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

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‘The villagers own everything on both sides of the road,’ he said. ‘But they do not know how much land they have.’ The heat shimmered and danced on the dried-up irrigation ditches: there were no deeds of ownership, no papers and no legal covenants in Kahak now that the landlords had gone. Just when the landlords did depart was something that bothered Sheikh Zaude. ‘In the past regime,’ he explained, ‘there were two big landowners – Habib Sardai and Ibrahim Solehi. The villagers lived in very bad conditions. Some of them were so poor that they owed many debts but Sardai and Solehi came here and took their grain in payment. I remember seeing these villagers going to other villages to buy back their own grain at high prices. So the people had to borrow money for this and then pay interest on the loans.’ More than a dozen villagers gathered round me as Sheikh Zaude talked on. They were poor people, most of them Turkish in origin with high, shiny cheekbones. Their grey jackets were torn and their trousers frayed where the rubble and thorns in the fields had scratched them. They wore cheap plastic sandals. There was only one girl with them, a thirteen-year-old with dark hair who had wrapped herself shroud-like in a pink and grey chador.

‘Then things improved for us,’ Sheikh Zaude said. ‘Sardai and Solehi left with the land reforms.’ There was no perceptible change in the mullah’s face. He had been asked about that year’s Islamic revolution but he was talking about the Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ seventeen years earlier when the monarch’s reform laws ostensibly curtailed the power of the big landowners. Private holdings were redistributed and landowners could retain only one village. Poor farmers were thereby brought into the economy, although most labourers and farm workers remained untouched. Kahak, it was clear, did not entirely benefit from the Shah’s ‘revolution’. ‘There were good things for us in the reforms,’ Sheikh Zaude said. ‘The number of sheep owned by the villagers went up from two thousand to three thousand. But the village itself, instead of being owned by two men, was now run by the government agent, a man called Darude Gilani, a capitalist from Qazvin. He was a bad man and he collected rent by demanding half of the villagers’ crops.’

There was an old man with an unshaven chin and a cataract in his left eye who now walked to the front of the villagers. From his grubby yellow shirt and broken shoes, I could not have imagined that Aziz Mahmoudi was the village headman and the largest farmer. He looked at the mullah for a moment and said, very slowly: ‘Darude Gilani is in Qazvin prison now.’ Mahmoudi walked across the village square, followed by a small throng of schoolchildren. He pointed to a crumbling, fortified mud house with two storeys, a sign of opulence amid such hardship. ‘That is where Solehi used to live,’ he said, gesturing to the broken windows. ‘Now Gilani is gone too. He will not come back.’ There was no reason why Gilani would return, even if he was released from prison. For on the first day of the revolution the previous February, when the villagers saw the imperial army surrendering in Tehran on the screen of a small black and white television set, they walked down to the fields that Gilani still owned on each side of the railway line. There they planted their own barley as a symbol that the revolution had arrived in Kahak.

Above the blackboard in the village’s tiny clay-walled schoolhouse was a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. It depicted the Imam bending over the bars of a jail while behind him thousands of Iranian prisoners wait patiently for their freedom. One after another, the boys in the seventh-grade class stood up and recited their admiration for Khomeini. Jalol Mahmoudi was twelve but talked about corruption in the Shah’s regime, Ali Mahmoudi, who at fourteen was head of class, launched into a long speech about the Imam’s kindness to children. ‘I am very pleased with the Ayatollah because in the past regime I was not taught well – now there are three extra classes and we can stay at school longer.’ Master Ali might be expected to receive a firm clout round the back of the head from his colleagues for such schoolboy enthusiasm. But the other children remained silent until asked to speak. And I knew that if I had visited this same village in the aftermath of the 1953 coup against Mossadeq in which ‘Monty’ Woodhouse had played so prominent a part, I would have heard the fathers of these same children talking about the corruption of Mossadeq and the Shah’s kindness to children.

Karim Khalaj was a teacher in his late forties and he said little as we sat in the staff room. He poured cups of tea from a large silver urn and sweetened it by drinking the tea sip by sip and nibbling lumps of sugar at the same time. Outside, we walked across the dusty fields towards the railway line. He was briefly imprisoned in the Shah’s time. He was fired from his job for complaining about a government teacher’s bribery.

The wind was picking up and the trees in the orchard were moving. A far belt of smog moved down the horizon. Somewhere near Kahak, more than a quarter of a century earlier, ‘Monty’ Woodhouse must have buried his guns. Did any of the villagers support the Shah? I asked Khalaj. ‘None,’ he said firmly. ‘At least I never knew any who did.’ Savak never came to the village. It was too small to capture anyone’s attention. So whose picture hung above the blackboard in class seven before the Ayatollah returned to Iran? Mr Khalaj shrugged. ‘They had to put a picture there. Of course, it was the Shah’s.’

CHAPTER FIVE (#)

The Path to War (#)

In March 1917, 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment carefully peeled a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It was a turning point in his life. He had survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 250 kilometres from its capital of Constantinople. He had then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate and enduring the ‘grim battle’ for Baghdad (#). The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens’s attention was Maude’s official ‘Proclamation’ to the people of Baghdad, printed in both English and Arabic.

That same 11 by 18 inch poster – now framed in black and gold – hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this chapter. Long ago, it was stained with damp – ‘foxed’, as booksellers say – which may have been Dickens’s perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times, witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall eighty-six years later, ‘to having travelled in his knapsack for a length of time’. She called it ‘his precious document’ and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy, of the false promises of the world’s greatest empire, commitments and good intentions and words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens’s death. They read now like a funeral dirge:

PROCLAMATION

… Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Hulagu* (#) your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers … and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile … But you, people of Baghdad … are not to understand that it is the wish of the British government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals … It is the hope and desire of the British people … that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth … Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain … so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.

(sd.) F. S. Maude, Lieutenant General,

Commanding the British Forces in Iraq

Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army – which included Arab soldiers – in Mesopotamia. My father Bill was originally in the Cheshire Regiment but was serving in Ireland the year Charles Dickens entered Baghdad, and would be sent to the Western Front in 1918. Dickens had a longer war. He ‘spoke, often & admirably’, his daughter Hilda would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at fifty-five had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion. But Munro’s leadership did not save Dickens’s married sister’s nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers ‘my father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his “nephew”. I don’t know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years.’* (#)

The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than eighty years later, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan sent me an amused letter along with a series of twelve very old postcards which were printed by the Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms, another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him, others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, a building shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by ‘local [Arab] notables’ that ‘we should be received (#) in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition’. But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters and ended in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle. The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of UN sanctions that followed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait when spare parts for pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague at the Independent, Patrick Cockburn, found ‘tombstones … still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed … a quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage.’ In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign.

Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets

gaped emptily (#), the shops were mostly closed … In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia coffins and half mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town (three hundred people were dying of it every day) the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves … There was no longer any life in the town …

The British held out wildly optimistic hopes for a ‘new’ Iraq that would be regenerated by Western enterprise, not unlike America’s own pipedreams of 2003. ‘There is no doubt (#),’ The Sphere told its readers in 1915, ‘that with the aid of European science and energy it can again become the garden of Asia … and under British rule everything may be hoped.’

The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army, but who ‘always entertained (#) friendly ideas towards the English’, found that in prison in India they were ‘insulted and humiliated in every way’. These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand over Iraq to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz – to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of ‘independence’ for the Arab world if it fought alongside the Allies against the Turks – on the grounds that ‘some of the Holy (#) Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia’.

British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia – the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that – and that ‘clearly it is our right (#) and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end’ – which was not how General Maude expressed Britain’s ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917. Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that ‘taking Mesopotamia (#) … means spending millions in irrigation and development …’ Once they were installed in Baghdad, the British decided that Iraq would be governed (#) and reconstructed by a ‘Council’, formed partly of British advisers ‘and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants’. Later, they thought they would like ‘a cabinet half of natives (#) and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives’.

The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became ‘oriental secretary’ to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion. ‘… The stronger the hold (#) we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased … they can’t conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it.’ Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude’s proclamation eleven months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told – which, of course, they were not – that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name and which was in fact written by Sir Mark Sykes, the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with François Georges Picot for French and British control over much of the postwar Middle East.

By September of 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain’s plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. ‘I imagine,’ the Times correspondent wrote on 23 September, ‘that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination … from the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration.’

Within six months, Britain was fighting an insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. ‘Is it not for the benefit (#) of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression. What would happen if we withdrew?’ Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to ‘anarchy and confusion’. By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on ‘local political agitation (#), originated outside Iraq’, suggesting that Syria might be involved. For Syria 1920, read America’s claim that Syria was supporting the insurrection in 2004. Arnold Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq, took a predictable line. ‘We cannot maintain (#) our position … by a policy of conciliation of extremists,’ he wrote. ‘Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money … We must be prepared … to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions.’

There was fighting in the Shiite town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The authorities demanded (#) ‘the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot’ and the leading Shiite divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house. Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a British target. ‘Badr must be killed (#) or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out,’ a political officer wrote. The British now realised that they had made one major political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq: the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. Wilson put it all down not to nationalism but ‘anarchy plus fanaticism’ (#). All the precedents were there. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi in 1920, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2004. For Badr in 1920, read Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004. For ‘anarchy and fanaticism’ in 1920, read ‘Saddam remnants’ and al-Qaeda in 2004.

Another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed an officer, Colonel Gerald Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad. The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted ‘heavy punishment’ (#) on the tribe. The location of this battle is today known as Khan Dhari; in 2003 it would be the scene of the first killing of an American occupation soldier by a roadside bomb. In desperation, the British needed ‘to complete the façade (#) of the Arab government’. And so, with Churchill’s enthusiastic support, the British were to give the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Feisal, the son of Sherif Husain, a consolation prize for the man whom the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria. ‘How much longer (#),’ The Times asked on 7 August 1920, ‘are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?’

The British suffered 450 dead in the Iraqi insurgency and more than 1,500 wounded. In that same summer of 1920, T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – estimated that the British had killed ‘about ten thousand Arabs (#) in this rising. We cannot hope to maintain such an average …’* (#) Henceforth, the British government – deprived of reconstruction funds by an international recession and confronted by an increasingly unwilling soldiery, which had fought during the 1914–18 war and was waiting for demobilisation – would rely on air power to impose its wishes.

The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill’s support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen. So urgent was the government’s need for modern bombers in the Middle East that, rather than freighting aircraft to the region by sea, it set up a ramshackle and highly dangerous transit system in which RAF crews flew their often un-airworthy bombers from Europe; at least eight pilots (#) lost their lives in crashes and 30 per cent of the bombers were lost en route. In Iraq, Churchill urged the use of mustard gas, which had already been employed against Shia rebels in 1920. He wrote to Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, that ‘you should certainly proceed (#) with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment upon recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them.’

Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, later Marshal of the Royal Air Force and the man who perfected the firestorm destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other great German cities in the Second World War, was employed to refine the bombing of Iraqi insurgents. The RAF found, he wrote much later, ‘that by burning down (#) their reed-hutted villages, after we’d warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt, and they soon stopped their raiding and looting …’ This was what, in its emasculation of the English language, the Pentagon would now call ‘war lite’. But the bombing was not as surgical as Harris’s official biographer would suggest. In 1924, he had admitted that ‘they [the Arabs and Kurds] now know (#) what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.’

Lawrence remarked in a 1920 letter to the Observerthat ‘these risings take (#) a regular course. There is a preliminary Arab success, then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats.’ This same description entirely fits American military operations in Iraq in 2004, once the occupying powers and their puppet government lost control of most of Iraq. But Lawrence had, as a prominent member (#) of the T. E. Lawrence Society put it, a maddening habit of being sardonic or even humorous about serious matters which was one of his less attractive traits. ‘It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions,’ he wrote in the same letter. ‘Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shooting down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly …’

In a less unpleasant mood, however, Lawrence spoke with remarkable common sense about the Iraqi occupation. ‘The Arabs rebelled (#) against the Turks during the war not because the Turk Government was notably bad,’ he wrote in a letter to The Times the same year, ‘but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects … but to win a show of their own. Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom.’

Far more prescient was an article Lawrence published in the Sunday Times in August 1920 in words that might have been directed to British prime minister Tony Blair eighty-four years later:

The people of England (#) have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows … We are today not far from a disaster.

Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers in Iraq that he resigned his post as Senior Air Staff Officer Iraq because he could no longer ‘maintain the policy (#) of intimidation by bomb’. He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen, and after the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Suleimaniya, Charlton ‘knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally.’ It was to be a policy followed with enthusiasm by the United States generations later.

The same false promises of a welcoming populace were made to the British and Americans, the same grand rhetoric about a new and democratic Iraq, the same explosive rebellion among Iraqis – in the very same towns and cities – the identical ‘Council of Ministers’ and the very same collapse of the occupation power, all followed historical precedent. Unable to crush the insurgency, the Americans turned to the use of promiscuous air assault, just as the British did before them: the destruction of homes in ‘dissident’ villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons were allegedly concealed, the slaughter by air strike of ‘terrorists’ near the Syrian border – who turned out to be members of a wedding party. Much the same policy of air bombing was adopted in the already abandoned democracy of post-2001 Afghanistan.

As for the British soldiers of the 1920s, we couldn’t ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East eighty years ago. So we buried them in the North Wall Cemetery in Baghdad where they still lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties, opposite the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy. Among them is the mausoleum of General Maude, who died in Baghdad within eight months of his victory because he chose to drink unboiled milk: a stone sarcophagus with the one word ‘MAUDE’ carved on its lid. When I visited the cemetery to inspect it in the summer of 2004, the Iraqi guarding the graves warned me to spend no more than five minutes at the tomb lest I be kidnapped.

Feisal, third son of the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, was proclaimed constitutional monarch by a ‘Council of Ministers’ in Baghdad on 11 July 1922 and a referendum gave him a laughably impossible 96 per cent of the vote, a statistic that would become wearingly familiar in the Arab world over the next eighty years. As a Sunni Muslim and a monarch from a Gulf tribe, he was neither an Iraqi nor a member of Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority. It was our first betrayal of the Shias of Iraq. There would be two more within the next hundred years. Henceforth, Mesopotamia would be known as Iraq, but its creation brought neither peace nor happiness to its people. An Anglo-Iraqi treaty guaranteeing the special interests of Britain was signed in the face of nationalist opposition; in 1930, a second agreement provided for a twenty-five-year Anglo-Iraqi alliance with RAF bases at Shuaiba and Habbaniya. Iraqi nationalist anger was particularly stirred by Britain’s continued support for a Jewish state in its other mandate of Palestine. Tribal revolts and a 1936 coup d’état created further instability and – after a further coup in 1941 brought the pro-German government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to power – Britain reinvaded Iraq all over again, fighting off Luftwaffe attacks launched from Vichy Syria and Lebanon – and occupying Basra and Baghdad.* (#)British forces paused (#) outside the capital to allow the regent, the Emir Abdullah, to be first to enter Baghdad, a delay that allowed partisans of Rashid Ali to murder at least 150 of the city’s substantial Jewish community and burn and loot thousands of properties. Five of the coup leaders were hanged and many others imprisoned; one of the latter was Khairallah Tulfa, whose four-year-old nephew, Saddam Hussein, would always remember the anti-British nationalism of his uncle. The German plan for a second Arab revolt, this time pro-Axis and supported by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini – whose journey to Berlin will be told later in our story – came to nothing.

But Iraq remained an inherently weak state, young King Feisal the Second having no nationalist credentials – since he was anyway not an Iraqi – and since the government was still led by a group of former Arab Ottoman officials like Nuri es-Said, who contrived to be prime minister fourteen times before his most bloody demise. On 14 July 1958, Iraqi forces under Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qassim stormed the royal palace. Es-Said was shot down after trying to escape Baghdad dressed as a woman. Feisal, the regent and the rest of the royal family were surrounded by soldiers and machine-gunned to death after trying to flee the burning palace. Qassim’s new military regime enraged the United States. Not only did Qassim take Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad pact but he threatened to invade Kuwait. He also failed to quell a mass Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq and was eventually brought down by another coup in February 1963, this one largely organised by the Baath party – but with the active assistance of the CIA. Qassim was taken to the radio station in Baghdad and murdered. His bullet-riddled body was then shown on television, propped up on a chair as a soldier laughingly kicked its legs.

The Baath had been founded in Syria in 1941 – inspired, ironically, by Britain’s re-invasion of Iraq – as a secular, pan-Arab movement intended to lift the burden of guilt and humiliation which had lain across the Arab world for so many generations. During the centuries of Ottoman rule, Arabs had suffered famine and a steady loss of intellectual power. Education had declined over the years and many millions of Arabs never learned to read and write. Baath means ‘rebirth’, and although its Syrian Christian founder, Michel Aflaq, was himself a graduate of the Sorbonne – and wore an outsize fez – it had a natural base among the poor, the villages and tribes and, of course, within the army. Saddam Hussein was an early adherent, and among the first Baathists to try to kill Qassim; his subsequent flight across Iraq, his own extraction of a bullet in his leg with a razor-blade, and his swim to freedom across the Tigris river – at almost exactly the same location where American Special Forces were to find him in 2003 – was to become an official Saddam legend.

Despite splits within the Baath, Saddam Hussein emerged as vice-chairman of the party’s Regional Command Council after a further coup in 1968. He would remain nominally the second most powerful man in Iraq until 16 July 1979, when President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam’s cousin, retired. There followed the infamous dinner party at the presidential palace at which Saddam invited his own party cadres to denounce themselves. The execution of his Baathist colleagues began within days.

As Saddam slowly took control of Iraq, the Kurdish insurrection began again in the north and President Sadat of Egypt, by his journey to Jerusalem in November 1977, took the most populous Arab country out of the Arab – Israeli conflict. The Camp David agreement made this final. So it was that Saddam would preside over what the Iraqis immediately called the ‘Confrontation Front Summit’ in Baghdad. This involved turning the Iraqi capital – however briefly – into the centre of the Arab world, giving Saddam exposure on the eve of his takeover from President al-Bakr. A vast tent was erected behind the summit palace, five hundred journalists were flown into Iraq from around the world – all telephone calls made by them would be free as well as bugged – and housed in hotels many miles from Baghdad, trucked to a ‘press centre’ where they would be forbidden any contact with delegates and watched by posses of young men wearing white socks. We knew they were policemen because each wore a sign on his lapel that said ‘Tourism’.

The latter was supposed to occupy much of our time, and I have an imperishable memory of a long bus journey down to Qurnah, just north of Basra, to view the Garden of Eden. Our bus eventually drew up next to a bridge where a fetid river flowed slowly between treeless banks of grey sand beneath a dun-coloured sky. One of the cops put his left hand on my arm and pointed with the other at this miserable scene, proudly uttering his only touristic announcement of the day: ‘And this, Mr Robert, is the Garden of Eden.’

Before the summit, a lot of Arab leaders were forced to pretend to be friends in the face of ‘the traitor Sadat’. President Assad was persuaded to forget the brutal schism between his country’s Baath party and that of al-Bakr and Saddam. The Syrians announced that Assad and al-Bakr would discuss ‘a common front against the mad Zionist attack against our region and the capitulationist, unilateral reconciliation of the Egyptian regime with Israel’. Once in Baghdad, Assad, who had maintained an entire army division on his eastern border in case Iraq invaded – he already had 33,000 Syrian troops deployed in Lebanon – and al-Bakr talked in ‘an atmosphere of deep understanding’, according to the Syrian government newspaper Tishrin. Unity in diversity. King Hussein of Jordan would have to travel to the city in which the Hashemite monarchy had been exterminated only twenty years earlier. Baath party officials were sent to the overgrown royal cemetery in Baghdad to scythe down the long grass around the graves of the Hashemites in case the king wanted to visit them. Even Abu Nidal, the head of the cruellest of Palestinian hit-squads, was packed off to Tikrit lest his presence in Baghdad offend the PLO leader, Yassir Arafat.

And so they all gathered, old al-Bakr and the young Saddam and Arafat and Hussein and Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Reporters were banned from the conference chamber but photographers were allowed to view these men much in the way that visitors are permitted to see the embalmed body of Lenin. Masquerading as part of Michael Cole’s BBC television crew, I walked into the chamber and shuffled along the rows of princes and presidents who sat in waxworks attitudes of concern and apprehension, past Arafat, who repeatedly and embarrassingly gave a thumbs-up to the cameras, past a frowning King Hussein and a glowering Saddam. I watched the future Iraqi leader carefully, and when his eyes briefly met mine I noted a kind of contempt in them, something supercilious. This was not, I thought, a man who had much faith in conferences.

And he was right. The Saudis made sure that they didn’t anger the United States, and after three days of deliberation the Arab mountain gave forth a mouse. Egypt would be put under an economic boycott – just like Israel – and a committee would be dispatched to Cairo to try to persuade Sadat to renounce Camp David. To sweeten the deal, they were to offer him $7 billion annually for the next ten years to support Egypt’s bankrupt economy. The unenviable task of leading this forlorn delegation to Cairo fell, rather sadly, to Selim el-Hoss, the prime minister of Lebanon whose own war-battered country was then more deeply divided than the Arab world itself. Sadat snubbed them all, refusing to meet the ministers. The money was a bribe, he accurately announced, and ‘all the millions in the world cannot buy the will of Egypt’.

The nature of the Iraqi regime was no secret, nor was its ruthlessness. The British had already become involved in a trade dispute with the government in 1978 after Iraqi agents in London murdered Abdul Razzak al-Nayef, a former Iraqi prime minister who had been condemned to death by the Baghdad authorities. A British businessman, a representative of Wimpey’s, had been languishing for a month in Baghdad’s central prison without any charges, and a British diplomat, Richard Drew, was dragged from his car in the city and beaten up, apparently by plain-clothes police.

But the search for ‘spies’ within the body politic of Iraq had been established eleven years earlier, and to understand the self-hatred which this engendered in the regime – and Saddam’s role in the purges – it is essential to go back to the record of its early days. After I first saw Saddam in Baghdad, I began to build up a file on him back home in Beirut. I went back to the Lebanese newspaper archives; Beirut was under nightly civil war bombardment but its journalists still maintained their files. And there, as so often happened in the grubby newspaper libraries of Lebanon, a chilling pattern began to emerge. At its congress in November 1968, the Baath party, according to the Baghdad newspaper Al-Jumhouriya, had made ‘the liquidation of spy networks’ a national aspiration; and the following month, the newly installed Baath party discovered a ‘conspiracy’ to overthrow its rule. It accused eighty-four people of being involved, including the former prime minister, Dr Abdul Rahman Bazzaz, and his former defence minister, Major General Abdul Aziz Uquili. The charges of spying, a Lebanese newspaper reported at the time, ‘were levelled in the course of statements made in a special Baghdad radio and television programme by two of the accused, an ex-soldier from the southern port of Basra and a lawyer from Baghdad.’ The interview was personally conducted, according to the Beirut press, ‘by Saddam Tikriti, secretary general of the Iraqi leadership of the ruling Baath party’. According to the same newspaper, ‘the interview was introduced by a recording of the part of the speech delivered by President al-Bakr in Baghdad on December 5th [1968] where he said “there shall no longer be a place on Iraqi soil for spies”.’

The slaughter began within six weeks. At dawn on 27 January 1969, fourteen Iraqis, nine of them Jews, were publicly hanged after a three-man court had convicted them of spying for Israel. They claimed that Izra Naji Zilkha, a 51-year-old Jewish merchant from Basra, was the leader of the ‘espionage ring’. Even as the men were hanging in Liberation Square in Baghdad and in Basra, a new trial began in Baghdad involving thirty-five more Iraqis, thirteen of them Jews. Only hours before the January hangings, the Baath – of which the forty-year-old ‘Saddam Tikriti’ was just now, according to the Lebanese press, ‘the real authority’ – organised a demonstration at which thousands of Iraqis were marched to the square to watch the public executions and hear a government statement which announced that the party was ‘determined to fulfil its promise to the people for the elimination of spies’. The Baghdad Observer later carried an interview with the revolutionary court president, Colonel Ali Hadi Witwet, who said that the court reached its verdicts regardless of the defendants’ religion, adding that seven Jews had been acquitted. When the next batch of ‘spies’ were executed on 20 February, all eight condemned men were Muslims. As usual, their conviction had been secret, although the night before their execution Baghdad radio broadcast what it claimed was a recording of the hearing. The condemned men had been accused of collecting information about Iraqi troop deployment. Their leader, Warrant Officer Najat Kazem Khourshid, was one of the eight, although his ‘trial’ was not broadcast. Baghdad radio later told its listeners that ‘the Iraqi people expressed their condemnation of the spies.’

By May 1969, the Baathist failure to suppress the Kurdish rebellion had led to the arrest of a hundred more Iraqis, including twenty-four who had served in the previous regime. One of these was the lord mayor of Baghdad, Midhat al-Haj Sirri, who was accused of leading a CIA intelligence network. Former ministers arrested included Ismail Khairallah, Fouad Rikabi, Rashid Musleh, Siddik Shansal and Shukri Saleh Zaki. The Baath leadership sought the ‘people’s’ opinion. Delegates to a meeting of farmers’ trade unions roared their support when President al-Bakr declared that he was determined to ‘chop off the heads of the traitors’. The lord mayor was duly brought to the Baghdad television studios to ‘confess’ his role as a CIA agent while another defendant, Dr Yussef al-Mimar – an ex-director general of the ministry of agrarian reform – broke down and implicated former senior ministers in the defection of Mounir Rufa, an Iraqi air force pilot who had flown his Mig-21 fighter-bomber to Israel three years earlier.

Al-Mimar also claimed that he was recruited into the CIA by an Iraqi businessman in Beirut in 1964, and ordered by a CIA front company masquerading as investment brokers first to open an investment business in Libya and then to secure an invitation to Baghdad for President Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury, Robert Anderson. How much of this ‘confession’ bore any relation to the truth it is impossible to know. Four Iraqi civilians – Taleb Abdullah al-Saleh, Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, Abdul Jalil Mahawi and Abdul Razzak Dahab – had been hanged the previous month for spying for the CIA. On 15 May 1969, the Baathist regime hanged another ten men after one of them, Abdul Hadi Bachari, had appeared in a television ‘confession’. They were accused of working for both Israel and the United States and included an army sergeant and an air force lieutenant.

In June, for the first time, a convicted ‘spy’ told Iraqi television he had worked for British intelligence. Named as Zaki Abdul Wahab, a legal adviser to the Iraqi businessman in Beirut, he was accused in the Baghdad press of being ‘a British-American agent’. By July, another eighty prominent Iraqis were on trial for espionage. They were merely the prelude to thousands of hangings, almost all for ‘subversion’ and ‘spying’. Eleven years later, when Saddam Hussein was confirmed in power, Iraqi hangmen were dispatching victims to the gallows at the rate of a hundred every six weeks. In 1980, Amnesty International reported the recent executions of 257 people.

In 1979 came Saddam’s own arrest of five of the twenty-one members of his revolutionary command council, accusing all of them of espionage for Syria, whose president had visited Baghdad only two years earlier for those talks of ‘deep understanding’ with al-Bakr. The revolutionary court condemned the five men to death without appeal, and the very next morning, Saddam Hussein and several of his senior advisers went to the central prison and personally executed them. Saddam himself used his service revolver to blow out one of the victims’ brains.

In those early days of the regime, the names of newly executed Iraqis would be read on state television every afternoon at 4 p.m. An old Iraqi friend of mine would recall for me in 2003 how her relatives were imprisoned and how, each afternoon, she would dose herself with morphine before sitting down in front of the television screen. ‘I don’t know how I survived those broadcasts,’ she said. ‘The man who read the names had a thin face and sharp eyes and he read them out in a very harsh way. His name was Mohamed al-Sahhaf.’ This was the same Mohamed al-Sahhaf who, grey-haired and humorous, was minister of information during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, the ‘Comical Ali’ who provoked President George W. Bush to laugh at his claims that US forces had not reached Baghdad when their tanks were crossing the Tigris river. From brutal apparatchik to friendly buffoon in just thirty years. He was later to record his memories for Al-Arabia satellite television – without recalling his days as spokesman for the hangman of Baghdad.

So what lay behind this ferocious passion for executions that Saddam manifested, this controlled cruelty that became part of the regime’s existence?* (#) I once asked this of Mohamed Heikal, as we sat on the lawn of his farm in the Nile Delta, wildly coloured birds cawing from the palm trees and a servant producing chilled beer in delicate mugs of blue glass.

‘I will tell you a story, Robert,’ he began. Heikal’s stories were always brilliant. With Heikal, you had to remain silent throughout. His recollections were a theatrical performance as well as a feat of memory, his hands raised before his face when he wished to express shock, eyebrows arching towards heaven, Havana cigar brandished towards me if he thought I was not paying sufficient attention; they were stories that usually had a sting in the tail.† (#) Heikal knew Saddam Hussein – in fact, he knew almost every Arab leader and was probably treated with greater deference than most of them – but he had no illusions about the Baath party.

‘On my first visit to Baghdad after the takeover of power, I met the minister of planning. He was a very nice, urbane, cultured man whom I immediately liked. When I returned to Iraq some time later, I asked to see him again. But each time I asked a minister where he was, I would be sidestepped. “You must ask the president this question when you meet him,” they would say. Every time I asked to see the minister of planning, it was the same reply. So when I came to see Saddam, I asked him if I could meet the minister of planning again. Saddam just looked at me. Why did I want to see him? he asked me. I said he seemed a very intelligent and decent man. Saddam looked at me very seriously and said: “We scissored his neck!” I was taken aback. Why? I asked. What had he done wrong? Had Saddam any proof of wrongdoing? “We don’t need proof,” Saddam replied. “This isn’t a white revolution in Iraq. This is a red revolution. Suspicion is enough.” I was speechless. Oh yes, and Robert, that blue beer mug you are drinking from – it was given to me personally as a gift by Saddam Hussein. It is Iraqi glass.’ I put down the beer.

I am in Tehran now, in 1997, in a cheap hotel in the centre of the city and, later, at a cosy restaurant that serves jugs of cold drinking yoghurt, and sitting opposite me is Dr Hussain Shahristani, holder of a doctorate in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto and formerly chief scientific adviser to Saddam’s Iraqi Atomic Energy Organisation, a Shia Muslim married to a Canadian with three children. His story is so frightening, so eloquent, so moving and so terrible that it deserves to be told in full, in his own words, without a journalist’s interruptions. The next pages therefore belong to Dr Shahristani:

In 1979, there was a backlash by the regime in Iraq because of activists in the Shia community. By the summer, the regime had started large-scale executions and mass arrests. I voiced my concern about human rights at atomic energy meetings. I knew I was very crucial to their atomic energy programme – I thought that they would not arrest me for voicing my concern. I wanted Saddam to know what I said. I was wrong. A little earlier, the regime had arrested and executed one of my cousins, Ala Shahristani – he was on his honeymoon and had only been married for fourteen days. He was not associated with any party. He was arrested in the street and taken away and his wife and sister were brought to the torture chamber to see him. They had given him a hideous torture. They had filled him with gas through his rectum and then beaten him. They threatened his young wife in front of him and then they banged his head into the wall, so hard that the wall was shaking. Then they killed him.

By this time, Saddam was president and he came to see us and he told us that he was going to redirect us at the Atomic Energy Organisation, that we were going to work on what he called ‘strategic projects’. Until July 1979, we had been involved on purely peaceful applications of atomic energy. I and my colleague, Dr Ziad Jaafar, were Saddam’s two advisers; we were reputable, internationally trained scientists. We were also close friends. I discussed this with him. I said: ‘If Saddam wants military applications, no way am I going to continue with this organisation.’

At that time, we didn’t take it seriously because we knew Iraq had limitations. I assumed I would be just thrown out of the organisation. They came to the Atomic Energy Organisation when I was talking to the board of directors on December 4th 1979. They said: ‘Could we have a word with Dr Hussain?’ As I stepped outside, they put handcuffs on me, shoved me into a car and took me to the security headquarters in Baghdad. At security headquarters, they took me in to the director of security, Dr Fadel Baraq, who was later executed by Saddam. He said that some people who had been arrested and brought to the headquarters had given my name. I denied any involvement in political parties, I said I was a practising Muslim but that I had never taken part in subversive activities.

Then they brought me to a man I knew, Jawad Zoubeidi, a building contractor. He had been so badly tortured, I hardly recognised him. Jawad said: ‘I know Dr Hussain. He comes to the mosque and takes part in our religious activities.’ For them, ‘religious activities’ meant anti-government activities. They said to me: ‘Better tell us all or you’ll regret it.’ Then they took me to the torture chamber in the basement. They blindfolded me and pushed me down the stairs into the chamber. It was a big room. My hands were tied behind my back and I was pulled up into the air by my hands. After five minutes, the pain was so severe in the shoulders that it was unbearable. Then they gave me shocks on sensitive parts of my body. By the end of the beating you are naked. There were shocks on my genitals and other parts of my body.

After fifteen minutes they came to me and said: ‘Sign.’ I was in a very cold sweat. They know you’ll faint. They brought me down and gave me a short rest. I fell asleep for a few minutes. But this went on day and night, day and night. It went on for twenty-two days and nights. Four of them did it, in shifts. Baraq, who had a PhD in military psychology from Moscow, was standing there. At one point, he said: ‘Look, Dr Hussain, I’ll tell you what your problem is – you think you are smart enough and we are stupid. You may be smart in your own field but we know what we are doing. Just tell us what you know and get this over.’

I knew Saddam. He knew me. But this could happen to me. I remember once, Saddam said to me: ‘You are a scientist. I am a politician. I will tell you what politics is about. I make a decision. I tell someone else the opposite. Then I do something which surprises even myself.’

The torture techniques in Baghdad were routine and varied in severity. The electric shocks could be everywhere. But sometimes they would burn people on the genitals and go on burning until they were completely burned off. They did the same with toes. They sometimes beat people with iron on the stomach or the chest. But with me, they were very careful not to leave any sign on me. I saw one man and they had used an iron on his stomach. They used drills and made holes in bones, arms and legs. I saw an officer, Naqib Hamid, and they dissolved his feet in acid. There was another torture where they would put sulphuric acid in a tub. They would take a man and start by dissolving his hands. Once, the founder of the Dawa party,* (#) Abdul Saheb Khail, was totally dissolved. Baraq said to me: ‘Have you heard about Khail – there is where we dissolved him.’

In the final stages of torture, they have a table with an electrical saw. They can saw off a hand or a foot. The majority talk. The people who have refused to talk are exceptional. Adnan Salman, a head of the Dawa, refused to talk. He was brought in – I saw him – and by that time they had a lot of confessions by other men who had been tortured. Adnan Salman was a teacher. Adnan knew – he was prepared. He told them: ‘My name is Adnan Salman. I am in charge of the Dawa party and none of these people are responsible for our activities. These will be my last words to you. You will never extract a single word from me.’ They brought three doctors and told them that if Adnan died under torture they would be executed. He didn’t utter a single word. Sometimes you would hear the doctors, so scared because they could not bring him back from unconsciousness. I was in another torture room and could hear everything. I was in Abu Ghraib prison when I heard Adnan had been executed. He had not died under torture.

One prisoner told me he was seventeen and was the youngest prisoner and so they made him sweep the corridors of the internal security headquarters every morning at seven o’clock. He saw a peasant woman from the south with tattoos, he said, a woman from the marshes with a girl of ten and a boy of about six. She was carrying a baby in her arms. The prisoner told me that as he was sweeping, an officer came and told the woman: ‘Tell me where your husband is – very bad things can happen.’ She said: ‘Look, my husband takes great pride in the honour of his woman. If he knew I was here, he would have turned himself in.’ The officer took out his pistol and held the daughter up by the braids of her hair and put a bullet into her head. The woman didn’t know what was happening. Then he put a bullet into the boy’s head. The woman was going crazy. He took the youngest boy by the legs and smashed the baby’s brain on a wall. You can imagine the woman. The officer told the young prisoner to bring the rubbish trolley and put the three children in it, on top of the garbage, and ordered the woman to sit on the bodies. He took the trolley out and left it. The officer had got into the habit of getting rid of people who were worthless.

I was taken to the revolutionary court. Mussalam al-Jabouri was the judge and there were two generals on each side of him. They asked me my name and if I had anything to say. The charges were that I was a ‘Zionist stooge’, an ‘Israeli spy’ and ‘working with the Americans’ and ‘a collaborator with the Iranians’. They realised I wasn’t a member of the Dawa party. The court handed down a sentence they had decided before I was taken there – life imprisonment. My own defence lawyer called for my execution. He had only a written statement to make: ‘This person has closed the doors of mercy – give him the severest penalty.’ I said to the court: ‘This Iraqi state which you are governing, we established it with our blood. My father was sentenced by the British, as for me I am president of the Palestinian Association in Toronto. A person with this background cannot be an Israeli agent.’ The lawyer said: ‘So you are a Russian spy.’ I said: ‘I have a family tree – from the Prophet Mohamed’s time, peace be upon him.’

I was taken to Abu Ghraib prison and put in a small cell with forty people inside. By the time I left in May, 1980, we were sixty people to a cell. I worked out that there were three death sentences for every prison sentence. So when a thousand people went to Abu Ghraib, that meant there were three thousand executions. That May, they took me to the Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters and now the torture was much worse. In the previous torture centre, they were allowed a 10 per cent death rate. Here they were allowed 100 per cent. The head was Barzan Tikriti, the head of Saddam’s human rights delegation to Geneva. Dr Ziad Jaafar was brought there because he told Saddam that the nuclear programme couldn’t continue without me, without Dr Shahristani. He said that Iraq needed Shahristani the chemist. Saddam took this as a threat. Jaafar was never shown to me. They tortured twenty people to death in front of him. So he agreed to return to work.

Then one day they came and shaved me and showered me, brought me new pyjamas, blindfolded me, put cologne on me, put me in a car and took me to a room in what looked like a palace. There was a bedroom, sitting room, videos, a television … Then one day Barzan Tikriti came with Abdul-Razak al-Hashimi – he was to be Iraqi ambassador to France during the Kuwaiti occupation in 1990. He was a Baathist, a very silly man with a PhD in geology from the United States. He was the vice-president of the Atomic Energy Organisation and he stood by the door like a guard. I just sat there, lying down, both my hands completely paralysed. A man arrived. He said: ‘You don’t know me but we know you well. Saddam was extremely hurt when he heard you had been arrested – he was very angry with the intelligence people. He knows about your scientific achievements. He would like you to go back to your work at the Atomic Energy Organisation.’ I said: ‘I am too weak after what I have been through.’ He said: ‘We need an atomic bomb.’ Barzan Tikriti then said: ‘We need an atomic bomb because this will give us a long arm to reshape the map of the Middle East. We know you are the man to help us with this.’ I told him that all my research was published in papers, that I had done no research on military weapons. ‘I am the wrong person for the task you are looking for,’ I said. He replied: ‘I know what you can do – and any person who is not willing to serve his country is not worthy to be alive.’

I was sure I would be executed. I said: ‘I agree with you that it is a man’s duty to serve his country but what you are asking me to do is not a service to my country.’ He replied: ‘Dr Hussain, so long as we agree that a man must serve his country, the rest is detail. You should rest now because you are very tired.’ After this, I was kept in several palaces over a number of months. They brought my wife to see me, once at a palace that had been the home of Adnan Hamdan, a member of the revolutionary command council who had been executed by Saddam. But they realised I wouldn’t work for them and I was sent back to Abu Ghraib. I spent eight years there. I wasn’t allowed books, newspapers, radio or any contact with any human being.

I knew I was doing the right thing. I never regretted the stand I took. I slept on the concrete floor of my cell, under an army blanket that was full of lice. There was a tap and a bucket for a toilet. I got one plate of food every day, usually stew without meat in it. I suffered from severe back pains from sleeping on the concrete. I made up mathematical puzzles and solved them. I thought about the people who had accepted the regime, who could have fought it when it was weak and did not. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I had done the right thing. I knew that my family would understand the reasons for it. I wished Bernice would take the kids and leave the country. That would have been much easier for me. She said that as long as I was alive, she would never leave the country.

Hussain Shahristani eventually escaped from Abu Ghraib during an American air raid in February 1990 after friends helped him disguise himself as an Iraqi intelligence officer, and he made his way via Suleimaniya to Iran. Bernice remembered a visit to her husband in prison when she could not recognise his face. ‘I could only recognise his clothes,’ she said. ‘But I knew it was him because I saw a tear running down his cheek.’

Just two months after Dr Shahristani’s mind-numbing transfer from Abu Ghraib prison to the palace in 1980, Saddam decided to deny what he had already admitted to Shahristani the previous year: his plan to possess nuclear weapons. I watched this typical Saddam performance, staged on 21 July 1980, in front of hundreds of journalists – myself among them – in the hall of Iraq’s highly undemocratic national assembly. Perhaps the chamber was just too big, because when he entered, the first impression was of a tiny man in an overlarge double-breasted jacket, a rather simple soul with a bright tie and a glossy jacket. He began not with the cheery wave adopted by so many Arab leaders but with a long, slightly stilted salute, like a private soldier desperately ill at ease among generals. But when Saddam spoke, the microphone – deliberately, no doubt – pitched his voice up into Big Brother volume, so that he boomed at us, his sarcasm and his anger coming across with venom rather than passion. You could imagine what it was like to be denounced before the revolutionary command council.

With an autocrat’s indignation that anyone should believe Iraq wanted to build an atom bomb – but with the suggestion that the Arabs were perfectly capable of doing so if they chose – he denied that his country was planning to produce nuclear weapons. He also condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and US military involvement in the Gulf, sneered at the Syrian Baathist leadership, accused British businessmen of bribery and belittled accurate reports of Kurdish unrest in Iraq. ‘We have no programme concerning the manufacture of the atomic bomb,’ he said. ‘We have no such programme for the Israelis to thwart … we want to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes.’

His argument was artful. ‘A few years ago, Zionists in Europe used to spread the news that the Arabs were backward people, that they did not understand technology and were in need of a protector. The Arabs, the Zionists said, could do nothing but ride camels, cry over the ruins of their houses and sleep in tents. Two years ago, the Zionists and their supporters came up with a declaration that Iraq was about to produce the atom bomb. But how could a people who only knew how to ride camels produce an atom bomb?’ Iraq had signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but no one asked if the Israelis were making atom bombs at their nuclear centre at Dimona in the Negev desert. ‘Arab nations are on the threshold of a new age and will succeed in using atomic energy. Millions of Arabs will be able to use this advanced technology.’ Saddam kept using the word ‘binary’ over and over again, as if Iraq had just split the atom.

His statements were laced with references to the ‘Arab nation’, and the ghost of Gamal Abdel Nasser – whose name he invoked on at least three occasions – was clearly intended to visit the proceedings. Regarding his own regime as an example of the purest pan-Arab philosophy, he clearly saw himself as the aspiring leader of the Arab world. But he could not resist, just briefly, hinting at the truth. ‘Whoever wants to be our enemy,’ he shouted at one point, ‘can expect us as an enemy to be totally different in the very near future.’ He had made his point: if the Arabs were able to use advanced nuclear technology in the near future and if Israel’s enemy was going to be ‘totally different’, this could only mean that he was planning to possess nuclear weapons. It was no secret that Iraq’s Osirak reactor was expected to be commissioned in just five months’ time.

Then came Iran. He believed, he said, in the right of the Iranian people to self-determination, but ‘Khomeini has become a murderer in his own country.’ At one point, Saddam began to speak of the 35,000 Iraqi Shiites of Iranian origin whom he had just expelled from Iraq – he did not mention the figure, nor the fact that many of them held Iraqi passports – and he suddenly ended in mid-sentence. ‘We have expelled a few people of Iranian origin or people who do not belong to Iraq,’ he began. ‘But now, if they want to come back …’ And there he suddenly ended (#) his remark. It was an oblique but ominous warning of the punishment Saddam intended to visit upon Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

His press conference went on long into the night and into the early hours of the next morning. He spoke without notes and, although he would not regard the comparison as flattering, he often improvised his speech as he went along in much the same way that President Sadat of Egypt used to do. I noted in my report to The Times next day that ‘when the president smiled – which he did only rarely – he was greeted by bursts of applause from fellow ministers and Baath party officials.’ When several of us were close to Saddam after his speech, he offered his hand to us. In my notes, I recorded that it was ‘soft and damp’.

Two years later, Richard Pim, who had been head of Winston Churchill’s prime ministerial Map Room at Downing Street during the Second World War, used exactly the same words – ‘soft and damp’ – when he described to me his experience of shaking hands in Moscow with Josef Stalin, upon whom Saddam consciously modelled himself. It was one of Stalin’s biographers (#) who noted in 2004 that in the 1970s Saddam had dutifully visited all of Stalin’s fifteen scenic seaside villas on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia, some of them Tsarist palaces; these were presumably the inspiration for the vast imperial – and largely useless – palaces which Saddam built for himself all over Iraq.* (#)

For the West, however, Saddam was a new Shah in the making. That, I suspected, was what his press conference was all about. He would be a Shah for us and a Nasser for the Arabs. His personality cult was already being constructed. He was a new version of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, it was said in Baghdad – he would soon become a far more disturbing version of an ancient Arab warrior – and his face now appeared across the country, in Kurdish dress, in Arab kuffiah, in business suit, digging trenches in guerrilla uniform, revolver tucked Arafat-style into his trouser belt, on dinar banknotes. He was, a local poet grovellingly wrote, ‘the perfume of Iraq (#), its dates, its estuary of the two rivers, its coast and waters, its sword, its shield, the eagle whose grandeur dazzles the heavens. Since there was an Iraq, you were its awaited and promised one.’

Saddam had already developed the habit of casually calling on Iraqis in their homes to ask if they were happy – they always were, of course – and my colleague Tony Clifton of Newsweek was himself a witness to this kind of Saddamite aberration. During an interview with the president, Clifton rashly asked if Saddam was never worried about being assassinated. ‘The interpreter went ashen-grey with fear and there was a long silence,’ Clifton was to recall. ‘I think Saddam knew some English and understood the question. Then the interpreter said something to him and Saddam roared with laughter and clapped me on the shoulder. He didn’t stop laughing, but he said to me: “Leave this room now! Go out onto the street! Go and ask anyone in Iraq: Do you love Saddam?” And he went on laughing. And all the people in the room burst out laughing. Of course, you couldn’t really do that, could you? You couldn’t go up to Iraqis and ask them that. They were going to tell you that they loved him.’* (#)

Saddam had inherited the same tribal and religious matrix as the British when they occupied Iraq in 1917. The largest community, the Shia, were largely excluded from power but constituted a permanent threat to the Sunni-dominated Baath party. Not only were their magnificent golden shrines at Najaf and Kerbala potent symbols of the great division in Islamic society, but they represented a far larger majority in Iran. Just so long as the Shah ruled Iraq’s eastern neighbour, its religious power could be checked. But if the Shah was deposed, then the Baathists would be the first to understand the threat which the Shia of both countries represented.

Shiites have disputed the leadership of Islam since the eighth-century murder of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed, at Najaf and believe that Ali’s descendants, the Imams, are the lawful successors of Mohamed. Their fascination with martyrdom and death would, if made manifest in modern war, create a threat for any enemy. The Sunnis, adherents of the sunnah (practice) of Mohamed, became commercially powerful from their close association with the Mamelukes and the Ottoman Turks. In many ways, Sunni power came to be founded on Shia poverty; in Iraq, Saddam was going to make sure that this remained the case. This disparity, however, would always be exacerbated – as it was in the largely Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia – by an extraordinary geographic coincidence: almost all the oil of the Middle East lies beneath lands where Shia Muslims live. In southern Iraq, in the north-east of Saudi Arabia and, of course, in Iran, Shiites predominate among the population.

Saddam tolerated the Shah once he withdrew his support for the Kurdish insurgency in the north – the Kurds, like the Shia, were regularly betrayed by both the West and Iraq’s neighbours – and agreed that the Iraqi-Iranian frontier should run down the centre of the Shatt al-Arab river. He had been prepared to allow Ayatollah Khomeini to remain in residence in Najaf where he had moved after his expulsion from Iran. The prelate was forbidden from undertaking any political activity, a prohibition that Khomeini predictably ignored. He gave his followers cassettes on which he expressed his revulsion for the Shah, his determination to lead an Islamic revolution and his support for the Palestinian cause. One of his closest supporters in Najaf was Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi – later to be the Iranian ambassador to Syria who sent Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon in 1982 – who was imprisoned three times by the Iraqi authorities.* (#) Khomeini’s theological ambassador was Ayatollah Sayed Mohamed Bakr Sadr, one of the most influential and intellectual of the Shia clergy in Najaf, who had written a number of highly respected works on Islamic economy and education.

But he also advocated an Islamic revolution in Iraq, relying – like Hussain Shahristani – on his own political importance to protect him from destruction. Once Khomeini was expelled by Saddam – to Turkey and ultimately to Paris – Bakr Sadr was in mortal danger. With an Islamic revolution under way in Iran, Saddam would have no qualms about silencing Khomeini’s right-hand man in Najaf, let alone his followers. They were to suffer first. Bakr Sadr, sick at his home, was arrested and imprisoned in Baghdad – only to be released after widespread demonstrations against the regime in Najaf. The Baath then announced the existence of the armed opposition Dawa party and pounced on Bakr Sadr’s supporters. The Iranians were later to list the first martyrs of ‘the Islamic Revolution of Iraq’ as Hojatolislam Sheikh Aref Basari, Hojatolislam Sayed Azizeddin Ghapanchi, Hojatolislam Sayed Emaddedin Tabatabai Tabrizi, Professor Hussain Jaloukhan and Professor Nouri Towmeh. The Baath decided to crush the influence of the Shia theological schools in Najaf by introducing new laws forcing all teachers to join the party. Bakr Sadr then announced that the mere joining of the Baath was ‘prohibited by Islamic laws’. This determined his fate – although it was a fate that Saddam was at first unwilling to reveal.

For months, reports of Bakr Sadr’s execution circulated abroad – Amnesty International recorded them – but there was no confirmation from the regime. Only when I asked to visit Najaf in 1980 did a Baath party official tell the truth, albeit in the usual ruthless Baathist manner. It was a blindingly hot day – 23 July – when I arrived at the office of the portly Baathist governor of Najaf, Misban Khadi, a senior party member and personal confidant of Saddam. Just before lunchtime on this lunchless Ramadan day, as the thermometer touched 130 degrees, the admission came. Had Ayatollah Bakr Sadr been executed? I asked.

‘I do not know an Ayatollah Bakr Sadr,’ Khadi said. ‘But I do know a Mohamed Bakr Sadr. He was executed because he was a traitor and plotted against Iraq and maintained relations with Khomeini. He was a member of the Dawa party. He was a criminal and a spy and had a relationship with not just Khomeini but with the CIA as well. The authorities gave his body back to his relatives – for burial in Wadi Salam. The family have not been harmed. They are still in Najaf.’

I remember how, as Khadi spoke, the air conditioner hissed on one side of the room. He spoke softly and I leaned towards him to hear his words. This was enough to send a tingle down the spine of any listener. Khomeini’s lack of respect for his former protectors now smouldered at the heart of the Baathist regime that once did so much to help him. ‘Khomeini speaks about crowds of people flocking to see Bakr Sadr in his absence,’ Khadi said softly. ‘But in court that man admitted that he spied. He was hanged just over five months ago. But these are small things to ask me about. We execute anybody who is a traitor in Iraq. Why do reporters ask unimportant questions like this? Why don’t you ask me about the development projects in Najaf?’

This was a bleak, dismissive epitaph for the man who accompanied Khomeini into fourteen years of exile. Wadi Salam – the Valley of Peace – is the cemetery where so many millions of Shiites wish to be buried, within a few hundred metres of the golden shrine of the Imam Ali. The family were permitted to give him a traditional Muslim funeral and he now lay in a narrow tomb amid the hundreds of thousands of tightly packed, hump-shaped graves whose swaddled occupants believe that their proximity to Ali’s last resting place will secure the personal intercession of the long-dead holy warrior on the day of resurrection. But there was another grave beside that of Bakr Sadr, and it was a more junior Baath party official who took some delight in expanding the governor’s brutal story.

‘We hanged his sister, too,’ he said. ‘They were both dressed in white shrouds for their hanging. Bint Huda was hanged around the same time. I didn’t see the actual hanging but I saw Bakr Sadr hanging outside the Abu Ghraib prison afterwards. They hanged him in public. He was in religious robes but with a white cloth over him and he was not wearing his turban. Later they took him down and put him in a wooden box and tied it to the roof of a car. Then he was taken back to Najaf. Why do you ask about him? He was a bad man.’

The history of the Baath party in Iraq might be written in the blood of ulemas and their families and the demise of the Shia clergy was to become a fearful theme over the coming years. Already, Imam Moussa Sadr, the leader of the Shia community in Lebanon and a relative of Bakr Sadr, had disappeared while on a visit to Libya in August of 1978. A tall, bearded man who was born in Qom and who looked younger than his fifty years, Moussa Sadr had been invited to Libya to observe the ninth anniversary celebrations of Colonel Ghadafi’s revolution. All he would talk of in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, one Lebanese newspaper reported, was the situation in Iran. Had the Shah’s Savak secret police seized Moussa Sadr? Had Ghadafi ‘disappeared’ him for Saddam? He was supposed to have boarded Alitalia Flight 881 to Rome on 31 August, on his way back to Beirut. His baggage turned up on the carousel at Fiumicino airport – but neither Moussa Sadr nor the Lebanese journalist travelling with him were on the plane. Many Shiites in Lebanon still believe that their Imam will return. Others are today trying to bring criminal charges against Ghadafi. Moussa Sadr, who founded the Amal – Hope – movement in Lebanon, was never seen again.

In Najaf, the Shiites were cowed. No one openly mentioned Bakr Sadr’s name in the ancient dusty city with its glorious mosque, built around the solid silver casket of the Prophet’s son-in-law, who was also his cousin. One stall-holder shrugged his shoulders at me with exaggerated ignorance when I mentioned Bakr Sadr. The banners in the streets of Najaf that boiling July all praised Saddam’s generosity – each slogan had been personally devised by local shopkeepers, an information ministry functionary insisted – and in one road there hung a small red flag bearing the words: ‘May the regime of Khomeini, the liar and traitor, fall to pieces.’

The elderly Grand Ayatollah Abulqassem al-Khoi, the rightful heir to the Shiite leadership in Najaf but a man who believed that the people should render unto God the things that are God’s and unto Saddam the things that are recognisably Baathist, had lacked the necessary influence to smother the unrest – just as he would fail to control the mobs during the southern Iraqi uprising in 1991. There were to be no interviews with the old man. But the governor was quite prepared to take me to the house in which Khomeini had once lived. A single-storey terraced building with walls of flaking blue paint, it stood in a laneway suitably named Sharia al-Rasoul – the Street of the Prophet – in the southern suburbs of Najaf.

They tell you that the house has a varnished wooden front door and this is true; but the midday heat was so harsh that it sucked all colour from the landscape. The heat smothered us in the shade and ambushed us in fiery gusts from unsuspecting alleyways until all I could see was a monochrome of streets and shuttered houses, the fragile negative of a city dedicated to the linked identities of worship and death. Ayatollah Khomeini must have loved it here.

But the city was changing. The roads had been resurfaced, a construction project had erased one of Khomeini’s old ‘safe’ houses from the face of the earth, and Iraq’s government was doing its best to ensure that the Shia now lacked nothing in this most holy of cities; new factories were being built to the north, more than a hundred new schools – complete with Baath party teachers – had been completed, together with a network of health centres, hotels and apartment blocks. The city’s beaming governor drove me through the drained and sweltering streets in his white Mercedes, pointing his pudgy finger towards the bazaar.

‘I know everyone here,’ Misban Khadi said. ‘I love these people and they always express their true feelings to me.’ Behind us, a trail of police escort cars purred through the heat. Khadi, though a Shiite, did not come from Najaf but from the neighouring province of Diyala. He came to the Imam Ali mosque every day, he claimed, and gestured towards a banner erected over the mosaics of the shrine. It was from a recent speech by Saddam. ‘We are doubly happy at the presence here of our great father Ali,’ it said. ‘Because he is one of the Muslim leaders, because he is the son-in-law of the Prophet – and because he is an Arab.’

Baathist officials made this point repeatedly. All the Iraqis of Iranian origin had already been expelled from Najaf – ‘if only you had telephoned me yesterday,’ Khadi said irritatingly, ‘I could have given you the figures’ – and the message that Shia Islam is a product of the Arab rather than the Persian world constantly reiterated. Had not Saddam personally donated a set of gold-encrusted gates to the Najaf shrine, each costing no less than $100,000? The governor stalked into the bazaar across the road. Because it was Ramadan, the shutters were down, so hot they burned your skin if you touched them. But a perfume stall was still open and Khadi placed his mighty frame on a vulnerable bench while the talkative salesman poured his over-scented warm oils into glass vials.

‘Ask him if he enjoys living in Najaf,’ the governor barked, but when I asked the salesman instead if he remembered Khomeini, his eyes flickered across the faces of the nearest officials. ‘We all remember Khomeini,’ he said carefully. ‘He was here for fourteen years. Every day, he went to pray at the mosque and all the people of Najaf crowded round him, thousands of them, to protect him – we thought the Shah would send his Savak police to kill him so we stood round Khomeini at the shrine.’ There was a moment’s silence as the perfume seller’s critical faculties – or lack of them – were assessed by his little audience.

‘But here’s a little boy who would like to tell you his view of Khomeini,’ said the governor, and an urchin in a grubby yellow abaya shrieked ‘Khomeini is a traitor’ with a vacant smile. All the officials acclaimed this statement as the true feelings of the people of Najaf. Khadi had never met Khomeini but confidently asserted that the Imam had been a CIA agent, that even Grand Ayatollah Abolqassem al-Khoi of Najaf had sent a telegram to Qom, blaming Khomeini for killing the Muslim Kurds of northern Iran. Al-Khoi may have done that – his fellow teacher, Ayatollah Sahib al-Hakim, had been executed by the regime – but this did not spare his family. In 1994, just two years after al-Khoi’s death, his courageous 36-year-old son Taghi was killed when his car mysteriously crashed into an unlit articulated lorry on the highway outside Kerbala. He had been a constant critic of Saddam’s persecution of the Shia and told friends in London the previous year that he was likely to die at Saddam’s hands. At the demand of the authorities, his burial – and that of his six-year-old nephew who died with him – went without the usual rituals.

Four years later, Ayatollah Sheikh Murtada al-Burujirdi, one of Najaf’s most prominent scholars and jurists, a student of the elder al-Khoi and another Iranian-born cleric, was assassinated as he walked home after evening prayers at the shrine of Ali. He had been beaten up the previous year and had escaped another murder attempt when a hand grenade was thrown at him. Al-Burujirdi had refused government demands that he no longer lead prayers at the shrine. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the principal marja al-taqlid – in literal Arabic, ‘source of emulation’ – was still under house arrest and the Baathists were promoting the more pliable Sayed Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, cousin of the executed Sadiq. But Sadiq al-Sadr himself was assassinated by gunmen in Najaf nine months later after he had issued a fatwa calling on Shiites to attend their Friday prayers despite the government’s objection to large crowds. Al-Khoi’s son Youssef – Taghi’s brother – blamed the Baathists, and rioting broke out in the Shia slums of Saddam City in Baghdad. But the history of Shia resistance did not end with the fall of Saddam. It was Sadiq al-Sadr’s son Muqtada who would lead an insurrection against America’s occupation of Iraq five years later, in 2004, bringing US tanks onto the same Najaf streets through which Saddam’s armour had once moved and provoking gun battles across Sadr City, the former Saddam City whose population had renamed it after the executed Bakr Sadr.