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

Hamid Kurdi Alipoor lies on his hospital bed in a semi-stupor, wheezing through cracked lips, his burned forehead artificially creased by his frown of pain. The nurse beside him – a girl in dark-framed spectacles wearing an equally black chador – pours water gently into his mouth from a plastic mug. The girl smiles at the young man as if she does not notice the dark skin hanging from his face or the livid pink burns around his throat. Something terrible has happened to him, but the Iranian doctors insist that I ask him to tell me his own story.

It is the same as that of many of the other 199 Iranian soldiers and Revolutionary Guards lying in torment in their beds in the Labbafinejad Medical Centre in Tehran. It is now February 1986. ‘I was in a shelter on the Iranian side of the Arvand [Shatt al-Arab] river,’ Alipoor says. ‘When the shell landed, I did not realise the Iraqis were firing gas. I could not see the chemical so I did not put my gas mask on. Then it was too late.’ He relaxes for a few moments, breathing heavily, the nurse holding out the cup to him again. How old is he? I ask. He looks at the girl when he replies. ‘Nineteen,’ he says.

Some of the other patients watch him from their beds, others are lying with their eyes congealed shut, a bowl of damp, pink swabs beside their pillows. They do not talk. All you can hear is the sound of harsh, laboured breathing. ‘The lungs are the real problem – we send them home when they improve and we can deal with the blood infections.’ Dr Faizullah Yazdani, one of the senior medical staff at the hospital, is a small man with huge eyebrows who radiates cheerfulness among all the pain. ‘But they come back to us with lung problems. They cough a lot. And some have been attacked with nerve gas as well as mustard gas.’

The Iranians very publicly flew some of their chemical warfare victims to London, Stockholm and Vienna for treatment, but Dr Yazdani’s wards are overflowing with patients. So far, only seven of the 400 he has received have died. He still hopes to send 200 home, although many will never recover. According to the doctors, the Iraqis use mustard and tabun gas and nerve gas on the Iranians; they renewed their chemical attacks on a large scale on 13 February. When the victims are badly affected, they drown in their own saliva. Those who survive are brought choking to the long hospital trains, successors to the train of gas victims on which I travelled three years earlier. Now these trains are running from Ahwaz every twenty-four hours. ‘You cannot see the gas so it’s often a terrible surprise,’ Dr Yazdani says. ‘The soldier will smell rotten vegetables then his eyes start to burn, he suffers headaches, he has difficulty seeing, then he starts crying, he coughs and wheezes.’

The pain is physically in the ward as the doctor takes me round bed after bed of blistered young men, their strangely contorted bodies swathed in yellow bandages. The blisters sometimes cover their bodies. They are yellow and pink, horribly soft and sometimes as large as basketballs, often breeding new bubbles of fragile, wobbling skin on top of them. In bed sixteen, I come across a doctor who is also a patient, a 34-year-old dermatologist from Tabriz called Hassan Sinafa who was working in a military hospital near the Shatt al-Arab on 13 January when a gas shell burst only 20 metres from him. I can tell he must have been wearing his gas mask at the time because it has left an area of unblemished skin tissue around his eyes and mouth, producing a cynical dark line around his forehead and cheeks. ‘There was nothing I could do,’ he says slowly, dosed in morphine. ‘I had my anti-gas clothes on but the shell was too close for them to protect me. I felt the burns and I knew what was happening.’

He smiles. He had been brought safely to Tehran but it was two days before he gave the doctors permission to telephone his wife, at home in Tabriz with his twenty-month-old daughter. What did she say when she arrived at his hospital bed and saw him? I ask. ‘She has not come,’ he replies. ‘I told her not to – I don’t want her or our baby seeing me like this.’

Throughout all these years, the Americans also continued to supply the Iraqis with battlefield intelligence so that they could prepare themselves for the mass Iranian attacks and defend themselves – as the US government knew – with poison gas. More than sixty officers of the US Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb-damage assessments. After the Iraqis retook the Fao peninsula from the Iranians in early 1988, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer, toured the battlefield with Iraqi officers and reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to secure their victory. The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Colonel Walter Lang, later told the New York Times that ‘the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern.’

The Iraqis had used gas to recapture Fao on 19 April 1988 – to the virtual indifference of the world. Just a month earlier, on 17 and 18 March, during Operation Anfal – anfal means ‘booty’ – the Iraqis had taken a terrible revenge on the Kurdish town of Halabja for allegedly collaborating with the Iranians during Iran’s brief Val Fajr 10 offensive in the area. For two days, Iraqi jets dropped gas, made from a hydrogen cyanide compound developed with the help of a German company, onto Halabja, killing more than 5,000 civilians. In Washington, the CIA – still supporting Saddam – sent out a deceitful briefing note to US embassies in the Middle East, stating that the gas might have been dropped by the Iranians.

Humanitarian organisations would, much later, draw their own frightening conclusions from this lie. ‘By any measure, the American record on Halabja is shameful,’ Joost Hilterman of Human Rights Watch was to say fifteen years afterwards. The US State Department ‘even instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.’ In the United States, Halabja was mentioned in 188 news stories in 1988, but in only twenty in 1989. By 2000, Halabja featured in only ten news stories in the American media. But then it was reheated by the George W. Bush administration as part justification for his forthcoming invasion of Iraq. Halabja was remembered by journalists 145 times in February 2003 alone. In common with Tony Blair and many other Western leaders, Bush repeatedly emphasised that Saddam ‘is a person who has gassed his own people’.

The possessive ‘his own’ was important. It emphasised the heinous nature of the crime – the victims were not just his enemies but his fellow Iraqis, though that might not be the Kurds’ point of view. But it also served to distance and to diminish Saddam’s earlier identical but numerically far greater crimes against the Iranians, who had lost many more of their citizens to the very same gases used at Halabja. And since we, the West, were servicing Saddam at the time of these war crimes – and still were at the time of Halabja – the gassing of the Kurds had to be set aside as a unique example of his beastliness.

More than a decade after Halabja, the United States accused Iran of trying to acquire chemical weapons, and it was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, in charge of Iranian forces during a large part of the Iran – Iraq war, who – as outgoing president of Iran – formally denied the American claim. ‘We have had such a malicious experience of the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis in the Imposed War that we would never wish to use or possess them,’ he said with unusual emotion in 1997. ‘At the time I was the sole commander of Iranian forces in the war. When we captured the Howeiza area, I witnessed such terrible scenes that I could never forget them. The people of Halabja cooperated with us after victory … Saddam had got away with using it on our people so he resorted to advanced chemical weapons which he then received from Germany and used these against those [Kurdish] people. These chemical substances were used and the people were harvested down on the ground. When you could smell this substance no one could survive. I saw terrible scenes there [in Halabja] and I hope this scene could never be repeated in any country.’

I am sitting on the floor of a tent in northern Iraq on 28 May 1991. Halabja was gassed three years ago. Around us, thousands of Kurdish refugees, victims of Saddam’s latest ethnic cleansing – the repression that followed our instigation and then betrayal of the post-Kuwait Iraqi uprising – are languishing amid squalor and disease under US military protection. The hillside is cold and streaks of snow still lie in the hollows around the tents, the air frozen, but thick with the thump of American Chinook helicopters transporting food and blankets to the refugee camp.

Zulaika Mustafa Ahmed is twenty-two and wears a white embroidered dress, a long skirt and a scarf over her dark hair. Her family are victims of the Anfal campaign during which perhaps 10,000 Kurds were murdered. Zulaika, married at the age of fourteen, was with her six children and her husband Moussa Issa Haji when the Anfal started and, like so many thousands of Kurds, they were obeying government instructions to report to their nearest town. ‘We were approaching Dahuk in our van when we were stopped by Iraqi soldiers,’ she says. ‘We were taken along with hundreds of other Kurds to Dahuk fort. They took us to the second floor where I saw Moussa being beaten with concrete blocks. I saw myself ten men who died after they were beaten with the blocks – I was standing only 6 metres away. Then they took them all away. I managed to speak to Moussa. I said to him: “Don’t be afraid, you are a man.” He answered: “Please, you have to take care of my children. If they kill me, it doesn’t matter.” What was I to say? They took him away and I have never seen him again. Sometimes I think I will never see my husband again – yes, sometimes I think this.’

Zulaika returned to her village of Baharqa. ‘It was some days later. We were used to the aircraft. I had left the village early with three of my children – the other three were with their grandfather – to go to the fields but I saw the two aircraft come low over Baharqa and drop bombs. There was a lot of smoke and it drifted towards us on the wind. It covered the land. We were hiding ourselves behind a small hill but we saw it coming towards us. The smoke had a nice smell, like medicine. Then my smallest children, Sarbas and Salah, started to cry. They started having diarrhoea but it didn’t stop. I couldn’t help them so I took them to the hospital in Irbil. The doctors were afraid. They gave them injections and medicine but it was no use. Both of them started to go black, as black as asphalt, and they both died nine or ten days later. The older child, when he died, he was vomiting his lungs. I buried them in the village cemetery. A lot of children died there. Now, if I go back there, I would not be able to find them.’

Zulaika says she will never marry again. How does she see her life, we ask. ‘I am living just to raise my children, that is all. In my dreams, I dream about my children who died. In one dream, I dream that my husband says to me: “You didn’t take care of the children as you promised. This is the reason why they died.”’

For some of the soldiers in the Iraqi army – the perpetrators, not the victims – the memory of those chemical attacks will also remain with them for ever. It is now July 2004, almost a quarter of a century after the start of the Iran – Iraq war, sixteen years since the Anfal operation against the Kurds. Under the occupation of the Americans and its puppet government, Baghdad has become the most dangerous city on earth. Suicide bombings, executions, kidnappings are the heartbeats of the city. But I arrive at the little market garden behind Palestine Street to buy a fir tree for the balcony of my hotel room, something to keep me sane in the broiling heat of midsummer Iraq. The garden is a place of flowers and undergrowth and pot plants and it is ruled over by Jawad, a 44-year-old with a sharp scar on his forehead, but who knows he lives in jenah. Jenah means ‘heaven’.

But Jawad, I quickly discover, has also lived in hell. When I ask about the scar, he tells me that a piece of Iranian shell cut into his head during a bombardment on the Penjwin mountain during the Iran – Iraq war. He was a radio operator and spent thirteen years in the Iraqi army. ‘I lost almost all my friends,’ he says, rubbing his hands together in a false gesture of dismissal. ‘What happened to us was quite terrible. And what happened to me. I can’t remember the name of one of my dead friends – because the shell fragment in my head took my memory away.’

Not all his memory, however. Jawad moves silently through the trees, only the trickle of water from a fountain and the back-cloth sound of Baghdad’s traffic disturbing his journey. A white ficus tree, perhaps? Very good for withstanding the heat. A green ficus tree? The only fir trees for sale are so deeply rooted, they would take an hour to dig up. All his life, Jawad has worked in the market garden, along with his father. The heat accentuates the smells so that the smallest rose is perfumed, white flowers turning into blossom.

Yes, Jawad survived the entire Iran – Iraq war. He loathed Saddam, he says, yet he fought for him for eight terrible years. ‘I was at Ahwaz, I was at the Karun river, in the Shamiran mountains, in the Anfal operation, at Penjwin. I was a conscript and then a reservist but I refused to become an officer in case I had to stay in the army longer.’ In my notebook, I put a line beside the word Anfal. Jawad had crossed the Iranian frontier in 1980. He had entered Khorramshahr and then, when Khorramshahr was surrounded, he had retreated out of the city at night.

‘I first noticed the gas being used east of Amara. Our artillery were firing gas shells into the Iranians. I couldn’t smell the gas but I soaked my scarf in water and held it to my nose. Because I was a radio operator, I had a lot of equipment round me that protected me from the gas. These were black days and we suffered a lot. After I was wounded, they insisted on sending me back to the front. I had a 35 per cent disability and still they sent me back to the war.’

Jawad manoeuvres a dark green potted plant onto the path, waving his hands at the birds that spring from the undergrowth. If heaven really is a warm and comfortable garden, then Jawad lives in it. And the Anfal operation? I ask. Did he see the effects with his own eyes? Jawad raises his hands in an imploring, helpless way.

‘We saw everything. Would you believe this, that when they started using the gas strange things happened? I saw the birds falling from the sky. I saw the little beans on the trees suddenly turning black. The leaves decayed in front of our eyes. I kept the towel round my face, just as I did near Amara.’

And bodies?

‘Yes, so many of them. All civilians. They lay around the villages and on the hillsides in clumps, as if streets of people had gathered at the same place to die. Some were scattered, but there were many women who held children in their arms and they all lay there dead. What could I do? I could say nothing. We soldiers were too frightened even to discuss it. We just saw so many dead. And we were silent.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘War against War’ and the Fast Train to Paradise

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

WILFRED OWEN, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’

In the hush of the curtained front room, the two former Iraqi pilots and the man who had been second-in-command of Saddam Hussein’s air force sat in front of me in silence. The pilots spoke the heavily accented French they had learned while training on their Mirage fighter-bombers at Cherbourg. I had asked them about the USS Stark. But why now? they wanted to know. Why, sixteen years after an Iraqi Mirage had fired two missiles at the American guided-missile frigate in the Gulf – incinerating thirty-seven of its crew – did I want to know why they had almost sunk the ship? Why not discuss the growing anarchy in Baghdad under American occupation? That very morning in 2003, a car bomb had exploded outside the gates of the American headquarters at Saddam’s former Republican palace.

All three men feared that I was a spy, that I was trying to identify the pilot who killed the young American seamen more than a decade and a half ago. Why else would I ask if he was still alive? I told them I would never betray any human being, that I was a journalist – not an intelligence officer – that I would no more hand them over to the Americans than I would hand Americans over to them. I knew that senior Iraqi air force personnel had all remained in contact with each other after the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, that they now constituted an air force without aircraft. But I also suspected, correctly, that many of these men were now involved in the anti-occupation insurgency. I tried to explain that this was the one Iraqi air force mission that changed the Middle East. Their colleague’s actions on 17 May 1987 had – through one of those grotesque double standards which only Washington seemed able to produce – brought Iran to its knees.

The ex-general looked at me for almost another minute without speaking. Then he gave what was almost a mundane operational report. ‘I saw him take off from Shaiba,’ he said. ‘It was a routine flight over the Gulf to hunt for Iranian ships. There was a “forbidden zone” from which we had excluded all ships and the Stark was in that zone. The pilot didn’t know the Americans were there. He knew he had to destroy any shipping in the area – that’s all. He saw a big ship on his radar screen and he fired his two missiles at it. He assumed it was Iranian. He never saw the actual target. We never make visual contact – that’s how the system works. Then he turned to come home.’

Seventy kilometres north-east of Qatar, the American Perry-class frigate’s radar had picked up the Iraqi Mirage F-1 as it flew low and slowly down the coast of Saudi Arabia towards Bahrain. But Captain Glenn Brindel and his crew were used to Iraqi jets flying over them. Iraqi aircraft, he was to tell journalists later, were ‘deemed friendly’. The green speck on the radar did not represent a threat. Because the Stark held a course almost directly towards the Iraqi Mirage, the frigate’s superstructure blocked the anti-missile sensors and the Phalanx anti-missile battery which had the ability to pick up an incoming missile and fire automatically. But the system had anyway been switched to manual to avoid shooting down the wrong aircraft in the crowded Gulf. The captain would later claim that the detection systems were also malfunctioning. At 10.09 p.m., Brindel ordered a radio message to be sent to the pilot: ‘Unknown aircraft, this is US navy warship on your 078 for twelve miles. Request you identify yourself.’ There was no reply. A minute later, the aircraft banked towards the north and rose to 5,000 feet. The crew in the Stark’s ‘combat information centre’ failed to identify the two Exocet missiles with their 352-lb warheads which had detached themselves from the Mirage and were now racing towards them.

It was a lookout who first saw the rocket skimming the surface of the water towards the ship and telephoned Brindel. Two seconds later, the Exocet punched into the Stark at 600 mph and exploded in the forward crew’s quarters, cremating several of the American seamen as they lay in their bunks. The second missile exploded thirty seconds later. More than a sixth of the frigate’s crew were to die in less than a minute after the first Exocet spewed 120 pounds of burning solid missile fuel into crew sleeping quarters. The warhead failed to explode but smashed through seven bulkheads before coming to rest against the starboard hull plating. The second missile sent a fireball through the crew’s quarters, its 3,500-degree burning fuel killing most of the thirty-seven victims, turning many of them to ash. The Stark filled with thick, toxic smoke, the temperature even in neighbouring compartments soaring to 1,500 degrees. Bunks, computers and bulkheads melted in the heat. One petty officer spent thirteen hours in a darkened magazine room spraying water on 36 missiles as a 2,000-degree fire raged only a bulkhead away. The ship burned for two days. Even after she was taken in tow, the fires kept reigniting.

Listing and flying the American flag at half-staff, the Stark was pulled towards Bahrain. Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger called the attack ‘indiscriminate’. The Iraqi pilot, he said, ‘apparently didn’t care enough to find out what ship he was shooting at’. But there America’s criticism of Iraq ended. Even before Saddam Hussein made his own unprecedented and contrite expression of remorse – and long before the US navy had begun its own three investigations into the attack – President Ronald Reagan decided to blame Iran. ‘We’ve never considered them hostile at all,’ he said of the Iraqis. ‘They’ve never been in any way hostile.’ The Gulf was an international waterway. ‘No country there has a right to try and close it off and take it for itself. And the villain in the piece is Iran. And so they’re delighted with what has just happened.’*

Listening to Reagan’s words, one might have thought that Iran had started the war by invading Iraq in 1980, that Iran had been using chemical weapons against Iraq, that Iran had initiated the maritime exclusion zone in 1984 which started the tanker war in the Gulf – of which the Stark was indirectly a victim. Iraq was responsible for each of these acts, but Iraq was deemed ‘friendly’. Only a few weeks before the near-sinking of the Stark, US undersecretary Richard Murphy had himself visited Baghdad and praised Iraq’s ‘bravery’ in withstanding Iran, spraying its enemies with poison gas now a definition of Iraqi courage for Mr Murphy. Reagan had rewarded the aggressor by accepting his excuses and referred to the nation that did not kill his countrymen as the ‘villain’. It was an interesting precedent. When Iraq almost sank an American frigate, Iran was to blame. When al-Qaeda attacked the United States fourteen years later, Iraq was to blame.

All that was left was for Saddam himself to offer his condolences to the families of the dead Americans. They were not long in coming. ‘Rest assured that the grief which you feel as a result of the loss of your sons is our grief, too,’ the Iraqi leader wrote in a letter to the families of the dead, dated 22 May and printed on the stationery of Iraq’s Washington embassy:

On the occasion of the funeral ceremony of the victims lost in the grievous and unintentional incident that has happened to the American frigate Stark, I would like to express to you … my condolences and feelings of grief. All the Iraqis and I feel most profoundly the sorrow of moments such as these. Since we have ourselves lost a great many of our dear ones in the war which has been raging now for seven years, while the Iranian government still persists in … rejecting our appeals and those of the international community for the establishment of a just and lasting peace.