скачать книгу бесплатно
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.
Even now, Saddam had to add his own propaganda line, although it neatly dovetailed with Reagan’s own distorted view of the conflict. Iran’s ‘rejection’ of appeals from the ‘international community’ alluded to Iran’s refusal to accept UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions which failed to demand punishment for the ‘aggressor’ nation. White House spokesman Dan Howard also said Reagan’s vilification of Iran was because of its refusal ‘to go to the bargaining table’.* (#) Shipping officials in the Gulf always suspected that the Iraqis made their night-time attack on the Stark in the hope that the United States would believe an Iranian aircraft tried to destroy the frigate and would therefore retaliate against Tehran. In the event, they didn’t need to waste their time with such conspiracy theories: America blamed Iran anyway. A few days later, Reagan called Iran ‘this barbarous country (#)’.
Saddam compared the American relatives of the Stark to the families of Iraqis killed during his aggression against Iran, thus turning the US navy personnel into the surrogate dead of his own atrocious war. Saddam’s plaintive call for a ‘just and lasting peace’ was almost Arafat-like in its banality. The final American abasement came when Washington dispatched a full-scale US navy inquiry team under Rear Admiral David Rodgers to Baghdad, where they were told they would not be permitted to question the Iraqi pilot who fired the two Exocet missiles; nor did the Iraqis agree with the Americans that the Stark was outside Iraq’s self-imposed ‘exclusion zone’ when it was hit. The Americans said the vessel was at least 10 nautical miles outside, Iraq claimed it was at least 20 nautical miles inside. Weinberger’s call to produce the Iraqi pilot was ignored. Captain Brindel of the Stark was relieved of his command, his weapons officer was reprimanded and left the navy, and his executive officer disciplined for ‘dereliction of duty’.
The Americans always assumed that the Iraqi pilot had been executed – hence Iraq’s refusal to produce him – but the ex-deputy commander of the Iraqi air force insisted to me in Baghdad that this was untrue. ‘I saw him a few months ago,’ he said. ‘Like me, he’s out of work. But he obeyed all our rules. We were fighting a cruel enemy. It was a mistake. We weren’t going to get rid of one of our senior pilots for the Americans. The Americans were inside our “forbidden zone”. We told them not to enter it again – and they obeyed.’
A visit by a group of US senators to the melted-down crew quarters on the Stark was sufficient to set them off in a spasm of rage at the one country that had nothing to do with the American deaths. Republican Senator John Warner, a former secretary of the US navy, described Iran as ‘a belligerent that knows no rules, no morals’. Senator John Glenn was reduced to abusing Iran as ‘the sponsor of terrorism and the hijacker of airliners’. Thus Saddam’s attack on the Stark was now bringing him untold benefits. Americans were talking as if they were themselves contemplating military action against Iran.
Reagan pretended that the Americans were in the Gulf as peacemakers. ‘Were a hostile power ever to dominate this strategic region and its resources,’ he explained, ‘it would become a chokepoint for freedom – that of our allies and our own … That is why we maintain a naval presence there. Our aim is to prevent, not to provoke, wider conflict, to save the many lives that further conflict would cost us …’ Most Americans knew, Reagan said, that ‘to retreat or withdraw would only repeat the improvident mistakes of the past and hand final victory to those who seek war, who make war’. The Iranians, needless to say – the victims of Iraq’s aggression – were those ‘who seek war, who make war’, not ‘friendly’ Iraq which had anyway been taken off the State Department’s list of ‘international terrorist countries’ in 1982, two years after its invasion of Iran and in the very year that Iran reported eleven Iraqi poison gas attacks against its forces. The truth was that the Stark – one of seven US warships in the Gulf – was sailing under false pretences.
Iraq had placed its ‘exclusion zone’ around Kharg Island in January 1984 because it was losing the land war it had initiated two years earlier; by attacking tankers lifting oil from Iran’s Kharg Island terminal, Saddam hoped to strangle his antagonist economically. His aircraft henceforth fired at ships of any nationality that were moving to and from Iranian ports. Iran retaliated by targeting vessels trading with Iraq through the Arab Gulf states. Iraq’s massive imports of arms for the war were transiting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, whose funding of Iraq’s war effort was close to $404 billion; any ship trading with either nation was now threatened with Iranian air attack. Between 18 April 1984 and 18 May 1987 – the day after the Stark was hit – 227 ships had been attacked (#) in the Gulf, 137 of them by Iraq and 90 by Iran; several had been struck by missiles and repeatedly repaired, and of the 227 total, 153 were oil tankers. Between May 1981 (#) and 18 May 1987, 211 merchant seamen, most of them foreigners, were killed on these ships, of which 98 were oil tankers; it was a tiny figure compared with the hundreds of thousands of combatants in the land war, but it internationalised the conflict – as both Iraq and Iran probably hoped that it would.
American warships were now ostensibly keeping the sea lanes open for international shipping, to prevent the Gulf becoming, in Reagan’s odd term, a ‘chokepoint’. But US vessels were not shielding Iranian tankers from Iraqi attack. Nor were they seeking to protect foreign oil tankers lifting Iranian oil for export at Kharg. America’s mission in the Gulf was to protect only one side’s ships – Iraq’s – in the sea lanes. Already the Americans were proposing to escort Kuwaiti-flagged tankers in the Gulf, which did not carry Iranian cargo. They carried Iraqi oil for export. Iraq might not be able to gain any victories in its land war with Iran, but with American help, as the Iranians realised at once, it could win the sea war. Reagan claimed that the United States was fighting ‘war against war’ in the Gulf. In fact, Washington was fighting a war against Iran.
Eleven days after the Stark was rocketed, the Iranians complained that a US warship in the Gulf had ‘threatened’ an Iran Air passenger jet flying from Shiraz to Doha, in Qatar, and ordered the pilot to alter course. My own investigation among Dubai air traffic controllers established that the American warning came from one of four naval vessels escorting a Kuwaiti-registered ship with a cargo of arms to Bahrain. ‘The incident provided (#) just the sort of scenario for a … tragedy in the Gulf,’ I wrote in my dispatch to The Times that night. ‘Iran Air flies scheduled routes to both Doha, the capital of Qatar, and to the Gulf emirate of Dubai further east, regularly overflying the waters in which American … frigates patrol. Although the Iranians did not say so, the pilot probably flew unwittingly over a US naval unit which identified the plane as Iranian and ordered it to change course.’ The ‘tragedy’ was to come exactly fourteen months later.
There were plenty of portents. Not long after the Stark was hit, I spent a day and a night on Gulf patrol with HMS Broadsword. Accompanying British ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Reagan’s now famous chokepoint – the word ‘escort’ was never used by the British – and discouraging the attentions of the Iranians might have seemed a simple matter in the dry memoranda that their naval lordships used at the defence ministry in London. But inside the glow-worm interior of the Type-22 class destroyer, the radar monitors watched with feverish intensity for the transponder numbers of the civilian aircraft passing over Broadsword. ‘If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you’ve got to be bloody careful,’ one of them said.
At least the air conditioning was pumped into their little nest – for the computers, of course, not for them – but what afflicted most of the seamen in the Gulf was the heat. It burned the entire decks until they were, quite literally, too hot to walk on. British sailors stood on the edges of their shoes because of the scalding temperatures emerging from the steel. The depth-charge casings, the Bofors gun-aiming device, were too hot to touch. On the helicopter flight deck, the heat rose to 135 degrees, and only a thoughtless leading hand would have touched a spanner without putting his gloves on. It created a dull head, a desperate weariness, an awesome irritation with one’s fellow humans on the foredeck.
Inside the ship – and their lordships would have appreciated the cleanliness of Broadsword’s galleys and mess decks and bunks and short, fearful advertisements warning of the dangers of AIDS in Mombasa port – the heat shuffled through the vessel faster than the seamen. The officer’s mess was a cool 80 degrees. One glass of water and I was dripping. Open the first watertight door and I was ambushed by the heat, just as I was seven years earlier in the streets of Najaf. After the second door, I walked into a tropical smelter, the familiar grey monochrome sea sloshing below the deck. How can men work in this and remain rational? Or – more to the point – how could the Iraqis and Iranians fight in this sweltering air and remain sane?
‘There’s Sharjah airport,’ the radar officer said, and fixed the beam. ‘I’m listening to a plane landing now – commercial flight – but if I want to know about a specific plane, I ask for an IFF [identification, friend or foe?] and talk to Sharjah control.’ There were boards and charts and crayon marks on war-zone lines. The USS Reid – part of Reagan’s Gulf flotilla – had just cut across the Iraqi ‘exclusion zone’. So much for Stark’s insistence that it stayed outside. Two Soviet Natya-class minesweepers and a submarine depot ship were listed as outside the Hormuz Strait. Two British Hong Kong-registered ships were waiting for us on the return journey.
Night was no relief. At 4.15 a.m., Broadsword was in the Gulf of Oman, her engineers dragging a hawser from the support ship Orangeleaf riding alongside her, refuelling in the heat. The humidity cloaked us all. The deck was awash with condensation, the seamen’s faces crawling with perspiration. The sweat crept through my hair and trickled down my back. Our shirts were dark with moisture. It came to all men, even to Russians. Off Fujairah, Moscow’s contribution to the freedom of Gulf navigation – a depot ship and two minesweepers – nestled against each other on the warm tide, the Soviet sailors, glistening and half-naked on deck, waiting for the next inbound Kuwaiti tanker. Here was the principal reason why Reagan wanted to patrol the sea lanes, here was the real ‘hostile power’ that he feared might ‘dominate’ the Gulf. The two British freighters came alongside to be ‘accompanied’ by Broadsword.
On the bridge, an Indian radio operator could be heard pleading over VHF with an Iranian patrol ship. ‘We are only carrying dates,’ he said. ‘Only dates.’ The Iranian was 30 kilometres away. An Iranian P-3 reconnaissance aircraft answered. ‘Be aware,’ boomed the tannoy throughout Broadsword, ‘that yesterday the Iraqis launched an Exocet attack on a Maltese tanker carrying oil from Iran. We can therefore expect the Iranians to retaliate …’ A dog-day mist now swirled around the ship, leaving salt cakes across the flight deck. The two freighters were steaming beside us, an overheated version of every Second World War Atlantic convoy, because Broadsword, however unheroic in her humidity, was – like the American ships – a naval escort.
Back in 1984, when Iraq began this maritime conflict, the Gulf looked a lot simpler. The Arabs, protesting mightily at every attack by the Iranians and silent when the Iraqis struck at Iranian shipping, were almost as fearful of American involvement as they were of the Iranians. Saudi Arabia maintained a quiet relationship with Iran – just in case Iraq collapsed – while at the same time underwriting Saddam’s war. Ostensibly, the Arabs remained neutral -‘at war but skulking’, as Churchill unfairly remarked about the Irish in the Second World War – and offered refuge to any ship’s master who found himself under fire. Bahrain and Dubai would receive the crippled hulks of both sides’ aggression, profiting from the millions of dollars in repairs that their shipyards would make in reconstituting the ships. By 1987, eighteen had been hit twice, six had been attacked three times and two – Superior and Dena – had the distinction of being rocketed and repaired four times in four years. As early as May 1984 there was a floating junkyard of mortally wounded vessels off Bahrain.
They called it the ships’ graveyard and the term was cruelly appropriate. The great tankers that Iran and Iraq had destroyed were towed here in terminal condition, bleeding fuel oil into the warm, muddy brown waves in the very centre of the Gulf, a series of jagged holes in their scalded superstructure to show how they met their end. The Bahraini government even ran a patrol boat out to this maritime cemetery for journalists to understand what this war now represented. An Iranian Phantom hit the 29,000-ton Chemical Venture so accurately on 24 May that its missile plunged into the very centre of the bridge: there was a 12-metre sign there saying ‘No Smoking’ in the middle of the superstructure; the rocket took out the letters ‘S’ and ‘M’. The tanker crews along the Gulf were growing restive over the dangers; by the end of May, up to twenty-five ships were riding at anchor off the Emirates alone, waiting for instructions from their owners, and you only had to take a look at the ruin of the Al-Hoot to understand why. The 117,000-ton supertanker was listing with a hole the size of a London bus along her waterline where an Iraqi missile had exploded three weeks earlier. The superstructure had been twisted back and outwards over the stern and the crew’s quarters had simply melted down as if they were made of plastic rather than iron. The gash on the starboard side was so deep I could see daylight through it.
Just to the north lay the 178,000-ton Safina al-Arab, moving restlessly in the swell as a Swedish-registered tanker tried to take off the last of her crude oil. The stuff was everywhere, down the sides of the ship, across the water, turning even the foam on the waves dark. I could smell it from a mile away. The salvage crews – mostly Dutchmen – knew the risks but strolled the decks as if they were in harbour rather than sitting on bombs 115 kilometres out in the Gulf.
It was an isolated place.* (#) On the map of the Middle East, the Gulf seemed just a crack in the land mass between the deserts of Arabia and southern Iran, but the seas could be rough and the horizon featureless save for the lonely and vulnerable tankers butting through the sirocco winds up to Ras Tanura and Kuwait. They had no convoys to sail in then, no protection from the air, and they crept in those days as close as they could to the southern shoreline. They passed us as we photographed the graveyard of their more unfortunate brethren, ill painted for the most part, plunging through the heat haze, targets of opportunity for either side in the upper reaches of the Gulf, depending on their masters and their ports of call.
The sea should have been polluted but it was alive with flying fish that landed on their tails, long yellow sea snakes that came up out of the green depths to look at us, and porpoises and even turtles. Big-beaked black cormorants effortlessly outflew our fast Bahraini patrol boat. The oil slicks came in thick, viscous patches and in long thin streaks that shredded their way up the pale blue water towards the wrecks. The only sign of President Reagan’s concern in those days was the discreet grey majesty of the USS Luce, a Seventh Fleet missile cruiser that lay all day off the Mina Salman channel outside Bahrain harbour, a picket boat filled with armed sailors slowly circling it to ward off unconventional attackers – an idea before its time, since the USS Cole would not be struck by suicide bombers in Aden for another decade. Besides, the radio traffic from the Luce, clearly audible on our own ship-to-shore radio, seemed mostly bound up with the complexities of bringing new video films aboard for the crew. A few hours later, a smaller US patrol craft moved into port and the Luce gently steamed off into the sweltering dusk, its in-house entertainment presumably updated.
But other American warships were – even then – playing the role of convoy escorts. This unofficial and unacknowledged protection was given no publicity in Washington, nor among the Arab states, coinciding with their own desire to keep the US navy over the horizon. Sometimes the escort was provided by the USS John Rodgers, a sleek, twin-funnelled missile cruiser that last defended American interests by bombarding the Chouf mountains of central Lebanon a year earlier. At other times, the USS Boone, a squat and rather cumbersome flat-topped missile carrier, came up by night from the Emirates and rested off Bahrain. Anyone who approached the warships by day – which we did, of course – would be confronted by a steel-helmeted US sailor manning a fixed heavy machine gun.
US air force cargo jets were already flying regularly into the airports of the Gulf states, carrying equipment so bulky that they were forced to deploy their giant C-48 droop-wing transports. These flights were being made to the countries that Reagan always called ‘our Arab friends’, a definition that no longer included Lebanon – from which US forces had been famously ‘redeployed to sea’ three months earlier, following the bombing of the Beirut marine barracks and the killing of 241 US servicemen – but which very definitely embraced the conservative oil states of the Gulf peninsula. If the Americans were to become strategically involved – as they would do three years later – then the Arab states would have to be portrayed, as I wrote in The Times in May 1984, ‘as the innocent party in the dispute: the Iranians, inevitably, will be the enemy’. And so it came to pass. Was it not Iranian aircraft, the Iranian regime and ultimately Iranian ideology that threatened the security of the area? Again, we would be expected to forget that Iraq began the war and that Iraq was the first to order its air force to attack oil tankers in the Gulf.
In the autumn of 1980, when it seemed certain to them that Khomeini’s regime would collapse in anarchy under the onslaught of the Iraqi army around Abadan, the Arab Gulf states – those very states which by 1984 were seeking UN censure of Iran for its air attacks on the shipping lanes – poured billions into Iraq’s war funds. But now that Iran’s Islamic Revolution had proved more tenacious than they thought, the Arabs were stapling their hopes to a worthless peace mission to Tehran and Riyadh by Syria, the one Arab country which very shrewdly decided at the beginning of the war that its Baathist enemies in Baghdad – rather than Khomeini’s mullahs – might prove to be the losers. The failure of the Arab Gulf states to draw the same conclusion had now led to a disjointed policy that was as impossible to follow as it would be to justify historically.
Sheikh Khalifa Sulman al-Khalifa, the Bahraini prime minister and brother of the emir, insisted to me in June of 1984 that Iraq did not start the war. ‘I believe that – Iraq likes to protect itself like any other nation …’ he said. ‘Of course, a war starts with something. You never know how far it will go on either side. First there is fire and fire depends on wind and the direction in which the wind blows. Sometimes people get carried away – they think they are strong.’ This was the nearest he came to criticism of Saddam. Now Bahrain – like the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council – was demanding a UN Security Council resolution that would condemn only Iran for air attacks in the Gulf. He was not in favour of US intervention. ‘There are ways of helping us and one of them is to stop the supply of arms to the fighting parties from Europe and from the Far East countries.’ And this, it has to be remembered, came from the prime minister of a country that was enthusiastically bankrolling Saddam’s aggression.
The Kuwaitis, who once denounced any foreign intervention on Gulf soil, had by November of 1983 reached the conclusion that the defence of the Strait of Hormuz was the responsibility of the countries that benefited from it – in other words, the West. Sheikh Ahmed al-Sabah, the foreign minister, was quoted in the Beirut newspaper An-Nahar as saying that the Gulf was an ‘international’ region in which he could not object to foreign intervention. Then on 27 May 1984 Kuwait’s ambassador to Washington was warning against American involvement because it might ‘prompt the Soviet Union to enter the area’. This was a strange observation to come from the only wealthy Gulf state to permit a Soviet embassy in its capital and the one country which had hoped Soviet goodwill could be used on behalf of the Gulf states at the UN Security Council.
The Saudis, on the other hand, were still fearful of any American presence in the Gulf. US bases on Gulf territory would run counter to the anti-Israeli campaign carried on by the sheikhdoms, while a prolonged American presence could quickly ignite the sort of fires that brought ruin upon the Americans and their client government in Lebanon. Reagan’s strategic cooperation agreement with Israel had not been forgotten in the Gulf – and Israel had added fuel to the Gulf War by supplying arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iranian enemy. This was long before Iran – contra, when the Americans used Israel to channel weapons to Tehran.
The Soviets, after watching the destruction of the communist Tudeh party in Iran, were sending massive new tank shipments to Iraq. The Israelis had provided large quantities of small arms and ammunition to the Iranians. So had the Syrians. The French were still supplying Exocet missiles to the Iraqis while the North Koreans sold Soviet rifles to Iran. The Americans had been quietly re-establishing their relations with Baghdad – at this point, they were still increasing their ‘interests section’ in the Belgian embassy in Baghdad – at the very moment when Saddam most needed the moral as well as the military support of a Western power. While George Bush was denouncing Iran’s ‘Oppressive regime’ in Pakistan, Saddam was reported to be hanging deserters by the roadside outside Baghdad.
On 29 May 1984 the first load of 400 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and launchers arrived by air in Saudi Arabia from the United States. President Khamenei of Iran sarcastically warned Washington that Iran would ‘resist and fight’ any US forces sent to the battle zone. ‘If the Americans are prepared to sink in the depths of the Persian Gulf waters for nothing, then let them come with their faith, motivation and divine power,’ he said. As for the Gulf Arabs, he warned: ‘You will be neutral in the war only if you do not provide Saddam with any assistance. But a neighbour who wants to deliver a blow at us is more dangerous than a stranger, and we should face that danger.’ Well aware that the Arabs were still giving huge financial support to Iraq, the oil-tanker crews took Khamenei’s threats seriously. Several vessels on the Kuwait run through the sea lanes north-west of Bahrain were now travelling by night for fear of Iranian air attack.
Covering this protracted war for a newspaper was an exhausting, often unrewarding business. The repetition of events, the Iraqi attacks on Kharg Island, the massing of hundreds of thousands of Iranian troops outside Basra, the constant appeals by both sides to the UN Security Council, the sinking of more oil tankers, had a numbing quality about it. Sometimes this titanic bloodbath was called the ‘forgotten war’ – even though at times it approached the carnage of the 1914–18 disaster. I dislike parallels with the two greatest conflicts of the twentieth century. Can we really say, for example, that Saddam’s decision to invade Iran in 1980 was a blunder on the scale of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, which led to the deaths of 20 million Russians – when perhaps only a million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s aggression? Certainly, by the time it ended, the Iran – Iraq bloodletting had lasted as long as the Vietnam war. And Saddam’s war was the longest conventional conflict of the last century, a struggle of such severity that the barrels of the Iranian army’s guns had to be replaced twelve times before it ended in 1988.
My visits to the battle fronts, and to Tehran and Baghdad, seemed to have a ‘story-so-far’ quality about them. Statistics lost their power to shock. In 1985 alone, Colonel Heikki Holma of the UN’s inspection team in Iran estimated that 4,500 Iranians had been killed or wounded by chemical weapons. In two years, there had been at least sixty major chemical attacks by Iraq. The casualty figures were obviously on a Somme-like scale – again, I found myself unwillingly using the parallels of my father’s war – but neither side would admit the extent of its own losses. By 1986 alone, a million (#) had perished in the war, so it was said by the Western diplomats who rarely if ever visited the war front, 700,000 of them Iranian. The Iranians said that 500,000 Iraqis had been killed. There were – and here the figures could be partly confirmed by the International Red Cross – 100,000 Iraqi POWs in Iran and around 50,000 Iranian POWs in Iraq. Both sides were together spending around $1.5 billion a month on the war.
In Iran, the conflict had changed the mood of the theologians trying to conduct the battle with Iraq. Only a year earlier, there were daily reports of torture and mass rape coming out of the grey-walled confines of Evin prison. But in April 1985, Hojatolislam Ali Ladjevardi, the Tehran prosecutor, was dismissed from his post together with many of his murderous henchmen; executions were now carried out almost exclusively on common criminals rather than enemies of the state. ‘The executions have been toned down,’ an Iranian businessman put it with mild sarcasm. ‘Now they only kill murderers and narcotics men. The worst they do to a girl who offends Islamic law is to cut her hair off.’ There was a growing acquiescence – rather than acceptance – of the Khomeini regime that produced an irritable freedom of speech; shopkeepers, businessmen, Iranian journalists, even conservative religious families could complain about the government without fear that they would be betrayed to the Revolutionary Guards.
It was part of an illusion. The Islamic Republic had not suddenly become democratic; it had cut so deeply into its political enemies that there was no focus of opposition left. In 1984 at least 661 executions were believed to have been carried out in Tehran, a further 237 up to Ladjevardi’s dismissal. The figures were Amnesty International’s, but the Iranians themselves admitted to 197 judicial killings between March 1984 and April 1985, claiming that they were all for drug offences. The introduction of a machine specially designed by Iranian engineers to amputate fingers was proudly announced by Tehran newspapers, proving that the revolution was as anxious as ever to exact punishment on those who contravened its laws.
Such public freedom of expression as still existed could be found in the Majlis, the institution that so many critics had once predicted would provide only a rubber-stamp parliament for Khomeini’s decrees. There was a confrontation in parliament over a series of laws on land reform, trade and the budget. Conservative members led by Rafsanjani, the speaker, wanted to preserve the power of the clergy and the bazaaris, arguing for a liberal economy and no changes in land ownership. More radical members who claimed to follow ‘the line of the Imam’ were demanding full government control of trade, land distribution and a number of social reforms that sounded like socialism. The result was government paralysis. Landowners refused to till their fields lest their property became profitable and was taken away by the state.
Khomeini had a final veto over all legislation, but his chief function now was to be a presence; he was the patriarch, produced for the relatives of martyrs or, more rarely, for foreign diplomats, a figure of solidity but no movement, of image rather than content, a mirror to past victory and what had gone before rather than to the future. His last meeting with diplomats was typical. More than sixty ambassadors, chargés and first secretaries were crammed into a minuscule room at the Ayatollah’s residence and obliged to sit cross-legged on a slightly grubby carpet, a French embassy attaché suffering severe cramp as he perched on top of a Scandinavian chargé. In due course, Khomeini entered the room and delivered himself of a fifteen-minute speech in Farsi, without translation. ‘It didn’t matter what he said,’ one of the ambassadors remarked acidly. ‘The old man sat there on a sheet on a raised dais and he was making only one point: that the Shah had received his guests in regal magnificence in his palace but that he, Khomeini, would receive us in humble circumstances.’
But each night now, Khomeini was taken off to the bunkers beneath the Shah’s old palace at Niavaran, the only air-raid shelter in all Tehran, to protect him from the war that was now his enduring legacy. As the Iraqi fighter-bombers soared unmolested over the capital, tens of thousands of his people would flee into the mountains by road. While Khomeini still demanded the overthrow of Saddam, his mullahs appeared on national television, begging the people of Isfahan, Shiraz, Ahwaz, Dezful and Tehran itself to contribute food and clothing for their soldiers at the front. Individual home towns were asked to resupply front-line units that came from their areas. In the marshes of southern Iraq, the Iranian Basiji clung on amid the hot mud and Iraqi counter-attacks.
The Iranians were now freighting their 600-kilo ground-to-ground missiles up to a new base at Sarbullzaharb in Kurdistan where North Korean engineers calibrated them for the flight to Baghdad. When they knew the rocket was approaching its target just over fifteen minutes later, the Iranians would announce the impending strike over national radio. For reporters, this could have a weird journalistic effect. ‘I’d be sitting in the bureau in Baghdad when Nabila Megalli would come through on my telex from Bahrain where she’d been listening to the radio,’ Samir Ghattas, Mohamed Salam’s AP successor in Iraq, would recall. ‘She would say that the Iranians had just announced they’d fired a missile at Baghdad. I stayed on the telex line – we had no fax then – and the moment I heard the explosion in Baghdad, I’d write ‘Yes’. The Iraqis would pull the plug five minutes later. It took twenty minutes for the rocket to travel from the border to Baghdad.’
The Iraqi raids often provoked little more than a fantasy display of antiaircraft fire from the guns around Tehran. The pilots could not identify any targets now that the Iranians had acquired new German SEL aircraft warning radar and switched off the electricity. On 2 June 1985, however, two bombs dropped by an Iraqi high-altitude Ilyushin 28 exploded on a large civilian housing complex in the Gishe suburb of the city, collapsing five entire blocks of apartments. From my hotel window – from where I had been watching the lights of the distant bomber – I saw two huge flashes of crimson light and heard a terrific roar of sound, the detonation of the bombs becoming one with the sound of crashing buildings. Hitherto, the Iraqis had fired rockets onto Tehran, so this was a new precedent in the War of the Cities. At least 50 civilians were killed and another 150 wounded in the raid. When I arrived there, it was the usual story: the cheaply-made bricks of the walls had crumbled to dust and a four-storey building – home to sixteen families – had been blown to pieces by one of the bombs. A little girl in the block had been celebrating her birthday during the evening and many children were staying the night with her family when the bombs destroyed the girl’s home. Angry Iranians gathered at the site next morning and the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guards were forced to fire into the air to clear the road.
In all of March and April of 1985, there were thirteen air raids on Tehran. Now there were thirteen a week, sometimes three a night. Only one Iraqi jet had been shot down – during a daylight raid in March – when an Iranian F-14 intercepted it over the capital. The Iraqi plane crashed into the mountains above Tehran, its pilot still aboard. Yet the Iranians could be forgiven for believing that the world was against them. In July, Iraq began (#) to take delivery of forty-five twenty-seater Bell helicopters from the United States, all capable of carrying troops along the war front. The Reagan administration said, in all seriousness, that the sale of the Super Transports did not breach the US arms embargo on the belligerents because ‘the helicopters are civilian’ and because the American government would ‘monitor’ their use. The sale had been negotiated over two years, during which the United States had been fully aware of Iraq’s use of poison gas and its ‘cleansing’ of the Kurds. I would later see eight of these same Bell helicopters near Amara – all in camouflage paint and standing on the tarmac at a military air base.
Yet still the martyrology of war could be used to send fresh blood to the front; the child soldiers of Iran, it seemed, would be forever dispatched to the trenches of Kerman and Ahwaz and Khorramshahr, each operation named Val Fajr – ‘Dawn’ – which, for a Muslim, also represents the dawn prayer. We had Val Fajr 1, all the way up to Val Fajr 8. I would walk down to the Friday prayers at Tehran University during the war and I would often see these miniature soldiers – every bit as young and as carefree of life and death as those I had met in the trenches outside Dezful. The inscription on the red bands round the little boys’ heads was quite uncompromising. ‘Yes, Khomeini, we are ready,’ it said. And the would-be martyrs, identically dressed in yellow jogging suits, banged their small fists against their chests with all the other worshippers, in time to the chants. This cerebral drumbeat – at least ten thousand hands clapping bodies every four seconds – pulsed out across the nation, as it did every Friday over the airwaves of Iranian radio and television. The audience was familiar, even if the faces changed from week to week: mullahs, wheelchair veterans of the war, the poor of south Tehran, the volunteer children and the Iraqi POWs, green-uniformed and trucked to the prayer ground to curse their own president.
Friday prayers in Tehran were a unique combination of religious emotion and foreign policy declaration, a kind of Billy Graham crusade and a weekly State of the Nation address rolled into one. A stranger – especially a Westerner – could be perplexed at what he saw, even disturbed. But he could not fail to be impressed. It was not the prayer-leader who acted as the centrepiece of this great theatre. Often this was Rafsanjani. He could discourse to his ten thousand audience on the origins of the revolution, superpower frustration in Lebanon and further Iranian military successes outside Basra. But this was almost a rambling affair. His hair curling from beneath his amami turban and his hand resting on an automatic rifle, Rafsanjani did not stir his audience to any heights of passion.
The congregation that June provided their own sense of unity, their voices rising and falling in cadence with a long chant in Farsi that attempted to integrate Islamic history with the struggle against Iraq, the little boys – some as young as ten – still banging their fists on their heads. Much Farsi verse rhymes and – by rhyming the English translation – these calls to war come across with an archaic, almost Victorian naivety:
We are ready to give our lives, we are ready to go,
And fight as at Kerbala against our foe.
Imam Hossein said those around him were the best;
Now you see with Khomeini we attest
That Hossein and those around him are with us.
In our way lies the honour of Islam
As we follow the word of our Imam.
There were some, the more youthful Basiji, who had already been chosen for martyrdom, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds kitted out in tiny bright camouflage uniforms. They stood on each side of Rafsanjani’s dais holding trays of toffees, each sweet wrapped in crimson cellophane. At a signal, they stepped among the rows of mullahs and war-wounded, the Revolutionary Guards in parka jackets and the elderly, unshaven, dark-suited men from south Tehran, and presented their trays of toffees. Each man carefully took a sweet without looking at the child in front of him, aware of the significance; for this was no interlude between prayers. It was a communion with doomed youth.
Then the boys walked soulfully back to their places on each side of the dais, hair cut short, large dark eyes occasionally turning shyly towards the mass of people. They were, the worshippers were told, aware of their mission. And they stood there, fidgeting sometimes, headbands slightly askew, but feet together at attention as any child might play at soldiers in his home. Rafsanjani made no reference to them. His message was more temporal and the formula was an old one. Iraq was losing many men at the front. It was also losing much territory. To save the land, it had to lose more men. To save the men, it had to lose more land. So Iraq was losing the war. In just one week, Rafsanjani said, Iraq had lost six more brigades. The worshippers chanted their thanks to their army at the front.
Friday prayers were broadcast through loudspeakers along those very trench lines opposite Basra, piped through loudspeakers so that the Iranian soldiers could hear these ten thousand voices above the shellfire. They called for revenge against Iraq for its air raids on Iranian cities. Rafsanjani added a pragmatic note. ‘If you want to make yourselves useful,’ he told his nationwide audience, ‘you can dig air-raid shelters at home.’ The young boys stood listlessly on either side of him, perhaps aware that their homes were no longer their immediate concern.
Yet still Iraq hoovered up Iranian prisoners – by the thousand now, just as the Iranians had done before – and ostentatiously presented them to the world’s press. Iraq opened a huge prison camp complex for its new POWs in the desert west of Baghdad, around the hot, largely Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, where there would be no Shia community to offer comfort and help should any of them escape. This was every man’s Stalag, complete with a jolly commandant called Major Ali who wanted to introduce us to his model prisoners. The Iranian inmates crowded round us when we arrived, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, still in their drab, desert-yellow uniforms, happy prisoners according to the senior Iranian officer at Ramadi, Anish Tusi. How could they be otherwise, the camp’s doctor asked? Why, look, they had schools, a library, a tuck shop, table tennis, basketball.
A portrait of Saddam Hussein smiled down benevolently upon them. ‘If you obey the camp rules, it will be better for you and for everybody else,’ a poster advised the prisoners in Farsi. ‘Obey the rules of the camp and the commander of the camp, and you will be treated as friends.’ Major Ali, smiling in the midday sun, gestured magnanimously towards the canteen. ‘Just see how well our prisoners eat,’ he said. We pushed inside a small hut where four Iranian Basiji – captured in the Howeiza marshes a year earlier – gently stirred two cauldrons of fish and roast chicken. ‘This camp is Ramadi Two,’ the jolly major said, ‘and all our camps at Ramadi are the same. The prisoners here are in such good conditions that they don’t feel the need to escape.’
A sharp eye detected an element of hyperbole. Ramadi One, for example, was surrounded by so much glistening barbed wire, 9 metres deep and 5 metres high, that there was scarcely room for the prisoners to lean out of their hut windows, let alone play basketball. Ramadi Three appeared to have none of those friendly tuck shops and prison libraries. Perhaps, too, the inmates of the other camps did not speak in quite such scathing tones of Ayatollah Khomeini. For the boy soldiers in Major Ali’s Ramadi Two condemned Khomeini’s regime with an enthusiasm that had the Baath party officials nodding sagely and the military police guards grinning with satisfaction.
Mohamed Ismaili, a twenty-year-old from Kerman, for example, admitted he had broadcast over Iraq’s Farsi-language radio, telling his parents on the air that ‘this war is not a holy war’. Ahmed Taki, who was only seventeen, was even more specific. A thin, shy youth with his head totally shaved, he was a Basij volunteer sent to the battle front a year ago. ‘I was in school when a mullah came to our class and told us we should fight in the battle against Iraq,’ he said. ‘I heard Khomeini say that all young people should go to the front. But now I know it is not a holy war.’ The stories were all similar, of schoolboys told that God would reward them if they died in battle, a spiritual inspiration that underwent a swift transition once they entered Ramadi Two.
For after uttering such statements, few of these Iranian prisoners could return home under the Khomeini regime, even if the war suddenly ended. Some of them admitted as much. The Iranians, of course, had persuaded hundreds of Iraqi POWs to speak with an identically heretical tongue about Saddam. Perhaps that is what both sides wanted: prisoners who could not go home.
Major Ali seemed unperturbed. ‘There are maybe sixty or seventy prisoners who still support Khomeini,’ he said. ‘That’s not many – a very small percentage. Sometimes they mention him at their prayers – we never interfere with their religion.’ But the major did interfere with their news. The POWs could listen only to the Farsi service of Iraqi radio and television – hardly an unbiased source of information on the war – and the only outside information they were permitted to receive were the letters sent to them by their families through the International Red Cross. ‘Come and see the barracks,’ the major insisted. We walked into a hut containing a hundred teenagers, all in that same pallid, greyish-yellow uniform. They stood barefoot on the army blankets that doubled as their beds and the moment an Iraqi army photographer raised his camera, half of them bowed their heads. Their identity concealed, perhaps they could one day go home.
Each military setback for Iraq provided an excuse to break the rules of war once more. Faced with human-wave attacks, there was gas. Faced with further losses, there was a sea war to be commenced against unarmed merchantmen. A new and amoral precedent was set in early 1986 – just after the Iranian capture of the Fao peninsula – when Iraq shot down an Iranian Fokker Friendship aircraft carrying forty-six civilians, including many members of the Majlis and the editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan, Sayad Hassan Shah-Cherghi.
The Iranians wanted to take journalists to Fao, but I for one refused to take the usual night-time C-130 Iranian military transport plane to the front. If the Iraqis were prepared to attack civilian aircraft, they would certainly shed no tears if they destroyed the international press as it travelled to witness Iraq’s latest humiliation. So we took the train again, back down to Ahwaz and the war I had been covering for five and a half years.
Fao had a special meaning for me. It was at Fao that I first saw the Iran – Iraq war with my own eyes. It lay on a spit of land at the bottom of the Shatt al-Arab river, from which the Iraqi army had shelled Abadan. In those days, the Iraqis planned to take the eastern bank of the river and secure it for all time for Iraq. They had not only failed to capture the eastern bank; now they had lost part of the western bank – they had lost the port of Fao itself to the Iranians. The next target for the Iranians would be the great port of Basra with its Shia Muslim population and its straight roads north-west to the holy Shia cities of Kerbala and Najaf. I would be reporting if not from Basra itself, at least from the city in which I started off in this war.
But I wasn’t happy. There were frequent allusions in Tehran to ‘setbacks’ in the Fao battle. Rafsanjani made a disturbing reference to Iran’s need to hold on to Fao, while announcing that there were no plans to advance on Basra – which was odd because, if this was true, why bother to capture Fao in the first place? The Tehran newspapers described how the Iranian forces in Fao were ‘consolidating’ their positions – always a sign that an army is in difficulties. Then when we arrived in Ahwaz and were taken to the nearest airbase for a helicopter ride to the front line, the two American-trained pilots packed the machine with journalists and mullahs – and then aborted the flight. There was too much wind on the river, one of them claimed. There was a bad weather forecast for the afternoon. A cleric arrived to order the men to fly. Gerry ‘G. G.’ Labelle of the Associated Press, with whom I had spent years in Beirut during the war, was sitting beside me on the floor of the chopper and we looked at each other with growing concern as the helicopter lifted off the apron, hovered 2 metres above the ground, turned to face due west – and then gently settled back onto the tarmac. Like so many journalists in time of war, we had been desperate to get to the front line – and even more desperate to find a reason to avoid going.* (#)
Part of me – and part of Gerry – was of the ‘let’s-get-it-over-with’ persuasion. Hadn’t I sped around the Dezful war front on an identical Bell helicopter scarcely a year before? Didn’t John Kifner and I admit that we had enjoyed those heart-stopping, shirt-tearing, speed-gashing rides up the wadis and over those hundreds of burned-out tanks? Wasn’t that what being a foreign correspondent in war was all about? Going into battle and getting the story and arriving home safe and sound and knowing you wouldn’t have to go back next day? We climbed off the helicopter and I could see the relief on the pilots’ faces. If they hadn’t wanted to go, then there was something very, very wrong with this journey to Fao.
