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

I saw the waters of the Shatt to our right – its paleness in the dawn light was breathtaking – and then, below us, coming up fast as if we were in a dive-bomber, a vast Iranian encampment of guns and mortars, earthworks and embrasures and tanks and armoured vehicles in the soggy desert, all swept by sand and smoke. The co-pilot, dressed in the beetle-like headset that the Americans supplied with their Bell helicopters, was scribbling something on a piece of paper as we made our final approach, the machine turning to settle next to a concrete bunker. The crewman was holding onto the machine with his right hand and scribbling with his left and I thought he must be writing an urgent message to the pilot until he turned to us and held up the paper with a grin. ‘We will kill Saddam,’ it said in English. Labelle and I looked at each other and Labelle put his mouth next to my ear. ‘Well, at least he knows what he fucking wants,’ he bellowed.

In the hot, noise-crushed air, I could see through the desert fog and rain that each dugout was decorated with a green banner bearing an Islamic exhortation. A middle-aged, slightly plump soldier ran to me smiling. ‘Death to England,’ he shouted and clasped my hand. ‘How are you? Do you want tea?’ Ali Mazinan’s bunker carried an instruction by the door, prohibiting the wearing of shoes. I walked in my socks across the woollen-blanketed floor as a 122-mm gun banged a shell casually towards Basra. A muezzin’s voice called for prayer. It was like one of my taped CBC reports. ‘Allah – BANG-akh -BANG-bar, ’ the voice sang amid the contentious gunfire. My map showed I was in what used to be a village called Nahr-e-Had.

Ali Mazinan clutched a wooden ruler in his right hand and pointed it lazily at the lower left-hand corner of a large laminated map, sealed to his dugout wall with minute pieces of Scotch tape. Mazinan wore a pair of thick spectacles with heavy black frames – they were at the time de rigueur for all self-respecting mullahs, Hizballah leaders, Revolutionary Guard officers and ministerial clerks – and was himself a Guard commander, one of the very men who captured Fao. ‘We won because we followed God’s orders,’ he said. I would be meeting Mazinan again; he was to become a symbol to me of rash and dangerous journalistic missions.

How much land had he captured? we asked. Mazinan took a step towards the map, raised the ruler in his right hand again and slapped the palm of his left hand generously over the Fao peninsula. He didn’t quite touch Kuwait but his index finger pointed towards Basra and his two middle fingers actually traversed the waterway, two fleshy pontoon bridges that spanned the Shatt above Abadan and gave the Iranians two quite mythical new bridgeheads into Iraqi territory. There was no talk of Iraqi counter-attacks. Instead, Mazinan’s ruler flicked towards the map and traced the pale green strips that ran down each side of the river bank. Both sides in the war produced dates, he said, and began a statistical analysis of their agricultural output. As he was speaking, the ministry men began to hand out dirty little plastic bags containing two tubes of liquid and an evil-looking syringe. ‘For nerve gas,’ one of them whispered in my ear, his finger poking the bottle with the green liquid. ‘For mustard gas,’ he said, indicating the bottle with the brown liquid. So here we were, kitted out with medical syringes for Saddam’s poison gas before landing in Fao, listening to the local military commander as he briefed us on Iraq’s 1979 date export production.

It is almost a relief to be told that we will now be taken to Fao. ‘Just think, Fisky,’ Labelle says wickedly. ‘In a short while, you’ll have your dateline – “From Robert Fisk, Iranian-occupied Fao.”’ Outside beneath the high bright sun, the sand swirls around our faces, swamping our clothes and eagerly working its way down our collars. There is a clap of sound and the rush of another artillery shell whooshing off towards Basra. I climb into the helicopter as if in a dream. It has a maximum safety load of eight but there are nineteen of us aboard, most of them clamouring mullahs. When I must do something utterly insane, I have discovered, an unidentifiable part of my brain takes over. There are no decisions to be taken, no choices to be made. My brain is now operating independently of me. It instructs me to sit beside the open starboard door of the helicopter gunship and I notice Labelle squatting beside me, notebook in hand. Notebook? I ask myself in my dream. He’s going to take notes on this suicide mission?

The growing rhythm of the rotor blades has a comforting effect, the gathering din slowly dampening the sound of the war. The crash of the artillery becomes a dull thump, the wind shears away from the blades, the first nudge off the ground and the sudden rise above the sand and it is the most normal thing in the world. We are immortal. Our helicopter moves round, faces east, then west then east again and then turns at 180 degrees to the ground, levels off and streaks between the artillery. And as we pass through the gun line – our door remains wide open because of the heat – there is a crack-crack-crack of sound and a long pink tulip of fire grow out of the gun muzzles, a barrage as beautiful as it is awesome. One of these big flowers moves inexorably past the starboard side of our chopper and for a moment I think I feel its heat. It hangs for a moment in the air, this magnificent blossom, until we overtake it and a line of palms curls beneath us and then the Shatt al-Arab, so close that the skids of the chopper are only a foot off the water.

I sit up and squint out of the pilot’s window. I can see a smudge on the horizon, a black rime across the paleness of the river and a series of broken needles that stand out on the far shoreline. The water is travelling below us at more than a hundred miles an hour. We are the fastest water-skiers in the world, the rotors biting through the heat, sweeping across this great expanse of river; we are safe in our cocoon, angels who can never fall from heaven, who can only marvel and try to remember that we are only human. We fly through the smoke of two burning oil tanks and then Labelle bangs me on my foot with his fist and points to a mountain of mud and filth that the helicopter is now circling and onto which it gingerly, almost carelessly, sets down. ‘Go, go, go!’ the pilot shouts and we jump out into the great wet mass of shell-churned liquid clay that tears off our shoes when we try to move and which sucks at our feet and prevents us even moving clear of the blades when the chopper whups back into the air and leaves us in a kind of noisy silence, Labelle and I trying to hold our trousers up, the mullahs’ robes caked with muck and then, as the chopper turns fly-like in the sky, we feel the ground shaking.

It is vibrating as surely as if there is a minor earthquake, a steady movement of the soil beneath our feet. Smoke drifts across the mud and the shell-broken cranes of Fao port – the ‘needles’ I had seen on the horizon – and the litter of burned-out Iraqi armour. Labelle and I struggle through the mire with the mullahs and an ascetic young man who turns out – of course – to be from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. We can hear the incoming shells now, a continuous rumble that makes no distinction between one explosion and the next, as if we have pitched up next to a roller-skating rink on which mad children roar endlessly over wooden boards. When we get to the quayside, littered with bits of mouldering bodies and hunks of crane and unexploded shells, Labelle comes staggering towards me, his feet caked in the glue-like mud. We are both exhausted, gasping for breath. ‘Well, Fisky,’ he wheezes grimly. ‘You’ve got your fucking dateline!’ And he shoots me the Steve McQueen grin.

We walk a mile down the waterfront. There are burned oil storage tanks and captured artillery pieces; the earth and concrete are pulverised and there are Iraqi bodies lying in the muck. One soldier has lost his head, another his arms. Both were hit by grenades. Labelle and I find a basin of sand and cement near one of the cranes and shout to the man from the ministry. But as we walk to sit down in the dirt, I see another body in a gun-pit, a young man in the foetal position, curled up like a child, already blackening with death but with a wedding ring on his finger. I am mesmerised by the ring. On this hot, golden morning, it glitters and sparkles with freshness and life. He has black hair and is around twenty-five years old. Or should that be ‘was’? Do we stop the clock when death surprises us? Do we say, as Binyon wrote, that ‘they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’? Age may not weary them nor the years condemn, but their humanity is quickly taken from their remains by the swiftness of corruption and the jolly old sun. I look again at the ring. An arranged marriage or a love match? Where was he from, this soldier-corpse? A Sunni or a Shia or a Christian or a Kurd? And his wife. He could not be more than three days dead. Somewhere to the north of us, his wife is waking the children, making breakfast, glancing at her husband’s photograph on the wall, unaware that she is already a widow and that her husband’s wedding ring, so bright with love for her on this glorious morning, embraces a dead finger.

The man from the ministry is full of false confidence. No need to worry about air raids: the Iranian air force has put up fighter cover above Fao to protect the visiting foreign correspondents. Labelle and I look at each other. This is a whopper. No Iranian pilot is going to waste his time protecting the khabanagoran – the ‘journalists’ – when his army is under such intense Iraqi fire to the north. A plane flies over at high altitude and the ministry man points up into the scalding heavens. ‘There you see, just like I said.’ Labelle and I know a Mig when we see one. It’s Iraqi.

Coughing and bouncing on the muck, there then arrived a captured Iraqi army truck, into which we climbed. The second helicopter had brought another group of reporters from Nahr-e-Had who came slogging over the mud. It was tourism time. I could hardly recognise the Fao I’d driven through – in almost equal fear – five and a half years earlier. I could just remember the Iraqi army barracks that now had a banner floating over its entrance, reading ‘Islam means victory’. The city was occupied by thousands of Revolutionary Guards. They waved at us, held up Korans and smiled and offered tea amid the ruins. The very name of Fao had acquired a kind of religious significance. ‘You will see there are no Iraqis left here,’ a young Pasdar officer told us, and he was as good as his word. The mud – ‘Somme-like mud’ as I was to write melodramatically in my dispatch that night – consumed Fao, its roads, its gun emplacements, the base of its burning oil tanks, the dull grey and pale brown uniforms of the Iranian fighters, gradually absorbing the Iraqi bodies spread-eagled across the town. One Iraqi soldier had been cut neatly in half by a shell, the two parts of his body falling one on top of the other beside a tank. He, too, had a wedding ring. The Iraqi defences – 3-metre-high sandbag emplacements – stood along the northern end of Fao, their undamaged machine guns still fixed in their embrasures. Was it Iraqi indolence that allowed the Iranians to sweep through the city with so little opposition, even capturing an entire missile battery on the coast? Some of the mud-walled houses still stood, but much of the city had been destroyed. The Iranians displayed several Iraqi 155-mm guns which they were now using to shell the Basra road.

An elderly, grey-bearded man emerged from a ruined house on cue. Jang ba piruzi, he shrieked. War till victory, the same old chorus. The rain poured out of the low clouds above Fao, sleeking the old man’s face. He wore a ragged red cloth round his forehead and waved a stick over his head. Members of Iran’s ‘War Propaganda Department’ had suddenly emerged from the bowels of a factory and turned to their foreign visitors in delight. ‘See – this is one of our volunteers. He wants to die for Islam in fighting Saddam.’ An old jeep pulled up alongside the man, a rusty loudspeaker on top. Jang ba piruzi, the machine crackled and the old man jumped up and down in the mud. Behind him, red flames rippled across the base of a burning oil storage depot where the Iraqis were shelling the Iranian lines.

Up the road there was now a curtain of fire and a wall of black smoke. From here came that drumbeat of sound, that seismic tremor which we had felt when we landed. The Iranians appeared to be nonchalant, almost childishly mischievous about their victory. On the back of our old Iraqi truck – we all noted the head-high bullet hole through the back of the driver’s cab – an Iranian officer stood with a megaphone and pointed across the torrid Khor Abdullah Strait towards the Kuwaiti island of Bubiyan. ‘Kuwait is on your left,’ he shouted. This was one of the reasons we had been brought to Fao. Here we were, inside Iraq with the Iranians, looking at the Arab country that was one of Iraq’s two principal arms suppliers.

Bubiyan is 130 square kilometres of swamp and mud-banks, but a small Kuwaiti guard force was stationed there and the symbolism was obvious. ‘We hope Kuwait remains responsible during this conflict,’ the officer shouted again. Many of the newly dug Iranian gun-pits along the road to Um Qasr – a port still in Iraqi hands – had been newly equipped with artillery pointed directly across the narrow strait towards Kuwait. In the ghost town of Fao, the bodies would soon have to be buried if the wind and sand did not reach them first. On a vacant lot, there lay the wreckage of an Iraqi Mig, half buried in the liquid sand, its pilot’s head poking from the smashed cockpit. A dead soldier was sitting next to the plane, as if preparing for our arrival.

We spent three hours waiting for our helicopter back to the east bank of the Shatt, Labelle and I sitting once more in our basin of sand with the dead soldier and his wedding ring a few metres away. We also discovered, as Labelle walked through the pieces of broken steel and body parts, puffing on his dozens of cigarettes – part of his charm was that he was a cigarette-smoking asthmatic – that there was a large unexploded bomb lying in the mud near us. ‘It has been defused,’ the ministry man lied. Labelle looked at it scornfully and lit another cigarette. ‘Fisky, it ain’t going to explode,’ he muttered and began to laugh. Only one chopper came back for us. There was a shameful race through the mud by reporters and mullahs to find a place aboard and, as Labelle heaved me above the skids and behind the co-pilot, I saw some desperate soul’s boot placed on the shoulder of a mullah, shoving at the scrabbling cleric until he fell backwards into the mud. Then we took off, back across the rippling waters of the Shatt, right over the army base at Nahr-e-Had and on to Ahwaz and the grotty hotel and the Ahwaz post office where there were no phone lines to London. So I called Tony Alloway in Tehran and dictated my report to him and he told me that The Times foreign desk had a message for me: the paper was full tonight – would my story hold till tomorrow?

The Iranians had occupied about 300 square kilometres of Iraqi territory south of Basra – their own claim of 800 square kilometres included territorial waters – and they would hold this land for almost two more years until Major-General Maher Abdul Rashed – whose 3rd Army Corps had gassed the Iranians in their thousands outside Basra in early 1985 – battered his way back into the city in April 1988. But how did the Iranians capture Fao in the first place? They said it was a mystery known unto God, but years after the war I met the young Iranian war hero – a helicopter pilot – who had swum the Shatt al-Arab at night to reconnoitre the city when it was still under Iraqi control. He had devised an extraordinary plan: to place giant oil pipes beneath the river until they formed an underwater ‘bridge’ upon which the Iranian trucks and fighters and artillery could cross with only their feet and the wheels of their vehicles under water. Thus the Iraqi defenders had seen, in the darkness, an Iranian ghost army walking and driving on the very surface of the water, crying ‘God is Great’ as they stormed ashore. And how did Major-General Rashed retake Fao? ‘The Iraqis are strangely reluctant to explain how they staged last Sunday’s attack,’ the Observer’s correspondent wrote on 24 April 1988. The Iraqis used their usual prosaic means; they drenched Fao in poison gas – as US Lieutenant Rick Francona would note indifferently when he toured the battlefield with the Iraqis afterwards. The writer of the Observer report, who had been invited by the Iraqis to enter ‘liberated’ Fao, was Farzad Bazoft. He had just two more years of his life to enjoy. Then Saddam hanged him.

Our train back to Tehran contained the usual carriages of suffering, half troop train, half hospital train, although mercifully without the victims of poison gas. The soldiers were all young – many were only fifteen or sixteen – and they sat in the second-class compartments, their hair shaved, eating folded squares of nan bread or sleeping on each other’s shoulders, still in the faded yellow fatigues in which Iran’s peasant soldiery were dressed. The wounded clumped on sticks down the swaying corridors, back and forth through the carriages, as if their exertion would relieve their pain.

One boy with cropped hair moved with an agonised face, grunting each time he put his weight on his crutches, staring accusingly at the compartments as if his comrades had personally brought about his ordeal. A youth in khaki trousers with an arm and hand wrapped in bandages sat disconsolately on a box by the carriage door, his back to the open window, hurling bottle caps over his shoulder into the desert north of Ahwaz, giggling to himself in a disturbing, fitful way.

It was a slow train that laboured for seventeen hours up from the Shatt al-Arab battle front, through the great mountains to the plains of Qom, a tired train carrying tired men home from a tired war. When darkness came, some of them left their crammed compartments and slept in the filthy corridors, so that I had to clamber over blankets and boots and backpacks and webbing to reach the broken buffet car with its chicken wings and tea and faded, blue-tinted photographs of the bearded man whom the soldiers had suffered for. They were kind, sad men, muttering ‘hallo’ from their chipped formica dinner tables and waiting for an acknowledgement before they smiled. ‘Jang good?’ one asked pathetically in the corridor. Was war ‘good’? ‘Saddam finished,’ came another darkened voice. ‘Welcome to Iran.’

A hundred kilometres north of Ahwaz, we had stopped at Shushtar, and on a windy platform Labelle and I fell into conversation with a civil engineer who tried to grasp the distance that separated him from his own countrymen. ‘I do not understand these people who say they want to die. I never knew people like this. These people say that if Khomeini wants them to die, they will die. What can you say to these people?’

The train pulled out of Shushtar late, its diesel engine roaring. And then, quite suddenly, our train climbed into a narrow valley and through the open window there were sheer-faced mountains with white peaks and ice glistening on the rock face, frozen rivers and stars. Just briefly, as we wound round a remote village, I saw a man and a woman standing on the roof of their home looking at us. His arm lay round her shoulders and she had no veil and her hair hung loosely over her shoulders. An ominous ridge – Zard Kho, a soldier said it was called, ‘Yellow Mountain’ – towered over our train as it wormed its way through tunnels and along the river bends so tightly that you could see the locomotive’s lamp far to the right as it illuminated the boulders and the dark torrents beneath. Here was a land for which these young men might be prepared to die. But for the man in the faded photograph in the buffet car? Yet the soldiers rarely looked out of the windows. A few read magazines, others smoked with their eyes closed, one read a tiny Koran, mouthing the words in silence.

There was an Ahwaz man on the train, a merchant going up to Tehran for a day, a round-faced, tubby figure who bemoaned his economic prospects but said that, yes, he was better off since the revolution because his family had become more religious. What did he think of the war? The man pondered this for a while, staring out at the moonlit waterfalls of the Bala Rud river, an innocent stream which – like most of the soldiers on the train – would eventually make its way down to the mud of the Shatt al-Arab. ‘I think the Americans are behind it,’ he said from the gloom of the corridor. ‘The great powers want us to be weak but we will win the war.’ And the price? I asked him. The train heaved itself through a station with a white nameplate that announced a village called Tchamsangar. The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the compartments of slumbering young men. ‘They will pay the price,’ he said. Then he looked out at the stars and mountains and ice, and he added: ‘We will all pay the price. We can afford it.’

Who would have believed that the United States would be flying anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran? I should have done. Back in Lebanon, I had been trying, through the help of an Iranian intermediary, to secure the release of my colleague Terry Anderson, who had been held hostage by a satellite group of the Shia Muslim Hizballah movement for more than a year. Anderson was the Associated Press bureau chief in Beirut and my best friend in the city; his apartment was in the same building as mine and we had travelled together on many hair-raising assignments.* The Iranians had started by demanding that I discover the whereabouts of three of their citizens taken hostage in Lebanon in 1982. But when I met with the Iranian intermediary at a Beirut restaurant in late May 1986, he bluntly told me that ‘his [Anderson’s] people are in Tehran’. I did not take this seriously. Only five years after the release of the US embassy hostages in Tehran, no US officials would travel to Iran.

I was wrong; doubly so. For quite by chance, I had stumbled onto the first evidence of the arms-for-hostages Iran – contra scandal in September 1985 when – passing through Cyprus en route from Cairo to Beirut – an old friend who worked in air traffic control at Larnaca airport tipped me off that a mysterious aircraft flying from Tabriz in northern Iran had been reported missing after it had passed over Turkey and suddenly turned south. My contact told me that Tel Aviv officials had personally telephoned the Cypriot air traffic controllers to confirm that the DC-8 cargo jet was safe on the ground at Ben Gurion airport after suffering ‘electrical failures’.

Officially, however, the Israelis denied any knowledge of the aircraft – a sure sign that the plane was on a secret mission – and when the machine’s purported American owners claimed in Miami that they had sold the aircraft the previous month to a Nigerian company, my interest only grew. The DC-8, bearing the US registration number N421AJ, had identified itself to air traffic controllers as belonging to ‘International Airlines’. The plane had originally filed a flight plan to Malaga in Spain, where a friendly airport official said that, although no DC-8 had been seen there, a Boeing 707 – also claiming to belong to ‘International Airlines’ – had touched down on 15 September from Tabriz and then taken off en route to another Iranian town which he said was called ‘Zal’ – although no one was able to identify this location.

Even when I first learned of these unorthodox flights, I should have been more suspicious. If Israel was sending or receiving freight aircraft to or from Iran, it was not exporting oranges or importing caviar. And as Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, Washington must have been involved. Had I connected this with the unexpected admission from my Iranian source that Anderson’s ‘people’ were in Tehran, I might have ‘broken’ the Iran – Contra story. But it was a low-circulation magazine in Beirut, Al-Shiraa, which did that and the rest – to use the veteran cliché – is history. A naive group of White House officials inspired by the gullible but handsome Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North – egged on by Israeli middlemen – persuaded President Reagan that American hostages in Beirut could be freed by Iran’s surrogate allies in the Hizballah in return for a large supply of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles and TOW antitank weapons to Iran. Part payment for these arms – which breached Washington’s arms embargo on Iran – would fund the right-wing Contra gunmen in Nicaragua whom Reagan and North so admired.