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

It was not hard to fathom what this might involve. The largest community in Lebanon – though not a majority – was Shia. Syria was effectively ruled by the Alawites, a Shia sect in all but name. If Iraq was to fall to its own majority Shiites, there could be a Shia state from the Mediterranean to the borders of Afghanistan, with both oil and the waters of the two great rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates. With both Iranian and Iraqi oil, Khomeini could undercut OPEC and control world prices, let alone dominate the waters of the Gulf and the Arab peninsula. That, at least, was the nightmare of the Arabs and the Americans, one that Saddam was happy to promote. Now he was portraying himself as the defender of the Arab lands, his war with Iran the new Qadisiya, the battle in ad 636 in which the Arab leader Saad bin Ali Waqqas vanquished the far larger Persian army of Rustum. In Baghdad’s official discourse, the Iranians were now the ‘pagan Zoroastrians’.

In Basra, the Iraqis had displayed their seventeen Iranian POWs to us. Now the Iranians took us to meet their Iraqi POWs – all 15,000 of them. At Parandak prisoner-of-war camp in northern Iran, they sat cross-legged on a windy parade ground in lines a quarter of a mile deep, many of them with well-trimmed beards, all of them wearing around their necks a coloured portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. Their eyes moved in a way that only captivity can control, studying each other nervously and then staring at their prison guards, awed by the enormity of their surrender. When Iran’s army chief of staff, grey-haired and bespectacled, told them of Iraq’s iniquities, the Iraqis roared back: ‘Down with Saddam Hussein.’

This was not brainwashing in the normally accepted use of the word. It was scarcely indoctrination. But there could be no doubt what the Iranians were trying to do at Parandak: to make Saddam’s own soldiers more dangerous to his Baathist regime than the Iranian army that was fighting its way towards the Iraqi frontier. When Khomeini’s name was mentioned, it echoed over the massive parade ground, repeated by thousands of Iraqi soldiers who then knelt in prayer and homage to the Islamic faith that overthrew the Shah.

True, there were some dissidents among the Iraqi troops, men who still retained their political as well as their Islamic identity. At the far back of one line of older prisoners – captives now for more than a year – an Iraqi soldier shouted ‘Saddam is a very good man’, and a few of his comrades nodded in agreement. ‘The man did not say “Saddam” – he was greeting you with the word “Salaam”,’ explained an Iranian official with the confidence of mendacity. Several hundred prisoners refused to pray. ‘They had probably not washed before prayers,’ said the same official. ‘They had not been purified.’

From his residence in north Tehran, Khomeini had given specific instructions that Iraqi prisoners-of-war were to be well treated and given all the rights of captive soldiers. The POWs were visited by the International Red Cross, but they were also being lectured in Arabic each day by Iranian officers who explained to them that the United States, France, Britain and other Western nations had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1980 attack on Iran. There were, naturally, no contradictions from their vast audience. When the Iraqi prisoners knelt to pray, they took Khomeini’s portrait from around their necks, placed it upon the ground in front of them and rested their heads upon it. In the barracks, these men – including Iraqi paratroopers who arrived from the war front on the very day of our visit, still wearing their blue berets – were to be given weekly lessons by mullahs on the meaning of Islam. They were already receiving the daily Tehran newspaper Kayhan, specially printed in Arabic for their convenience.

When these prisoners eventually returned to Iraq, some of them, perhaps a goodly proportion, must have carried these lessons with them, an incubus for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – or an inspiration to oppose any other army that dared to take control of their country in the years to come. We were not told how many of these young Iraqi soldiers were Shiites and what percentage were Sunni.

The Iranians would not permit us to speak to the prisoners, although they produced more than a hundred captives – or ‘guests’ as they cloyingly called them – from Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Nigeria and Somalia, who had been taken among the Iraqi prisoners. A bearded Lebanese librarian from Zahle – a Christian town – claimed to have been forced to enlist while working in Baghdad. A Somali, Fawzi Hijazi, frightened but smiling, pleaded with me to tell his embassy of his presence. He had been a scholarship student at Baghdad University, he said, when he had been press-ganged into the Iraqi army. He had not been visited by the Red Cross. But at this point, an Iranian guard ordered him to stop speaking.

Now on our chaperoned visits to the Iranian front, we could see the country’s newly established self-confidence made manifest. The Revolutionary Guard Corps had become the spine of Iran’s military power, drawing on a huge pool of rural volunteers, the Basiji, the schoolboys and the elderly, the unemployed, even the sick. An official history of the Guard Corps was published in booklet form in Tehran during the war, claiming that it was ‘similar in many respects to the combatants of early Islam, in the days of the Holy Prophet … Among the important and prevalent common points of the two is … life according to an Islamic brotherhood; the story of the travellers and the followers. The travellers … migrated to the war fronts, and the followers … support their families in the cities during the war.’ An ‘important and popular activity’ of the Guards, the pamphlet said, was ‘the military, political, and ideological training of the Baseej [sic], in which the limitless ocean of our people are organised.’*

Both the ‘Guards’ and the ‘travellers’ were now in convoy towards the borders of Iraq, singing and chanting their desire to ‘liberate’ the Iraqi Shia holy cities. One trail of trucks, jeeps and tanks 5 kilometres long, which I overtook near the Iranian city of Susangerd, was loaded down with thousands of Basiji, almost all of them waving black and green banners with ‘Najaf’ and ‘Kufa’ written across them. Jang ta pirouzi, they shouted at me when I took their pictures. ‘War until victory.’ Another convoy was led by a tank with a placard tied above its gun muzzle, announcing that it was the ‘Kerbala Caravan’. These men, most of them, were going to their deaths in Iraq but they were doing so with an insouciance, a light-heartedness – a kind of brazen stubbornness – that was breathtaking.

I suppose the soldiers of the 1914 war had something of the same gaiety about them, the British who thought the war would be over by Christmas, the French who painted ‘Berlin’ on the side of their troop trains, the Germans who painted ‘Paris’ on theirs. In Frederic Manning’s semi-autobiographical Her Privates We, a unit of British soldiers marching through a French village at night during the First World War awakes the inhabitants:

… doors suddenly opened and light fell through the doorways, and voices asked them where they were going.

‘Somme! Somme!’ they shouted, as though it were a challenge.

‘Ah, no bon!’ came the kindly, pitying voices in reply … And that was an enemy to them, that little touch of gentleness and kindliness; it struck them with a hand harsher that death’s, and they sang louder, seeing only the white road before them …

No wonder that boy soldier on the Dusallok Heights had lectured me about spirituality and materialism. There comes a point, I suspect, in a soldier’s life when the inevitability of death becomes more pressing than the possibility of life.

Now the Arab leaders who had expressed such confidence in Saddam were fearful that he might lose the war they had so cheerfully supported. King Hussein of Jordan arrived hurriedly in Baghdad for talks with Saddam, speaking boldly of standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Iraqis but privately expressing his fears that their army would soon fall back even further, allowing the Iranians to enter Iraq. The Kuwaitis and Saudis bankrolled Saddam’s new armoury. Egyptian-made heavy artillery shells were sent by air to Iraq from Cairo, overflying Saudi airspace.*

But the Arabs were not alone in their fears that Iraq might collapse. The United States had been furnishing Iraq with satellite imagery of the Iranian battle lines since the first days of the war, and a steady stream of unofficial US ‘advisers’ had been visiting Baghdad ever since. When Mohamed Salam, a Lebanese staff correspondent for the American Associated Press news agency in Beirut, was posted to Iraq in 1983, ‘Donald Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to meet Saddam and I was treated like a king, like all the people connected to the Americans. The Iraqis couldn’t be more cooperative.’ At Muthanna, the old military airport in the centre of Baghdad, the Iraqis held an arms fair and ‘everyone was there, from the British to the South Koreans,’ he recalled. Around May 1985, a US military delegation travelled to Baghdad with twelve ranking officers, according to Salam. ‘The embassy wouldn’t talk about it. They stayed for three days and they came on a special Pan Am plane.’

At the time, Salam – we had both covered the Lebanese civil war together – could not travel unaccompanied in Iraq, but he told me in Baghdad at the time how the Americans were concentrating on Iraq. ‘The US is beginning to regard Iraq as its main card in the area … So far, Saddam has been successful in suppressing the communists, the Shiites and all the opposition. That suits the Americans quite well. King Hussein is useful in promoting Iraq to the West. But the US would not want Iraq to be a post-war regional power. Nothing is clear at the embassy here. There’s a USIS guy called Jim Bulloch, the deputy chief of mission is Ted Katouf and Dean Strong is their military affairs man. But they’re cut out of the loop of what the Pentagon is doing.’ Salam recalls now that he ‘saw satellite photos of the Iranian forces – I saw these pictures at the US interests section in Baghdad in 1984.’

Iraq’s 15 million population was now facing Iran’s 35 million, outnumbered on the battlefield itself almost five to one. Saddam’s army could not fight against these odds in open battle – Dezful was proof of that – so a new and merciless logic was adopted in Baghdad. Iraqi troops would dig in along the front lines, embed their thousands of tanks in the earth and use them as mass artillery to wipe out the human-wave attacks. But in 1984, through the swamps of Howeiza and the rivers that run through the land of the Marsh Arabs, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards led an attack – along dykes and using power-boats – deep into Iraq. At one point – the Iraqis only admitted this eight months later but Salam was to see the evidence with his own eyes – the Iranians pushed armour across the main eastern Baghdad – Basra highway at Qurnah. They had traversed the Tigris river and began destroying Iraqi tanks by firing at them from the highway bridges.

Baghdad’s response was as successful as it was devastatingly cruel. Because he was one of the only journalists to witness the result, the account of what happened next belongs to Mohamed Salam:

There had been a major battle at Azair, Sada and Baida in the Howeiza marshes south of Amara – the Iraqi commander was Major General Hisham Sabah al-Fakhry. He got the Iranians into a pocket in the marshes then the Iraqis built a big dam to the east of them. It was still early ’84. Al-Fakhry brought huge tanker trucks down and pumped fuel into the marshland and then fired incendiary shells into the water and started the biggest fire I’ve seen in my life. He burned and killed everything, the whole environment.

Then when the fire was out, he brought electrical generators and put huge cables into the marsh waters and electrified everything so that there was no source of life left in that place. When I was there, I needed to take a leak and walked over to an embankment and one of the soldiers said ‘Don’t piss in the water’ and pointed at the cables. He asked me: ‘Do you want to be a piss-martyr?’

Gutted bodies were floating everywhere, even women and children were among them – marsh people, people who knew what a toad was, people who’d lived among ducks and buffaloes and fished with spears, this civilisation was being wiped out. I saw about thirty women and children, all gutted open like fish, and many, many Iranians. The innocent had to die along with the living.

But petrol and electricity alone could not annihilate the invaders. In the battle of Qadisiya, Sardar and his fellow Arabs were astonished to see Rustum’s army advancing towards them on massive animals they had never before seen, beasts six times the size of a horse with vast bones protruding from each side of their noses, their feet so great that they sank into the sand. Sardar told his archers to fire their arrows – and his soldiers to throw their spears – into the eyes of the elephants; to this day, the Iraqis believe that this was the key to their victory. So what was to be Saddam’s weapon against the frightening hordes now moving into Iraq? What spear was poisoned enough for the ‘racist Persians’?

I am on an Iranian military hospital train, trundling through the night-time desert north of Ahwaz, returning from another trip to the front, eating chicken and rice and drinking warm cola in the restaurant car. It is 1983. Rumsfeld is shaking hands with Saddam, asking to reopen the US embassy. The train is slow, its un-oiled bogies shrieking on the curves, making heavy weather of the gradients, bumping over the unmaintained permanent way. Occasionally, a light moves slowly past the window, a distant village, no doubt with its own crop of martyrs. The man from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance is asleep, knowing that I cannot stray from a moving train.

But I cannot sleep and so I walk through the carriages. It is cold and the windows are shut against the night breeze off the desert but there is a strange, faint smell. At first I think it must be a deodorant, something to ameliorate the shitty stench of the blocked toilets at the end of each car. Then I pull open the connecting door of the next carriage and they are sitting in there by the dozen, the young soldiers and Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic, coughing softly into tissues and gauze cloths. Some are in open carriages, others crammed into compartments, all slowly dribbling blood and mucus from their mouths and noses. One young man – I thought he could be no more than eighteen – was holding the gauze against his face. It was already stained pink and yellow but in his left hand he was holding a Koran with a bright blue cover. From time to time, he laid the gauze on his knee and coughed and a new streak of red would run in a line from his nose and he would turn the page of the Koran with his right hand and put the cloth back to his face to sop up the new blood and then pick up the Koran to read again.

Carriage after carriage of them, they sit without talking, uncomplaining, accepting – so it seems – what has happened to them. Only after ten or fifteen minutes do I realise that the smell that bothered me is not deodorant. It’s a kind of sick perfume and the men are coughing it out of their lungs. I go to the windows of the carriages and start pulling them down, filling the corridors with the sharp night air. I don’t want to breathe into my lungs what is coming out of theirs. I don’t want to be gassed like them. I go on opening the windows but the soldiers don’t look at me. They are enduring a private hell into which, thank God, I cannot be admitted.

Iran’s own official history of the war says that Iraq first used chemical weapons against its combatants on 13 January 1981, killing seven Iranians. In 1982, the Iranians recorded eleven chemical attacks by Saddam’s army, in 1983, thirty-one. Dr Naser Jalali, a dermatologist and head of the dermatology ward at the Loqman al-Doleh Hospital in Tehran, examined a number of soldiers brought to the Iranian capital after a chemical weapons attack against Piranshahr and Tamarchin on 9 August 1983. ‘The injuries of those involved have been caused by exposure to toxic agents which have been released in the atmosphere in the forms of gas, liquid or powder,’ he said. ‘… the weapons of delivery had released a toxic chemical called “Nitrogen mustard” or “mustard gas”.’ At around 9.30 in the evening of 22 October 1983, between Marivan and Sultan, an Iraqi artillery shell exploded on the Iranian lines, giving off a smell of kerosene. Next morning, eleven Iranians – soldiers, Revolutionary Guards and Basiji – were afflicted with nausea, vomiting, burning of the eyes, blurred vision, itching, suffocation and coughing. Taken to a medical centre, they were found to have blisters all over their skin. Between 21 and 28 October, three Kurdish villages sympathetic to Iran came under chemical attack; an Iranian medical report stated that ‘many villagers of this Kurdish district, including women and children, were severely injured’. Between 28 December 1980 and 20 March 1984, the Iranian official history of the war lists sixty-three separate gas attacks by the Iraqis.

Yet the world did not react. Not since the gas attacks of the 1914–18 war had chemical weapons been used on such a scale, yet so great was the fear and loathing of Iran, so total the loyalty of the Arabs to Saddam Hussein, so absolute their support for him in preventing the spread of Khomeini’s revolution, that they were silent. The first reports of Saddam’s use of gas were never printed in the Arab press. In Europe and America, they were regarded as little more than Iranian propaganda, and America’s response was minimal. Only in March 1984 did Washington condemn Iraq for using poison gas – but even that criticism was mild. It was 1985 before the New York Times reported that ‘United States intelligence analysts have concluded that Iraq used chemical weapons in repelling Iran’s latest offensive in the Gulf War.’ True to that paper’s gutless style, even this report had to be attributed to those favourite sources of all American reporters – ’Administration officials’.

Preliminary evidence suggested that the Iraqis had been using bis(2-chloroethyl)sulphide, a blistering agent that damages all human tissues. The New York Times report continued in the same cowardly fashion: ‘Iran flew purported [sic] victims of the attacks to Austria and West Germany, where some doctors were quoted as saying [sic] the wounded showed signs of having been under attack by mustard gas …’ Four days earlier, US Secretary of State George Shultz had met the Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in Washington, but uttered no criticism of the chemical weapons attack. Despite the mass of evidence now available, my own paper, The Times of London, was still able to carry a photograph in March 1985 of an Iranian soldier in a London hospital covered in terrible skin blisters, with a caption saying only that he was suffering from ‘burns which Iran says [sic] were caused by chemical weapons’.

Mohamed Salam was again one of the few correspondents to obtain first-hand, almost lethal evidence of this latest poison gas attack. Again, he should tell his own awesome story:

I was invited with Zoran Dogramadjev of the Yugoslav Tanjug news agency to go down to Basra where there had been a major offensive by the Iranians. The 3rd Army Corps under Major General Maher Abdul Rashed was faced by this huge attack, totally overwhelming, so the only way of handling it was by mass killing. Rashed had crushed the Iranian offensive. There had been no flooding, no fire, no electricity. Zoran and I wandered around the desert where all this had happened and we came across hundreds and hundreds of dead Iranians, literally thousands of them, all dead. They were still holding their rifles – just think, thousands of them dead in their trenches, all still holding their Kalashnikovs. They had their little sacks of food supplies still on their backs – all the Iranians carried these little sacks of food. There were no bullet holes, no wounds – they were just dead.

We started counting – we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting. We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again. All the dead Iranians had blood on their mouths and beards, and their pants below the waist were all wet. They had all urinated in their pants. The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination of nerve gas and mustard gas. The nerve gas would paralyse their bodies so they would all piss in their pants and the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That’s why they spat blood.

We described all this in our reports, but we didn’t know what it was. We asked the Iraqi soldiers. They had been eating – tomatoes and cucumbers – but when they weren’t eating, they would wear gas masks. From that visit, I developed an infection in my sinus and went to see a friend of mine in Baghdad who was a doctor. He said: ‘This is what we call “front line infection” – I would advise you to leave Iraq immediately.’ I went to see Eileen and Gerry [Eileen Powell and Gerry Labelle, a husband-and-wife AP team in Nicosia] and they put me into the Cyprus Clinic. They gave me antibiotic injections.

But what I saw was a killing machine. Zoran and I, in the end, we thought we had seen about 4,700 Iranian bodies. You know, the things that happened in that war, you would need centuries to write about it.

Every evening at 6 p.m., the Iraqis would broadcast their official war communiqué for the day. I remember word for word what it said in early 1985: The waves of insects are attacking the eastern gates of the Arab Nation. But we have the pesticides to wipe them out.

So where did the ‘pesticides’ come from? Partly from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994 the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs of the US Senate produced a report, United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War. The ‘Persian Gulf War’ referred to the 1991 war and liberation of Kuwait, but its investigations went all the way back to the Iran – Iraq war – which was itself originally called the ‘Gulf War’ by the West until we participated in a Gulf war of our own and purloined the name. The committee’s report informed the US Congress about government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis – which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli (E. coli). The same report stated that ‘the United States provided the Government of Iraq with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile-system programs, including … chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans), chemical warfare filling equipment …’

In the summer of 1985, the Iraqi information ministry took Salam close to the Syrian border, where there was a quarry with the name Al-Qaem-ukashat. The government ‘minders’ told Salam it produced fertilisers. ‘There was an American engineer there from Texas,’ he was to recall.

I interviewed him and he said they were making fertilisers there. Actually, they were producing the mustard and nerve gas there. Many people in Iraq knew about this. There was a kind of artificial town next to it with a restaurant and chalets. The place was bombed by the Americans in the 1991 war. The regime people stayed there for a while immediately after the American invasion in 2003. But at the time they wanted us to write about this wonderful fertiliser plant. They laid on this big banquet with lots of wine and whiskey.