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

Already I was beginning to realise that this war might not be so easy to win as the Iraqi authorities would have us believe. In Washington and London, the usual military ‘experts’ and fossilised ex-generals were holding forth on the high quality of the Iraqi army, the shambles of post-revolutionary Iran, the extraordinary firepower of Iraq’s largely Soviet equipped forces. But on 30 September, eight days after their invasion, the Iraqis could only claim that they were 15 kilometres from Khorramshahr – the old Abbasid harbour which was Iran’s largest port, and closer than ‘surrounded’ Abadan.

I crossed the river from Basra, trailing behind convoys of military trucks carrying bridge-building equipment – the Iraqis had yet to cross the Iranian Karun river north of Khorramshahr – and headed into the blistering, white desert towards the Iranian border post at Shalamcheh. I overtook dozens of T-62 tanks and Russian-made armour and trucks piled with soldiers, all of whom obligingly gave us two-finger victory signs. The air thumped with the sound of heavy artillery, and on a little hill in the desert I came across the wrecked Iranian frontier station, stopped the car and gingerly walked inside. I was in Iran, occupied Iran. No problem with visas now, I thought. It’s always an obscure thrill to enter a country with an invading army, knowing how furious all those pious little visa officers would be – those who kept me waiting for hours in boiling, tiny rooms, the perspiration crawling through my hair – if they could see me crossing their borders without their wretched, indecipherable stamps in my passport. Pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini had been ritually defaced on the walls of Shalamcheh frontier station and a large pile of handwritten ledgers were strewn over the floor.

I have a fascination for the documents that blow through the ruins of war, the pages of letters home and the bureaucracy of armies and the now useless instructions on how to fire ground-to-air missiles that flutter across the desert and cover the floors of roofless factories. These books were written in Persian and recorded the names and car numbers of Iraqis and Iranians crossing the border at Shalamcheh. The last entry was on 21 September 1980, just a day before the Iraqi invasion. So although the Iraqis claimed that the war began on 4 September, they had allowed travellers – including their own citizens – to transit the border quite routinely until the very eve of their invasion.

An American camera-crew had pulled up outside the wreckage of the building and were dutifully filming the desecrated pictures of Khomeini, their reporter already practising his ‘stand-upper’. ‘Iraq’s army smashed its way across the Iranian frontier more than a week ago and now stands poised outside the strategic cities of Khorramshahr and Abadan …’ Yes, cities were always ‘strategic’ – at least, they always were on television – and armies must always ‘smash’ through borders and stand ‘poised’ outside cities. It was as if there was only one script for each event. Soon, no doubt, the Iraqis would be ‘fighting their way’ towards Khorramshahr, or ‘poised’ to enter Khorramshahr, or ‘claiming victory’ over the Iranian defenders.

But who was I to talk? My CBC tape recorder hung over my shoulder and behind the border post stood a battery of Russian 155-mm guns, big beasts whose barrels pointed towards Khorramshahr and whose artillery captain walked up to us smiling and asked politely if we would like his guns to open fire. For a millisecond, for just that little fraction of temptation, I wanted to agree, to say yes, I would like them to fire, just the moment I had finished adjusting my microphone; and the captain was already turning to give the order to fire when a moral voice shouted at me – I had just imagined the tearing apart of an unknown body – and I ran after him and said, no, no, he should not fire, not for me, not under any circumstances.

But of course, I found a basin in the sand and sat down in it and leaned on the lip of the hole with my microphone on the edge and I waited as a desert gale blew over me and the sand caught in my hair and nose and ears and then, when the first artillery piece much later blasted a shell towards the Iranian lines, I switched on the recorder. I still have the cassette tape. The guns were dark against the sky as they bellowed away and I kept thinking of Wilfred Owen’s description of ‘the long black arm about to curse’. And there were twenty, thirty long black arms in front of me, more still behind the curtains of sand. And there, I recorded, unwittingly, my own future loss of hearing, 25 per cent of the hearing in my left ear which I would never recover. That very moment is recorded on the cassette:

We can see the gunnery officer just in front of us through this desert dust storm, feeding shells into the breeches of these big 155-mm Russian-made guns and preparing to cover their ears. The guns are so loud, they are leaving my ears singing afterwards – BANG – There’s another one just gone off, a great tongue of fire about 20 feet – BANG – in front of it – BANG – They’re going off all around me at the moment, an incredible sight, this heavy artillery firing right in the middle of a – BANG – there’s another one, right in the middle of this dusty, windswept desert.

I can still hear that gun’s distant echo in my ears as I write these words, a piercing tinnitus that can drive me crazy at night or when I’m tired or irritable or trying to listen to music or can’t hear someone talking to me at dinner.

I turned on Iraqi radio. Further Iranian territory was about to ‘fall’ and Iraqi generals were announcing a ‘last push’ into Khorramshahr. Five days ago, the inhabitants of Basra were content to listen to news of the Iraqi advance on television, but now traders and shopkeepers in the city chose to supplement their knowledge by asking foreign journalists for information about the war. No one thought Iranian shells would still be falling on Iraqi soil this long after the invasion.

That evening, we were invited to tour Basra District Hospital, a bleak building of tiles and pale blue paint, a barrack-like edifice whose uniformity was relieved only by the neat flower-beds outside, the energetic doctors and, more recently, by the ubiquitous presence of Dr Saadun Khalifa Al-Tikriti, Iraq’s deputy health minister. He was saluted and clapped on the back wherever he went, a short, friendly fellow with a mischievous smile and a large moustache. Everyone greeted Dr al-Tikriti with exaggerated warmth, and when the minister made a joke, gales of laughter swept down the marble corridors. Basra hospital had taken almost all the city’s five hundred wounded this past week but al-Tikriti had more than just his patients on his mind when he toured the wards. Foreign press correspondents were greeted with a short, sharp speech about the evils of civilian bombing, and the doctor stopped smiling and thumped his little fist on the table when he claimed that the Iranian air force deliberately killed Iraqi children.

He strode into a children’s ward, a long, curtained room where tiny, awe-struck faces peered from beneath swaths of bandages while silent mothers stared with peasant intensity at the white-coated doctors. ‘Take, for example, this little girl,’ said the good doctor, pausing for a moment beside a child with beautiful round brown eyes and curled black hair. ‘She is only three years old and she has lost a leg.’ With these words, al-Tikriti seized the sheets and swept them from the child to reveal that indeed her left leg was nothing but a bandaged stump. The little girl frowned in embarrassment at her sudden nakedness but al-Tikriti had already moved on, preceded by a uniformed militiaman. In civilian life, the militiaman was a hospital dresser but his camouflage jacket and holstered pistol provided a strange contrast to the hospital as he clumped around the beds, especially when we reached the end of the second children’s ward.

For there in a darkened corner lay a boy of five, swaddled in bandages, terribly burned by an Iranian incendiary bomb and clearly not far from death. There were plastic tubes in his nostrils and gauze around his chest and thighs, and his eyes were creased with pain and tears, the doors to a small private world of torment that we did not wish to imagine. The boy had turned his face towards his pillow, breathing heavily; so the militiaman moved forward, seized the little bandaged head and twisted it upwards for the inspection of the press. The child gasped with pain but when a journalist protested at this treatment, he was told that the militiaman was medically trained.

Dr al-Tikriti then briskly ushered us to the next bed and the child was left to suffer in grace, having supposedly proved a measure of Iranian iniquity that he would certainly never comprehend. An air raid siren growled and there was, far away, a smattering of anti-aircraft fire. There were other wards, of Bangladeshi seamen caught by strafing Iranian jets, thin men who scrabbled with embarrassment for their sheets when Dr al-Tikriti stripped the bedding from their naked bodies, a new generation of amputated, legless beggars for the streets of Dacca. There were oil workers caught in the cauldron of petroleum tank explosions, roasted faces staring at the ceiling, and for one terrible moment the doctors began to take off the bandage round a man’s face. Al-Tikriti smiled brightly. ‘Some of these people speak English,’ he said, gesturing at the huddles on the beds. ‘Why not ask them what happened?’

No one took up the offer but Iraq’s deputy health minister was already ushering his guests to the training hospital by the Shatt al-Arab, a six-storey block that looked more like a government ministry than a medical centre. Iranian cannon fire had punctured the fourth floor, wounding four patients, and the doctor claimed that this, too, was a deliberate attack, since the hospital had flown white flags with the red crescent on them. But the flags were only six foot square and the dark crescent painted upon the flat roof by the doctors merged with the colour of the concrete. Al-Tikriti pointed to the splashes of blood on the ceiling. ‘Arabs would never do this,’ he said. ‘They would never attack civilians.’ But as he was leaving the building, a battered, open-top truck drew up. There were two corpses in the back, half-covered by a dirty blanket, four bare brown feet poking from the bottom. The driver asked what he should do with the bodies but Dr al-Tikriti saw no journalists nearby. ‘Take them round the back,’ he told the driver.

The first commandos of the Iraqi army broke through to the west bank of the Karun river on the Shatt al-Arab at 12.23 Iraq time on the afternoon of 2 October, four small figures running along the Khorramshahr quayside past lines of burned-out and derailed trucks, bowling hand grenades down the dockside. I was able to watch them through Iraqi army binoculars from just 400 metres away, peering above sandbags in a crumbling mud hut while an Iraqi sniper beside me blasted away at the Iranian lines on the other side of the Karun river.

Pierre Bayle of Agence France-Presse was beside me, a tough, pragmatic man with a refusal to panic that must have come from his days as a French foreign legionnaire. ‘Not bad, not bad,’ he would mutter to me every time an Iraqi moved forward down the quayside. ‘These guys aren’t bad.’ It was an extraordinary sight, an infantry attack that might have come from one of those romanticised oil paintings of the Crimean war, one soldier running after another through the docks, throwing themselves behind sandbags when rockets exploded round them and then hurling grenades at the last Iranian position on the river bank. The Iranians fought back with machine guns and rockets. For over an hour, their bullets hissed and whizzed through the small island plantation on which we had taken refuge, smacking into the palm trees above us and clanging off the metal pontoon bridge that connected the island to the Iraqi mainland. Only hours earlier, the Iraqis had succeeded in crossing the Karun 4 kilometres upstream from the Shatt al-Arab, sending a tank section across the river and beginning – at last – the encirclement of the Iranians in Abadan. Iran’s own radio admitted that ‘enemy troops’ had ‘infiltrated’ north of the city.

The Karun river runs into the Shatt al-Arab at right angles and it was almost opposite this confluence – from the flat, plantation island of Um al-Rassas in the middle of the Shatt itself – that we finally watched the Iraqis take the riverfront. Behind them, Iraqi shells smashed into a group of abandoned Chieftain tanks, deserted by their Iranian crews when their retreat was cut off by the Karun. All morning and afternoon, the Iraqis fired shells into Abadan, an eerie, jet-like noise that howled right over our heads on the little island.

Shells travel too fast for the naked eye, but after some time I realised that their shadows moved over the river, flitting across the water and the little paddyfields, then dropping towards Abadan where terrific explosions marked their point of impact. I could not take my eyes off this weird phenomenon. As the projectiles reached their maximum altitude before dropping back to earth, the little shadows – small, ominous points of darkness that lay upon the river – would hover near us, as if a miniature cloud had settled on the water. Then the shadow would grow smaller and begin to move with frightening velocity towards the far shore and be lost in the sunlight.

On the other bank of the river, one of these shells set a big ship ablaze; a sheet of flame over 100 metres in height ran along its deck from bow to stern. Its centre was a circle of white intensity, so bright that I could feel my face burning and my eyes hurting as I stared at it. At times, the din of Iraqi artillery fire and the explosion of Iranian shells around our little mud hut was so intense that the Iraqi troops crouched behind the windows and alleyways of the abandoned village on the island could not make themselves heard. An army captain – the small gold medallion on his battledress proof of his Baath party membership – was fearful that his riflemen might shoot into their own troops on the far side of the river, and repeatedly gave orders that they should turn their fire further downstream. One Iraqi sniper, a tall man with a broad chest, big, beefy arms and a scar on his left cheek, walked into our shabby mud hut holding a long Soviet Dragunov rifle with telescopic sights. He grinned at us like a schoolboy, scratched his face, placed his weapon at the broken window and fired off two rounds at the Iranians. Whenever a shell landed near us, the palm trees outside shook and pieces of mud fell from the ceiling.

At last, it seemed, the Iraqis might be marrying up reality with their propaganda. If they could take Khorramshahr and Abadan and so control both banks of the Shatt al-Arab, they would have placed their physical control over the entire waterway – one of the ostensible reasons for the war. There were reports that the Iraqis were now making headway towards Dezful, 80 kilometres inside Iran, as well as Ahwaz, although claims that they had already captured the Ahwaz radio station were hard to believe. They had originally captured it twelve days earlier, but journalists later watched it blown to pieces by Iranian shells. And there was no denying the ferocity of Iran’s defence of Abadan. Even in Khorramshahr, they were still fighting, their snipers firing from the top of the quayside cranes.

The Iraqi soldiers in our hut had warned us of them as we were about to leave Um al-Rassas. Although they could not see us near the hut, the Iranians had a clear view over the top of the palm plantation once we arrived at the lonely iron bridge that linked the island to the western shore of the Shatt al-Arab. Pierre Bayle and I walked quickly between the trees, hearing the occasional snap of bullets but unworried until we reached the river’s edge. There again, I could see the shadow of the shells moving mysteriously across the water. ‘Robert, we are going to have to run,’ Bayle said, but I disagreed. Perhaps it was the bright sunlight, the heavenly green of the palms that made me believe – or wish to believe – that no one would disturb our retreat across the bridge.

I was wrong, of course. As soon as we set off across the narrow iron bridge, the bullets started to crack around us, many of them so close that I could feel the air displacement of their trajectory. I saw a line of spray travelling across the river towards us – I was running now, but I still had the dangerous, childish ability to reflect that this was just how it looked in Hollywood films, the little puffs of water stitching their way at speed towards the bridge. And then they were pinging into the ironwork, spitting around us, ricochets and aimed shots. I actually saw a square of metal flattened by a round a few inches from my face. I ran faster but was gripped by a kind of stasis, a feeling – most perilous of all – that this cannot be happening and that if it is, then perhaps I should accept whatever harm is to come to me. Within seconds, Bayle was beside me, taking the cassette recorder from me, screaming ‘Run, run’ in my left ear, physically pushing me from behind and then, when we neared the end of the bridge, grabbing me by the arm and jumping with me into the water of the Shatt al-Arab, the bullets still skitting around us. We waded the last metres to shore, scrambled up the bank and plunged into the palm grove as a cluster of mortar shells burst around the bridge, the shrapnel clanging off the iron.

Amid the trees, an Iraqi platoon was banging off mortars towards Khorramshahr. The sergeant beckoned to Pierre and myself, and there, amid his soldiers, we lay down exhausted in the dirt. One of his men brought us tea and I looked at Bayle and he just nodded at me. I thought at first that he was telling me how bad things had been, how closely we had escaped with our lives. Then I realised he was thinking what I was thinking: that Saddam had bitten off more than he could chew, that this might not be a whirlwind war at all but a long, gruelling war of aggression. When we returned to the Hamdan Hotel that afternoon, I typed up my story on the old telex machine, sent the tape laboriously through to London, went to my room and slept for fifteen hours. The smell of adventure was beginning to rub off.

So why did we go back for more? Why did I tell the Times foreign desk that although I was short of money, I would stay on in Basra? To be sure, I wanted to see a little bit more of this history I was so dangerously witnessing. If it was true that Saddam had grotesquely underestimated the effect of his aggression – and the Iranians were fighting back with great courage – then eventually the Iraqi army might heed Khomeini’s appeal and revolt. This could mean the end of Saddam’s regime or – the American and Arab nightmare – an Iranian occupation of Iraq and another Shiite Islamic Republic.

But war is also a vicarious, painful, attractive, unique experience for a journalist. Somehow that narcotic has to be burned off. If it’s not, the journalist may well die. We were young. I was fresh from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, already immersed in covering the Lebanese civil war and the effects of Israel’s first 1978 invasion. I had covered the Iranian revolution, the very crucible of this Iraq – Iran conflict. This was my war. Or so I felt as we set off each morning for the Iraqi front lines. And thus it was one burning morning along the Shatt al-Arab, this time with Gavin and his crew, that I almost died again. Once more, I was carrying CBC’s recording equipment and so – before writing these paragraphs – I have listened once more to that day’s tape; and I can hear myself, heart thumping, when I first began to understand how frightening war is.

Most of the ships on the far side of the river were now on fire, a pageant of destruction that lent itself to every camera. But again, we had to approach the river through the Iraqi lines and the Iranians now had men tied by ropes to the cranes along the opposite river bank who were holding rocket-propelled grenades as well as rifles. Here is the text of the audio-track that I was ad-libbing for CBC:

FISK: We’re walking through this deserted village now, there really doesn’t seem to be anybody here, just a few Iraqi soldiers on rooftops and we can’t see them. But there’s a lot of small-arms fire very near. Sound of gunfire, growing in intensity. Yes, the car’s just over there, Gavin.

HEWITT: Down here.

FISK: Yes, there they are. Sound of shooting, much closer this time. I’m beginning to wonder why I got into journalism. My heartbeats are breaking up my commentary. Going through the courtyard of what was obviously a school – there are school benches laid out here.

The sound of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade followed by a thunderous explosion that obliterates the commentary and breaks the audio control on the recorder.

FISK: Back over here, I think, round this way. Dozens of shots and the sound of Gavin, the BBC crew and Fisk running for their lives, gasping for breath. Just trying to get back to the car to get to safety. Ouch, that’s too near. I think they can see us wandering around. Let’s go! Let’s go! There’s …

HEWITT (to crew): Yah, c’mon, c’mon, we’re getting out of here. Can we go? Damn!

And then, listening to this tape, I hear us urging our Iraqi driver to leave, shouting at him to leave. ‘Go, just go!’ one of us screams at him in fury and, once we are moving away, I talk into the microphone, giving a message to George Lewinski and Sue Hickey in the CBC office in London:

George and Sue, I hope you’ve now listened to all that. Please, please, use as much as you can ’cos you can tell how dangerous it was. And please would you keep this cassette whatever happens – it’s a memory I want to remember for the rest of my life, sitting in my Irish cottage. Whatever you do, don’t throw it away!

The tape never made it. I gave it to our Iraqi taxi-driver in Basra to take across the border to send from Kuwait airport, but he was turned round at the frontier and arrived back four hours later outside our hotel, smiling ingratiatingly and holding my tape out of the driver’s window like a dead fish. I later transmitted it down a crackling phone line. Heaven knows what the Canadians made of it – although I was later told that a truck-driver in White Horse, Yukon, pulled over to a phone booth, dialled CBC in Toronto and asked: ‘Was that for real?’

In one sense, it was. The recording was the actual sound of four comparatively young men risking their lives for … Nothing? I’m not sure that would be true. By putting our lives on the line, we did, I suspect, give an authenticity to our work that also gave us a credibility when we came to challenge what governments – or other journalists – claimed to be true. This experience had proved to me beyond all doubt that Iraq was not going to ‘win’ this huge war. An Iranian artillery counter-attack was being sustained and, as I wrote that October – accurately but six years prematurely – ‘if this is carried to its logical conclusion, then it will not be Khorramshahr that is under shellfire from Iraqi guns but Basra that will be hit by shellfire from the Iranians.’

Across the Bailey bridge in Basra came now a steady stream of military ambulances. I ventured out to the border post at Shalamcheh again and there now were the Iraqi wounded, lying in the sand while an artillery battery beside them lobbed 155-mm shells across the border. An ambulance came bumping out of the desert and bounced to a halt in a sandy basin half surrounded by palm trees. They brought an infantryman out of it on a stretcher, pulled the blood-soaked bandages off his shoulder and laid him on a makeshift bed in the shade of the old police station. The man, shot by an Iranian sniper, was still in pain but he made no sound as three army medical orderlies fussed with drip-feed bags above him, the guns firing off a round every minute, a slamming explosion that shook the walls of the building and had the doctors wincing.

A second Iraqi casualty was brought out of the sands, a private from a tank crew who had been blasted from his vehicle, a severely shell-shocked soldier whose head lolled from side to side and whose knees buckled when his comrades carried him into the courtyard of the police station. The soldier with the shoulder wound moaned a little, and every time the big guns fired and the shells soared off towards Khorramshahr, the shell-shock victim rolled his eyes around, his arms flopping from side to side like a dummy with the stuffing knocked out of it.