under fire from Iranian anti-aircraft guns. The pilots were presumably trying to locate Iran’s ground-to-air defence positions. On 3 July Kayhan newspaper in Tehran was reporting that the Iraqi regime had set up a ‘mercenary army’, led by an Iraqi officer, near Qasr-e Shirin. By August, regular artillery fire was directed across the border in both directions. Iranian claims that their villages were coming under constant attack were dismissed by Iraq as ‘falsehoods’. The Iraqi foreign ministry, however, listed twenty shooting incidents – against Iraqi villages and ships in the Shatt al-Arab around Basra – between 18 and 22 September. Ever afterwards, Saddam Hussein would claim that the Iran – Iraq war began on 4 September, by which time Iraq had complained of artillery firing at its border posts and neighbouring oil refineries on ninety-eight occasions. Iraq denounced Iran for violating the Shah’s 1975 agreement with Baghdad which set the two countries’ common frontier along the Shatt al-Arab, declaring the treaty ‘null and void’.

Although a major conflict seemed inevitable, the UN Security Council would not meet to discuss the hostilities until after the Iraqis invaded Iranian territory; Iraq had made strenuous efforts to prevent seven non-aligned members of the Council from going to the UN chamber. Had Iran not been a pariah state after its seizure of the US embassy, it could have obtained a favourable motion and vote. But in the end, UN Security Council Resolution 479 did not even call for a withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Iranian territory, but merely for a ceasefire – which would satisfy neither party. Iran was convinced that the whole world had now turned against its revolution and was supporting the act of aggression by Saddam.

Fathi Daoud Mouffak, a 28-year-old Iraqi military news cameraman, was to remember those days for the rest of his life. Almost a quarter of a century later, he was to recall for me in Baghdad how he set off one morning in September 1980 from the Iraqi ministry of defence towards a location near Qasr-e Shirin. ‘When we arrived we found our border checkpoints attacked and destroyed – and our Iraqi forces there were less than a brigade,’ he said. ‘We visited Qasr-e Shirin and Serbil Sahab. All our checkpoints there had been destroyed by artillery from the Iranians. We filmed this and we found many dead bodies, our martyrs, most of them border policemen. I had never seen so many dead before. Then we brought our films back to Baghdad.’ Across Iraq, Mouffak’s newsreel was shown on national Iraqi television under the title ‘Pictures from the Battle’. It provided a kind of psychological preparation for the Iraqi people, perhaps for Saddam himself. For on 22 September, on the first day of what the Iranians would call the ‘Imposed War’, Saddam’s legions with their thousands of tanks, armour and artillery swept across the frontier and into Iran on a 650-kilometre front.

CHAPTER SIX

‘The Whirlwind War’

GAS! GAS! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …

… If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues …

WILFRED OWEN, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’

Saddam Hussein called it ‘The Whirlwind War’. That’s why the Iraqis wanted us there. They were victorious before they had won, they were celebrating before they had achieved success. Saad Bazzaz at the Iraqi embassy in London couldn’t wait to issue my visa and, after flying from Beirut to London – Middle East journalism often involves vast round-trips of thousands of kilometres to facilitate a journey only a few hundred kilometres from the starting point – I was crammed into the visa office with Gavin Hewitt of the BBC and his crew and more radio and newspaper reporters than I have ever seen in a smoke-filled room before. We would fly to Kuwait. We would be taken from there across the Iraqi border to the war front at Basra. And so we were. In September 1980 we entered Basra at night in a fleet of Iraqi embassy cars from Kuwait city, the sky lit up by a thousand tracer shells. Jets moaned overhead and the lights had been turned off across the city, a blackout to protect all of us from the air raids.

‘Out of the cars,’ the Iraqis shouted, and we leapt from their limousines, crouched on the pavements, hands holding microphones up into the hot darkness as the frail Basra villas, illuminated by the thin moonlight around us, vibrated to the sound of anti-aircraft artillery. The tracer streaked upwards in curtains, golden lines that disappeared into the smoke drifting over Basra. Sirens bawled like crazed geriatrics and behind the din we could hear the whisper of Iranian jets. A great fire burned out of control far to the east, beyond the unseen Shatt al-Arab river. Gavin, with whom I had shared most of my adventures in Afghanistan that very same year, was standing, hands on hips, in the roadway. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he kept saying. ‘What a story!’ And it was. Never again would an ‘Arab army so welcome journalists to a battle front, give them so much freedom, encourage them to run and take cover and advance with their soldiers. In the steamy entrance of the Hamdan Hotel – the authorities had switched off power across Basra and the air conditioners were no longer working – the staff had turned on their battery-powered radios. There was a constant blowsy song, all trumpets and drums and men’s shouting voices. Al-harb al-khatifa, nachnu nurbah al-harb al-khatifa. ‘The whirlwind war, the whirlwind war, we shall win the whirlwind war,’ they kept chanting.

We stood on the steps, watching the spray of pink and golden bullets ascending into the dark clouds that scudded across Basra. Somewhere to the east of the city, through the palm groves on the eastern banks of the Shatt al-Arab and all the way to the north, Saddam’s army was moving eastwards through the night, into Iran, into the great deserts of Ahwaz, into the Kurdish mountains towards Mahabad. The Arab journalists who had accompanied us up from Basra were ecstatic. The Iraqis would win, the Iraqis would protect the Arab world from the threat of Iran’s revolution. Saddam was a strong man, a great man, a good man. They were confident of his victory – even more confident, perhaps, than Saddam himself.

Yet the orders to give us journalists the freedom of the battlefield must have come from Saddam. We could take taxis without the usual ‘minders’, all the way to the front if we wanted. The ministry of information would provide us with officials to escort us through road checkpoints if we wished. The Fao peninsula, that vulnerable spit of land south of Basra from which you can look eastwards across ‘the Shatt’ at the palm-fringed shore of Iran? No problem. But when we reached Fao, it was under constant Iranian shellfire and the two deep-sea oil terminals 30 kilometres off the coast, Al-Amaya and Al-Bakr – the latter, one of the most modern in the world, had been opened only four years earlier – were already seriously damaged by Iranian ground-to-ground missiles. The Iraqis had not been able to silence the Iranian guns.

By 29 September 1980, exactly a week after the Iraqi invasion, Iranian shells were landing around Fao at the rate of one every twenty-five seconds and it was unsafe even to drive along the river promenade. The windows and doors of houses in the city rattled as each round exploded, hissing over the bazaar and crashing beyond the oil storage depots. In revenge, the Iraqis had attacked the huge oil terminal at Abadan, and for more than an hour I sat near the river, watching 200-metre gouts of fire shooting into the air over Abadan, a ripple of flame that moved with frightening speed along the bank of the river beneath a canopy of black smoke. An Iraqi official crouched next to me, pointing out the Iranian positions on the other shore. So much for the claims on Iraqi radio that its army had ‘surrounded’ Abadan. In Basra, two Iranian Phantoms bombed a ship moored in the river, setting it on fire and splattering bullets along the waterfront walls, proof that the Iranian air force was still capable of daylight raids.

The Iraqis claimed to have shot down four Phantoms in five days, and the undamaged fuel tank of one aircraft – the American refuelling instructions still clearly readable on one canister in a local Baath party headquarters – was proof that their claim was at least partly true. The Iranians had damaged homes and schools in Fao – though their pilots could hardly be expected to distinguish between ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ targets during their high-speed low-level attacks.

Fao was almost deserted. I watched many of its inhabitants – part of the constant flow of millions of refugees which are part of Middle East history – driving north-west to Basra in a convoy of old wooden Chevrolet taxis, bedding piled on the roofs and chador-clad mothers and wives on the back seats, scarcely bothering to glance at the burning refineries of Abadan. They were Iraqi Shia Muslims and now they were under fire from their fellow Shias in Iran, another gift from Saddam.