скачать книгу бесплатно
These were just the most prominent of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who would be murdered during Saddam’s twenty-four-year rule. Kurds and communists and Shia Muslims would feel the harshest of the regime’s punishments. My Iraqi files from the late Seventies and early Eighties are filled with ill-printed circulars from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, from Iraqi trade unions and tiny opposition groups, naming thousands of executed men and women. As I thumb through them now, I come across the PUK’s magazine The Spark, an issue dated October 1977, complaining that its partisans have been jointly surrounded by forces of Baathist Iraq and the Shah’s Iran in the northern Iraqi village of Halabja, detailing the vast numbers of villages from which the Kurdish inhabitants had been deported, and the execution, assassination or torturing to death of 400 PUK members. Another PUK leaflet, dated 10 December 1977, reports the deportation of 300,000 Kurds to the south of Iraq. Yet another dreadful list, from a communist group, contains the names of 37 Iraqi workers executed or ‘disappeared’ in 1982 and 1983. Omer Kadir, worker in the tobacco factory at Suleimaniya – ‘tortured to death’; Ali Hussein, oil worker from Kirkuk -‘executed’; Majeed Sherhan, peasant from Hilla – ‘executed’; Saddam Muher, civil servant from Basra – ‘executed’… The dead include blacksmiths, builders, printers, post office workers, electricians and factory hands. No one was safe.
This permanent state of mass killing across Iraq was no secret in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the West was either silent or half-hearted in its condemnation. Saddam’s visit to France in 1975 and his public welcome by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, who bestowed upon the Iraqi leader ‘my esteem, my consideration, and my affection’, was merely the most flagrant example of our shameful relationship with the Iraqi regime. Within three years, agents at the Iraqi embassy in Paris would be fighting a gun battle with French police after their diplomats had been taken hostage by two Arab gunmen. A French police inspector was killed and another policeman wounded; the three Iraqi agents claimed diplomatic immunity and were allowed to fly to Baghdad on 2 August 1978, just two days after the killing. US export credits and chemicals and helicopters, French jets and German gas and British military hardware poured into Iraq for fifteen years. Iraq was already using gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers when Donald Rumsfeld made his notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad to shake Saddam’s hand and ask him for permission to reopen the US embassy. The first – and last – time I called on the consulate there, not long after Rumsfeld’s visit, one of its young CIA spooks brightly assured me that he wasn’t worried about car bombs because ‘we have complete faith in Iraqi security’.
Iraq’s vast literacy, public health, construction and communications projects were held up as proof that the Baathist government was essentially benign, or at least worthy of some respect. Again, my files contain many Western press articles that concentrate almost exclusively on Iraq’s social projects. In 1980, for example, a long report in the Middle East business magazine 8 Days, written with surely unconscious irony, begins: ‘Iraqis who fail (#) to attend reading classes can be fined or sent to prison where literary classes are also compulsory. Such measures may seem harsh, but as Iraq enters its second year of a government drive to eliminate illiteracy, its results have won United Nations acclaim.’
In 1977, the now defunct Dublin Sunday Press ran an interview with former Irish minister for finance Charles Haughey in which the country’s human rights abuses simply went unrecorded. It was not difficult to see why. ‘An enormous potential market (#) for Irish produce,’ it began, ‘including lamb, beef, dairy products and construction industry requirements was open in Iraq … Charles Haughey told me on his return from a week-long visit to that country.’ Haughey and his wife Maureen, it transpired, had been ‘the guest of the 9-year-old socialist Iraqi government’ so that he could inform himself ‘of the political and economic situation there and to help to promote better contact and better relations between Ireland and Iraq at political level’. Haughey, who had met ‘the Director General of the Ministry of Planning, Saddam Hussein’, added that ‘the principal political aspect of modern Iraq is the total determination of its leaders to use the wealth derived from their oil resources for the benefit of their people …’ The Baath party, the article helpfully informed its readers, ‘came to power in July 1968 without the shedding of one drop of blood’.
The British understood the Iraqi regime all too well. In 1980, gunmen from the ‘Political Organisation of the Arab People in Arabistan’ – the small south-western corner of Iran with a predominantly Arab population, which is called Khuzestan – had taken over the Iranian embassy in London; the siege ended when SAS men entered the building, capturing one of the men but killing another four and executing a fifth in cold blood before fire consumed the building.* (#) Less than three months later, however, on 19 July 1980, I was astonished to be telephoned at my Baghdad hotel and invited by the Iraqi authorities to attend a press conference held by the very same Arab group which had invaded the embassy. Nasser Ahmed Nasser, a 31-year-old economics graduate from Tehran University, accused the British of ‘conspiring’ with Iran against the country’s Arabs and demanded the return to Iraq of the bodies of the five dead gunmen.
Nasser, a mustachioed man with dark glasses, a black shirt and carefully creased lounge trousers, spoke slowly and with obvious forethought when he outlined his group’s reaction to the killings. ‘We will take our vengeance,’ he said, ‘because now our second enemy is England.’ He claimed that he had been sentenced to death in absentia in Iran. But his arrival for the conference in the heavily upholstered interior of the Iraqi information ministry made it clear that the Baghdad government fully supported his cause and must have been behind the seizure of the embassy in London. A senior official of the ministry acted as interpreter thoughout Nasser’s resentful peroration against Britain and Iran.
The Arabs of Khuzestan had been seeking autonomy from Khomeini’s regime, and many Arab insurgents in the province had been executed or imprisoned, Nasser said. It was to demand the release of the jailed men that the gunmen had attacked the embassy in London. Nasser agreed that there was a ‘link’ between the insurgents and the Iraqi Baath party and we should have questioned him about this. ‘Iraq’s Arab Socialist Baath Party’s motto – one unified Arab nation – is a glorious motto and we are Arabs,’ he said. ‘We follow this motto.’ What did this mean? On reflection, we should have grasped its import: Saddam was preparing a little Sudetenland, another Danzig, a piece of Iran that he might justifiably wish to liberate in the near future.
But of course, we asked about the siege in London rather than the implications of Iraq’s support for the rebels. ‘When we went to the embassy in London, our aim was not to kill,’ Nasser said. ‘We were not terrorists. We selected the British government as our negotiator because Britain is a democratic country and we wanted to benefit from this democracy. The British knew – all the world knew – that we did not intend to kill anyone … But for six days, they did not answer our requests or publicise our demands. They cut off the telex and the telephone … They did not have to kill our youths – they could have taken them prisoner and put them on trial.’ Nasser blamed Sadeq Khalkhali, the Iranian judge, for the torture of Arabs in Khuzestan – ‘he employs torturers who break the legs and shoot the arms of prisoners before knifing them’ – and claimed that Arabs in the province had first accepted the Iranian revolution because ‘it came in the name of Islam’ but that they now wanted autonomy ‘just like the Kurds, Baluchis and Turks’. When we asked how the Arabs in the Iranian embassy had brought their weapons into Britain, Nasser replied: ‘How did the Palestinians get guns into Munich? How do Irish revolutionaries bring guns to Britain? We are able to do the same.’ Again, no one thought to ask if the guns reached Britain in the Iraqi diplomatic bag. Nasser himself came from the Iranian port of Khorramshahr, for which he used the Arab name ‘Al-Mohammorah’. So was al-Mohammorah going to be Danzig?
Britain, however, made no protest to Iraq over the siege – or over the extraordinary press conference so obviously arranged by the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It was an eloquent silence. Of course, there were those who questioned Britain’s cosy relationship with Iraq. There was an interesting exchange in the House of Lords in 1989 – a year after the end of the eight-year Iran – Iraq war and shortly after the arrest in Baghdad of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft and his friend, the British nurse Daphne Parish – when Lord Hylton asked how the British government ‘justify their action (#) in guaranteeing new credits to Iraq of up to £250 million in view of that country’s detention of British subjects without trial, refusal to release prisoners of war following the ceasefire with Iran and its internal human rights record’. For the government, Lord Trefgarne replied that ‘the Iraqi Government are in no doubt of our concerns over the British detainee, Mrs Parish, and over Iraq’s human rights record … we are a major trading nation. I am afraid that we have to do business with a number of countries with whose policies we very often disagree … we do not sell arms to Iraq.’ Hylton’s response – that ‘while I appreciate that this country is a trading nation … is not the price that we are paying too high?’ – passed without further comment.
Bazoft, who was Iranian-born and held British identity papers but not citizenship, had visited the Iraqi town of Hilla in Parish’s car in a hunt for evidence that Iraq was producing chemical weapons. He was arrested as he tried to leave Baghdad airport, accused of spying and put on trial for his life, along with Parish. A month later, Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave was noting privately of Iraq that ‘I doubt if there is any (#) future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly, nor can I think of any major market where the importance of diplomacy is so great on our commercial position. We must not allow it to go to the French, Germans, Japanese, Koreans, etcetera.’ He added that ‘a few more Bazofts or another bout of internal repression would make it more difficult’. Waldegrave’s words were written only months after Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds of Halabja. Geoffrey Howe, the deputy prime minister, decided to relax controls on the sale of arms to Iraq – but kept it secret because ‘it would look very cynical (#) if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.’
Bazoft was sentenced to death on 10 March 1990. The Observer attacked Saddam over the conviction – not, perhaps, a wise decision in the circumstances – and British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd offered to fly to Baghdad to meet the Iraqi president. Saddam, according to the Iraqi foreign ministry, ‘could not intervene while under political pressure’. But by then, a grim routine had begun, one of which my own research back in Beirut had made me painfully aware. Back in 1968, convicted Iraqi ‘spies’ would confess their guilt on television. Then they would be executed. In 1969, the lord mayor of Baghdad had confessed – on television – to ‘spying’ and he had been executed. And Bazoft had appeared on television, and confessed to spying – only later did his friends discover that he had been tortured with electricity during interrogation. In February 1969, before the execution of seven ‘spies’, Baghdad radio had announced that the Iraqi people ‘expressed their condemnation of the spies’ – they were then put to death. In May 1969, the farmers’ trade union delegates had applauded President al-Bakr’s decision to ‘chop off’ the heads of a CIA ‘spy ring’. They were duly hanged. Now, on one of his interminable visits to Iraqi minority groups, Saddam asked in front of a large group of Kurds if they believed that the ‘British spy’ should hang. Of course, they chorused that he should. It was the same old Baathist technique; get the people to make the decision – once they knew what it should be – and then obey the people’s will.
On the morning of 16 March 1990, Robin Kealy, a British diplomat in Baghdad, was informed that Bazoft was to be executed that day. He arrived at the Abu Ghraib prison to find the young man still unaware of his fate, still planning a personal appeal for his life to Saddam. It was Kealy’s mournful duty to tell Bazoft the truth. Kealy declined an invitation to be present at the hanging. Eight days later, four Heathrow luggage handlers heaved his coffin off a regular Iraqi Airways flight to London. No Foreign Office representative, relative or friend attended at the airport. The coffin was taken to a cargo shed to await burial. His friend Daphne ‘Dee’ Parish was given fifteen years. Bazoft’s last words to Kealy were: ‘Tell Dee I’m sorry (#).’
Throughout the early years of Saddam’s rule, there were journalists who told the truth about his regime while governments – for financial, trade and economic reasons – preferred to remain largely silent. Yet those of us who opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 were quickly accused of being Saddam’s ‘spokesmen’ or, in my case, ‘supporting the maintenance of the Baathist regime’ – this from, of all people, Richard Perle, one of the prime instigators of the whole disastrous war, whose friend Donald Rumsfeld was befriending Saddam in 1983. Two years after Rumsfeld’s initial approach to the Iraqi leader – followed up within months by a meeting with Tariq Aziz – I was reporting on Saddam’s gang-rape and torture in Iraqi prisons. On 31 July 1985, Wahbi Al-Qaraghuli, the Iraqi ambassador in London, complained to William Rees-Mogg, the Times editor, that:
Robert Fisk’s extremely one-sided article ignores the tremendous advances made by Iraq in the fields of social welfare, education, agricultural development, urban improvement and women’s suffrage; and he claims, without presenting any evidence to support such an accusation, that ‘Saddam himself imposes a truly terroristic regime on his own people.’ Especially outrageous is the statement that: ‘Suspected critics of the regime have been imprisoned at Abu Ghoraib [sic] jail and forced to watch their wives being gang-raped by Saddam’s security men. Some prisoners have had to witness their children being tortured in front of them.’ It is utterly reprehensible that some journalists are quite prepared, without any supporting corroboration, to repeat wild, unfounded allegations about countries such as Iraq …
‘Extremely one-sided’, ‘without presenting any evidence’, ‘outrageous’, ‘utterly reprehensible’, ‘wild, unfounded allegations’: these were the very same expressions used by the Americans and the British almost twenty years later about reports by myself or my colleagues which catalogued the illegal invasion of Iraq and its disastrous consequences. In February 1986, I was refused a visa to Baghdad on the grounds that ‘another visit by Mr Fisk (#) to Iraq would lend undue credibility to his reports’. Indeed it would.* (#)
So for all these years – until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – we in the West tolerated Saddam’s cruelty, his oppression and torture, his war crimes and mass murder. After all, we helped to create him. The CIA gave the locations of communist cadres to the first Baathist government, information that was used to arrest, torture and execute hundreds of Iraqi men. And the closer Saddam came to war with Iran, the greater his fear of his own Shia population, the more we helped him. In the pageant of hate figures that Western governments and journalists have helped to stage in the Middle East – peopled by Nasser, Ghadafi, Abu Nidal and, at one point, Yassir Arafat – Ayatollah Khomeini was our bogeyman of the early 1980s, the troublesome priest who wanted to Islamicise the world, whose stated intention was to spread his revolution. Saddam, far from being a dictator, thus became – on the Associated Press news wires, for example – a ‘strongman’. He was our bastion – and the Arab world’s bastion – against Islamic ‘extremism’. Even after the Israelis bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, our support for Saddam did not waver. Nor did we respond to Saddam’s clear intention of driving his country to war with Iran. The signs of an impending conflict were everywhere. Even Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, was helping stoke opposition to Khomeini from Iraq, as I discovered when I visited him in his wealthy – but dangerous – Paris exile in August 1980.
It had been the bright idea of Charles Douglas-Home, the foreign editor of The Times, to chase the remains of the Shah’s old regime. ‘I’m sure Bakhtiar’s up to something,’ Charlie said over the phone. ‘Besides, he knows a lot – and his daughter is stunningly beautiful!’ He was right on both counts, although Bakhtiar – so Francophile that he had joined the French army in the Second World War – looked more impressive in his photographs than he did in person. Newspaper pictures portrayed him as a robust man with full, expressive features, his eyes alight for the return of Iranian democracy. In reality, he was a small, thin man, his cheeks somewhat shrunken, his clothes slightly too large for him, a diminutive figure sitting on a huge sofa with seven heavily armed gendarmes outside to protect him.
Even in his Paris apartment, with the noise of the city’s traffic murmuring away outside and the poplar trees swaying in the breeze beyond the sitting-room window, you could feel the presence of the Iranian assassination squads that Tehran had ordered to kill Bakhtiar. When they had called less than two weeks earlier under the command of a 29-year-old Lebanese Islamist called Anis Naccache, they left behind a dead woman neighbour, a murdered French policeman and a bullet-smashed door handle, a souvenir of bright, jagged steel that lay beside the little table next to Bakhtiar’s feet.
This had not served to dampen Bakhtiar’s publicly expressed hatred of Khomeini or his theocratic regime. He admitted to me, uneasily and only after an hour, that he had twice visited Iraq to talk to officials of the Baath party – an institution that could hardly be said to practise the kind of liberal democracy Bakhtiar was advocating – and had broadcast over the clandestine radio that the Iraqis operated on their frontier with Iran, beaming in propaganda against the regime. ‘Why shouldn’t I go to Iraq?’ he asked. ‘I have been in Britain twice, I have been to Switzerland and Belgium. So I can go to Iraq. I contacted people there. I was invited to deal with the authorities there. I have a common point with the Iraqi government. They, like other Muslim countries, are against Khomeini by a large majority. It is possible to work together. This radio that is on the border with Iran is broadcasting what the Iranian people like to listen to. It has broadcast my statements on cassette. That is the only possible way when a dictatorship is established somewhere.’
Bakhtiar, like many Western statesmen, suffered from a Churchill complex, a desire to dress himself up in the shadow of history. ‘When Khomeini arrived in Iran, I said we had escaped from one dictatorship [the Shah’s] but had entered an even more awful one. Nobody believed me. Now, they have plenty to complain about but they do not have the courage to say it. So why do people talk about a coup d’état? I know that I have people on my side in the army … I remember when I was a student in Paris, there was an English leader by the name of Winston Churchill who saw the dangers of dictatorship. Other people were very relaxed about it all and wanted to do deals with Hitler. But Churchill told them they were on the point of extinction. In the same way I knew that Mr Khomeini could not do anything for Iran: he is a man who does not understand geography, history or the economy. He cannot be the leader of all those people in the twentieth century, because he is ignorant about the world.’
The Shah had died in a Cairo hospital six days before my interview with Bakhtiar, although he seemed quite unmoved at his former king’s departure. ‘The death of a person does not give me happiness. I am not the sort of man who dances in the streets because someone is dead and I am alive – I did not even do that when Hitler died. And God knows, I am an anti-fascist as you know yourself. The king was a sick man, a very sick man – and I think that even for him, death was a deliverance, morally and physically.’ What Bakhtiar wanted was a provisional government ‘which would go to Iran and which, under the 1906 constitution, would call for a constituent assembly, calmly and without emotion, and would study the different constitutions for Iran’.
Bakhtiar was already painfully out of touch with Iran, unaware that Khomeini’s revolution was irreversible, partly because it dealt so mercilessly with its enemies – who included Bakhtiar himself. Naccache and his Iranian hit squad had bungled the first attempt to kill him.* (#) Just over eleven years later, on 9 August 1991, more killers arrived at Bakhtiar’s home. This time they cut his head off. Accused of helping the murderers, an Iranian businessman told the Paris assize court that Bakhtiar ‘killed 5,000 people during his thirty-three days in power. Secondly, he was planning a coup d’état in Iran … thirdly, he collaborated with Saddam Hussein during the Iran – Iraq war …’† (#)
Just as Saddam was planning the destruction of the Iranian revolution, so Khomeini was calling for the overthrow of Saddam and the Baath, or the ‘Aflaqis’ as he quaintly called them after the name of the Syrian founder of the party. After learning of Bakr Sadr’s execution and that of his sister, Khomeini openly called for Saddam’s overthrow. ‘It would be strange (#),’ he wrote on 2 April 1980,
if the Islamic nations, especially the noble nation of Iraq, the tribes of the Tigris and Euphrates, the brave students of the universities and other young people turned a blind eye to this great calamity inflicted upon Islam and the household of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, and allowed the accursed Baath party to martyr their eminent personalities one after the other. It would be even more strange if the Iraqi army and other forces were tools in the hands of these criminals, assisting them in the eradication of Islam. I have no faith in the top-ranking officers of the Iraqi armed forces but I am not disappointed in the other officers, the non-commissioned officers or their soldiers. I expect them to either rise up bravely and overthrow this oppression as was the case in Iran or to flee the garrisons and barracks … I hope that God the Almighty will destroy the system of oppression of these criminals.
Oppression lay like a blanket over the Middle East in the early 1980s, in Iraq, in Iran, and in Afghanistan. And if the West was indifferent to the suffering of millions of Muslims, so, shamefully, were most of the Arab leaders. Arafat never dared to condemn the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan – Moscow was still the PLO’s most important ally – and the kings and princes and presidents of the Arab world, who knew better than their Western counterparts what was happening in Iraq, were silent about Saddam’s deportations and tortures and executions and genocidal killings. Most of them used variations of the same techniques on their own populations. In Syria, where the ‘German chair’ torture was used to break the backs of opposition militants, the bloodbath of the Hama uprising lay less than two years away.* (#)
In Iran, the authorities turned brutally against members of the Bahai faith whose 2 million members regard Moses, Buddha, Christ and Mohamed as ‘divine educators’ and whose centre of worship – the tomb of a nineteenth-century Persian nobleman – lies outside Acre in present-day Israel. By 1983, Amnesty estimated that at least 170 Bahais had been executed for heresy among the 5,000 Iranians put to death since the revolution. Among them were ten young women (#), two of them teenagers, all hanged in Shiraz in June of 1983. At least two, Zarrin Muqimi and Shirin Dalvand, both in their twenties, were allowed to pray towards Acre before the hangmen tied their hands and led them to the gallows. All were accused of being ‘Zionist agents’. Evin prison began to fill with women, some members of the Iraqi-supported Mujahedin-e-Qalq – People’s Mujahedin – others merely arrested while watching political protests. They were ferociously beaten on the feet to make them confess to being counter-revolutionaries. On one night, 150 women (#) were shot. At least forty of them were told to prepare themselves for execution by firing squad by writing their names on their right hands and left legs with felt-tip markers; the guards wanted to identify them afterwards and this was often difficult when ‘finishing shots’ to the head would make their faces unrecognisable. But Bahais were not the only victims.
Executions took place in all the major cities of Iran. In July 1980, for example, Iranian state radio reported (#) fourteen executions in Shiraz, all carried out at eleven at night, including a retired major-general – for ‘making attacks on Muslims’ – a former police officer, an army major charged with beating prisoners, an Iranian Jew sentenced for running a ‘centre of fornication’ and seven others for alleged narcotics offences. One man, Habib Faili, was executed for ‘homosexual relations’. Two days earlier, Mehdi Qaheri and Haider Ali Qayur were shot by firing squad for ‘homosexual offences’ in Najafabad. Naturally, Sadeq Khalkhali presided over most of these ‘trials’.
Amnesty recorded the evidence (#) of a female student imprisoned in Evin between September 1981 and March 1982 who was held in a cell containing 120 women, ranging from schoolgirls to the very old. The woman described how:
One night a young girl called Tahereh was brought straight from the courtroom to our cell. She had just been sentenced to death, and was confused and agitated. She didn’t seem to know why she was there. She settled down to sleep next to me, but at intervals she woke up with a start, terrified, and grasped me, asking if it were true that she really would be executed. I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, and reassure her that it wouldn’t happen, but at about 4 a.m. they came for her and she was taken away to be executed. She was sixteen years old.
A frightening nine-page pamphlet (#) issued by the Iranian Ministry for Islamic Guidance – but carrying neither the ministry’s name nor that of its author – admitted that ‘some believe only murderers deserve capital punishment, but not those who are guilty of hundreds of other crimes … Weren’t the wicked acts of those upon whom [the] death penalty was inflicted tantamount to the spread … of corruption … The people have indirectly seconded the act of the revolutionary courts, because they realise the courts have acted in compliance with their wishes.’ The same booklet claimed that trials of senior officials of the Shah’s government had to be carried out swiftly lest ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements tried to rescue them from prison.
Khomeini raged (#), against the leftists and communists who dared to oppose his theocracy, and the Great Satan America and its Iraqi ally. Why did people oppose the death penalty, he asked. ‘… the trial of several young men … and the execution of a number of those who had revolted against Islam and the Islamic Republic and were sentenced to death, make you cry for humanity!’ The ‘colonial powers’ had frightened Muslims with their ‘satanic might and advancement’ – Khomeini’s prescient expression for the ‘shock and awe’ that US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld would call down on Iraq almost exactly twenty years later – and now communists were ‘ready to sacrifice [their] lives out of love of the party’ while the people of Afghanistan were ‘perishing under the Soviet regime’s cruelty’.
Here Khomeini was on safe ground. From Afghan exile groups and humanitarian organisations there came a flood of evidence that Soviet troops were now carrying out atrocities in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch was reporting (#) by 1984 that it had become clear ‘that Soviet personnel have been taking an increasingly active role in the Afghan government’s oppression of its citizens. Soviet officers are not just serving as “advisors” to Afghan Khad agents who administer torture – routinely and savagely in detention centres and prisons; according to reports we received there are Soviets who participate directly in interrogation and torture.’ The same document provided appalling evidence of torture. A 21-year-old accused of distributing ‘night letters’ against the government was hung up by a belt until he almost strangled, beaten until his face was twice its normal size and had his hands crushed under a chair. ‘… mothers were forced to watch their infant babies being given electric shocks … Afghan men … were held in torture chambers where women were being sexually molested. A young woman who had been tortured in prison described how she and others had been forced to stand in water that had been treated in chemicals that made the skin come off their feet.’ After Afghans captured a Soviet army captain and three other soldiers in the town of Tashqurghan in April 1982, killed them, chopped up their bodies and threw them in a river, the brother of the officer took his unit – from the Soviet 122nd Brigade – to the town and slaughtered the entire population of around 2,000 people.
An exile publication of the Hezb Islami in Pakistan listed the murder in Afghanistan of twenty-six religious sheikhs, mawlawi and other leaders, often with their entire families, from Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Konar and Ghazni. The Soviets always claimed their village raids were targeted at insurgents, ‘terrorists’ or the ‘remnants’ of the dushman – ironically, they would use the Afghan Persian word for ‘enemy’ – but inevitably most of the victims would be civilians. It was a pattern to be repeated by US forces in Iraq almost a quarter of a century later. Photographs in exile magazines showed the victims of Soviet napalm attacks, their faces burned off by chemicals. One Soviet officer who launched his career amid the Afghan atrocities was General Pavel Grachev, later to be Russian defence minister. He it was who would earn the sobriquet ‘the Butcher of Grozny’, after forgetting the lessons of the Afghan war and the defeat of the Soviets by the mujahedin and Osama bin Laden’s Arab fighters, by launching the Chechnya war on Boris Yeltsin’s behalf and bragging that he could sort out the Chechens in a matter of hours. Wiser counsels had warned that he would unleash a ‘holy war’.
And now, across much of this landscape of horror in Muslim south-west Asia, an epic of bloodletting was about to begin as an obsessive, xenophobic and dictatorial nationalist and secular Arab regime prepared to destroy the Muslim revolutionary forces that were bent on its destruction. As long ago as October 1979 (#), the documents found in the US embassy in Tehran would reveal, the Iranian government feared that the Iraqis were being encouraged to foment further rebellion among Iranian Kurds. Ibrahim Yazdi, the Iranian foreign minister, told American diplomats that ‘adequate assurances had been given to Sadam Husayn [sic] with regard to the Shia majority in Iraq’ to calm his fears of Shia nationalism; but ‘if Iraqi interference continued, Iran would have to consider agitating among the Iraqi Shia community.’ By November, the Americans were reporting that the Iraqi regime was convinced that Iran wished to pursue a claim to the Arab but largely Shia island of Bahrein, which Saddam Hussein had thought he might negotiate with Tehran after meeting Yazdi at a summit in Havana, but that the Iraqis now believed real power lay in ‘the Iranian religious establishment which is hostile to Iraq’.
Just how militarily powerful the two regimes were in 1980 obsessed both sides in the forthcoming struggle. Back in 1978, the Shah (#), boasting of his ‘very good relations’ with Saddam’s Iraq, claimed that Iraq had ‘more planes and tanks than Iran has’, even though Iran had acquired 80 F-14 Tomcats from the United States – to counter any strikes from the Soviet Union – which could counter Mig high reconnaissance and fighter aircraft. All the Iranian F-14 pilots had been trained in the United States. Before the Shah’s fall, according to one of the documents discovered in the US embassy in Tehran, America believed that:
Iran’s … military superiority over Iraq rests primarily on the strength of its Air Force, which has more high-performance aircraft, better pilot training … and ordnance such as laser-guided bombs and TV-guided missiles that are unavailable to Iraq. The Iranian navy also is far superior to that of Iraq; it could easily close the Gulf to Iraqi shipping … The two states’ ground forces are more nearly balanced, however, with each side possessing different advantages in terms of equipment and capable of incursions into the other’s territory. The disposition of ground forces and the greater mobility of Iraqi forces could in fact give Baghdad a substantial numerical advantage along the border during the initial stages of an attack.
This was an all-too-accurate prediction of what was to happen in September 1980 – and was presumably also known to Saddam Hussein and his generals in Iraq. They would have been comforted to know that, according to the same assessment, Iran’s reliance on US equipment meant that ‘if US support was withdrawn, the Iranian armed forces probably could not sustain full-scale hostilities for longer than two weeks’. But this was a woefully inaccurate forecast, which may have led Saddam to take the bloodiest gamble of his career.
The revolution had certainly emasculated part of the Iranian army. Every general had been retired – more than 300 of the Shah’s senior officers departed in three weeks – and conscription had been lowered from two years to one. As they prepared for a possible American invasion during the hostage siege, the Iranians desperately tried to rebuild their army to a pre-revolution complement of 280,000 men. But pitched battles in Kurdistan meant that every Iranian army unit had been involved in combat by the autumn of 1980. The Revolutionary Guards, who would provide the theological military muscle in any defence of Iran, were – or so I wrote in a dispatch to The Times from Tehran on 26 November 1979 – ‘zealous, overenthusiastic and inexperienced’, while the army’s firepower might have been considerably reduced. Its 1,600 tanks, including 800 British-made Chieftains and 600 American M-60s – all purchased by the Shah – sounded impressive, but the Chieftains, with their sophisticated firing mechanism, may have been down to half strength through lack of maintenance. The M-60s were easier to maintain. The new army was commanded by Major-General Hussain Shaker, who had been trained by the Americans at Fort Leavenworth.
The Islamic government in Tehran put more faith in its air force, mainly because air force cadets had played a leading role in fighting the imperial army during the revolution. In the days after the Shah’s fall, the air force was the only arm of the services permitted to appear in uniform outside its bases. But the F-14s were in need of US maintenance, and although pilots could still fly the older F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers, much of the US and British radar system had broken down and the US technicians who serviced it had long ago left Iran.* (#)
For months in early 1980, there had been violent incidents along the Iran – Iraq border. Tony Alloway, our stringer in Tehran – increasingly isolated but still doggedly filing to us – was now reporting almost daily artillery duels between Iraqis and Iranians. In The Times on 10 April, he reported on tank as well as artillery fire across the border near Qasr-e Shirin. Sadeq Qotbzadeh, now the Iranian foreign minister, was quoted as saying that his government was ‘determined to overthrow the Iraqi Baathist Government headed by that United States agent Saddam Hussein’. On 9 April alone, 9,700 Iraqis of Iranian origin were forced across the border into Iran with another 16,000 soon to be deported. Four hundred of the new arrivals were businessmen who complained that they had been falsely invited to the commerce ministry in Baghdad and there stripped of their possessions, loaded onto lorries and sent to the frontier.
In April, I got a taste of what was to come when pro-Iranian militiamen in Beirut fought street battles with pro-Iraqi gunmen. At the American University Hospital, I counted fifty-five dead, some of them civilians, as armed men, bloodstained bandages round their faces and arms, were brought to the hospital on trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns. Clouds of smoke billowed up from the Bourj el-Barajneh Palestinian camp where six charred corpses were found inside an Iraqi Baath party office.
Often, the Iranians would complain that Iraqi aircraft had entered Iranian airspace; in early July 1980, Iraqi jets passed above Kermanshah province on two separate days, coming under fire from Iranian anti-aircraft guns. The pilots were presumably trying to locate Iran’s ground-to-air defence positions. On 3 July Kayhan newspaper in Tehran was reporting that the Iraqi regime had set up a ‘mercenary army’, led by an Iraqi officer, near Qasr-e Shirin. By August, regular artillery fire was directed across the border in both directions. Iranian claims that their villages were coming under constant attack were dismissed by Iraq as ‘falsehoods’. The Iraqi foreign ministry (#), however, listed twenty shooting incidents – against Iraqi villages and ships in the Shatt al-Arab around Basra – between 18 and 22 September. Ever afterwards, Saddam Hussein would claim that the Iran – Iraq war began on 4 September, by which time Iraq had complained of artillery firing at its border posts and neighbouring oil refineries on ninety-eight occasions. Iraq denounced Iran for violating the Shah’s 1975 agreement with Baghdad which set the two countries’ common frontier along the Shatt al-Arab, declaring the treaty ‘null and void (#)’.
Although a major conflict seemed inevitable, the UN Security Council would not meet to discuss the hostilities until after the Iraqis invaded Iranian territory; Iraq had made strenuous efforts to prevent seven non-aligned members of the Council from going to the UN chamber. Had Iran not been a pariah state after its seizure of the US embassy, it could have obtained a favourable motion and vote. But in the end, UN Security Council Resolution 479 did not even call for a withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Iranian territory, but merely for a ceasefire – which would satisfy neither party. Iran was convinced that the whole world had now turned against its revolution and was supporting the act of aggression by Saddam.
Fathi Daoud Mouffak, a 28-year-old Iraqi military news cameraman, was to remember those days for the rest of his life. Almost a quarter of a century later, he was to recall for me in Baghdad how he set off one morning in September 1980 from the Iraqi ministry of defence towards a location near Qasr-e Shirin. ‘When we arrived (#) we found our border checkpoints attacked and destroyed – and our Iraqi forces there were less than a brigade,’ he said. ‘We visited Qasr-e Shirin and Serbil Sahab. All our checkpoints there had been destroyed by artillery from the Iranians. We filmed this and we found many dead bodies, our martyrs, most of them border policemen. I had never seen so many dead before. Then we brought our films back to Baghdad.’ Across Iraq, Mouffak’s newsreel was shown on national Iraqi television under the title ‘Pictures from the Battle’. It provided a kind of psychological preparation for the Iraqi people, perhaps for Saddam himself. For on 22 September, on the first day of what the Iranians would call the ‘Imposed War’, Saddam’s legions with their thousands of tanks, armour and artillery swept across the frontier and into Iran on a 650-kilometre front.
CHAPTER SIX (#)
‘The Whirlwind War’ (#)
GAS! GAS! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …
… If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues …
WILFRED OWEN, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’
Saddam Hussein called it ‘The Whirlwind War’. That’s why the Iraqis wanted us there. They were victorious before they had won, they were celebrating before they had achieved success. Saad Bazzaz at the Iraqi embassy in London couldn’t wait to issue my visa and, after flying from Beirut to London – Middle East journalism often involves vast round-trips of thousands of kilometres to facilitate a journey only a few hundred kilometres from the starting point – I was crammed into the visa office with Gavin Hewitt of the BBC and his crew and more radio and newspaper reporters than I have ever seen in a smoke-filled room before. We would fly to Kuwait. We would be taken from there across the Iraqi border to the war front at Basra. And so we were. In September 1980 we entered Basra at night in a fleet of Iraqi embassy cars from Kuwait city, the sky lit up by a thousand tracer shells. Jets moaned overhead and the lights had been turned off across the city, a blackout to protect all of us from the air raids.
‘Out of the cars,’ the Iraqis shouted, and we leapt from their limousines, crouched on the pavements, hands holding microphones up into the hot darkness as the frail Basra villas, illuminated by the thin moonlight around us, vibrated to the sound of anti-aircraft artillery. The tracer streaked upwards in curtains, golden lines that disappeared into the smoke drifting over Basra. Sirens bawled like crazed geriatrics and behind the din we could hear the whisper of Iranian jets. A great fire burned out of control far to the east, beyond the unseen Shatt al-Arab river. Gavin, with whom I had shared most of my adventures in Afghanistan that very same year, was standing, hands on hips, in the roadway. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he kept saying. ‘What a story!’ And it was. Never again would an ‘Arab army so welcome journalists to a battle front, give them so much freedom, encourage them to run and take cover and advance with their soldiers. In the steamy entrance of the Hamdan Hotel – the authorities had switched off power across Basra and the air conditioners were no longer working – the staff had turned on their battery-powered radios. There was a constant blowsy song, all trumpets and drums and men’s shouting voices. Al-harb al-khatifa, nachnu nurbah al-harb al-khatifa. ‘The whirlwind war, the whirlwind war, we shall win the whirlwind war,’ they kept chanting.
We stood on the steps, watching the spray of pink and golden bullets ascending into the dark clouds that scudded across Basra. Somewhere to the east of the city, through the palm groves on the eastern banks of the Shatt al-Arab and all the way to the north, Saddam’s army was moving eastwards through the night, into Iran, into the great deserts of Ahwaz, into the Kurdish mountains towards Mahabad. The Arab journalists who had accompanied us up from Basra were ecstatic. The Iraqis would win, the Iraqis would protect the Arab world from the threat of Iran’s revolution. Saddam was a strong man, a great man, a good man. They were confident of his victory – even more confident, perhaps, than Saddam himself.
Yet the orders to give us journalists the freedom of the battlefield must have come from Saddam. We could take taxis without the usual ‘minders’, all the way to the front if we wanted. The ministry of information would provide us with officials to escort us through road checkpoints if we wished. The Fao peninsula, that vulnerable spit of land south of Basra from which you can look eastwards across ‘the Shatt’ at the palm-fringed shore of Iran? No problem. But when we reached Fao, it was under constant Iranian shellfire and the two deep-sea oil terminals 30 kilometres off the coast, Al-Amaya and Al-Bakr – the latter, one of the most modern in the world, had been opened only four years earlier – were already seriously damaged by Iranian ground-to-ground missiles. The Iraqis had not been able to silence the Iranian guns.
By 29 September 1980, exactly a week after the Iraqi invasion, Iranian shells were landing around Fao at the rate of one every twenty-five seconds and it was unsafe even to drive along the river promenade. The windows and doors of houses in the city rattled as each round exploded, hissing over the bazaar and crashing beyond the oil storage depots. In revenge, the Iraqis had attacked the huge oil terminal at Abadan, and for more than an hour I sat near the river, watching 200-metre gouts of fire shooting into the air over Abadan, a ripple of flame that moved with frightening speed along the bank of the river beneath a canopy of black smoke. An Iraqi official crouched next to me, pointing out the Iranian positions on the other shore. So much for the claims on Iraqi radio that its army had ‘surrounded’ Abadan. In Basra, two Iranian Phantoms bombed a ship moored in the river, setting it on fire and splattering bullets along the waterfront walls, proof that the Iranian air force was still capable of daylight raids.
The Iraqis claimed to have shot down four Phantoms in five days, and the undamaged fuel tank of one aircraft – the American refuelling instructions still clearly readable on one canister in a local Baath party headquarters – was proof that their claim was at least partly true. The Iranians had damaged homes and schools in Fao – though their pilots could hardly be expected to distinguish between ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ targets during their high-speed low-level attacks.
Fao was almost deserted. I watched many of its inhabitants – part of the constant flow of millions of refugees which are part of Middle East history – driving north-west to Basra in a convoy of old wooden Chevrolet taxis, bedding piled on the roofs and chador-clad mothers and wives on the back seats, scarcely bothering to glance at the burning refineries of Abadan. They were Iraqi Shia Muslims and now they were under fire from their fellow Shias in Iran, another gift from Saddam.
Already I was beginning to realise that this war might not be so easy to win as the Iraqi authorities would have us believe. In Washington and London, the usual military ‘experts’ and fossilised ex-generals were holding forth on the high quality of the Iraqi army, the shambles of post-revolutionary Iran, the extraordinary firepower of Iraq’s largely Soviet equipped forces. But on 30 September, eight days after their invasion, the Iraqis could only claim that they were 15 kilometres from Khorramshahr – the old Abbasid harbour which was Iran’s largest port, and closer than ‘surrounded’ Abadan.
I crossed the river from Basra, trailing behind convoys of military trucks carrying bridge-building equipment – the Iraqis had yet to cross the Iranian Karun river north of Khorramshahr – and headed into the blistering, white desert towards the Iranian border post at Shalamcheh. I overtook dozens of T-62 tanks and Russian-made armour and trucks piled with soldiers, all of whom obligingly gave us two-finger victory signs. The air thumped with the sound of heavy artillery, and on a little hill in the desert I came across the wrecked Iranian frontier station, stopped the car and gingerly walked inside. I was in Iran, occupied Iran. No problem with visas now, I thought. It’s always an obscure thrill to enter a country with an invading army, knowing how furious all those pious little visa officers would be – those who kept me waiting for hours in boiling, tiny rooms, the perspiration crawling through my hair – if they could see me crossing their borders without their wretched, indecipherable stamps in my passport. Pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini had been ritually defaced on the walls of Shalamcheh frontier station and a large pile of handwritten ledgers were strewn over the floor.
I have a fascination for the documents that blow through the ruins of war, the pages of letters home and the bureaucracy of armies and the now useless instructions on how to fire ground-to-air missiles that flutter across the desert and cover the floors of roofless factories. These books were written in Persian and recorded the names and car numbers of Iraqis and Iranians crossing the border at Shalamcheh. The last entry was on 21 September 1980, just a day before the Iraqi invasion. So although the Iraqis claimed that the war began on 4 September, they had allowed travellers – including their own citizens – to transit the border quite routinely until the very eve of their invasion.
An American camera-crew had pulled up outside the wreckage of the building and were dutifully filming the desecrated pictures of Khomeini, their reporter already practising his ‘stand-upper’. ‘Iraq’s army smashed its way across the Iranian frontier more than a week ago and now stands poised outside the strategic cities of Khorramshahr and Abadan …’ Yes, cities were always ‘strategic’ – at least, they always were on television – and armies must always ‘smash’ through borders and stand ‘poised’ outside cities. It was as if there was only one script for each event. Soon, no doubt, the Iraqis would be ‘fighting their way’ towards Khorramshahr, or ‘poised’ to enter Khorramshahr, or ‘claiming victory’ over the Iranian defenders.
But who was I to talk? My CBC tape recorder hung over my shoulder and behind the border post stood a battery of Russian 155-mm guns, big beasts whose barrels pointed towards Khorramshahr and whose artillery captain walked up to us smiling and asked politely if we would like his guns to open fire. For a millisecond, for just that little fraction of temptation, I wanted to agree, to say yes, I would like them to fire, just the moment I had finished adjusting my microphone; and the captain was already turning to give the order to fire when a moral voice shouted at me – I had just imagined the tearing apart of an unknown body – and I ran after him and said, no, no, he should not fire, not for me, not under any circumstances.
But of course, I found a basin in the sand and sat down in it and leaned on the lip of the hole with my microphone on the edge and I waited as a desert gale blew over me and the sand caught in my hair and nose and ears and then, when the first artillery piece much later blasted a shell towards the Iranian lines, I switched on the recorder. I still have the cassette tape. The guns were dark against the sky as they bellowed away and I kept thinking of Wilfred Owen’s description of ‘the long black arm about to curse’. And there were twenty, thirty long black arms in front of me, more still behind the curtains of sand. And there, I recorded, unwittingly, my own future loss of hearing, 25 per cent of the hearing in my left ear which I would never recover. That very moment is recorded on the cassette:
We can see the gunnery officer just in front of us through this desert dust storm, feeding shells into the breeches of these big 155-mm Russian-made guns and preparing to cover their ears. The guns are so loud, they are leaving my ears singing afterwards – BANG – There’s another one just gone off, a great tongue of fire about 20 feet – BANG – in front of it – BANG – They’re going off all around me at the moment, an incredible sight, this heavy artillery firing right in the middle of a – BANG – there’s another one, right in the middle of this dusty, windswept desert.
I can still hear that gun’s distant echo in my ears as I write these words, a piercing tinnitus that can drive me crazy at night or when I’m tired or irritable or trying to listen to music or can’t hear someone talking to me at dinner.
I turned on Iraqi radio. Further Iranian territory was about to ‘fall’ and Iraqi generals were announcing a ‘last push’ into Khorramshahr. Five days ago, the inhabitants of Basra were content to listen to news of the Iraqi advance on television, but now traders and shopkeepers in the city chose to supplement their knowledge by asking foreign journalists for information about the war. No one thought Iranian shells would still be falling on Iraqi soil this long after the invasion.
That evening, we were invited to tour Basra District Hospital, a bleak building of tiles and pale blue paint, a barrack-like edifice whose uniformity was relieved only by the neat flower-beds outside, the energetic doctors and, more recently, by the ubiquitous presence of Dr Saadun Khalifa Al-Tikriti, Iraq’s deputy health minister. He was saluted and clapped on the back wherever he went, a short, friendly fellow with a mischievous smile and a large moustache. Everyone greeted Dr al-Tikriti with exaggerated warmth, and when the minister made a joke, gales of laughter swept down the marble corridors. Basra hospital had taken almost all the city’s five hundred wounded this past week but al-Tikriti had more than just his patients on his mind when he toured the wards. Foreign press correspondents were greeted with a short, sharp speech about the evils of civilian bombing, and the doctor stopped smiling and thumped his little fist on the table when he claimed that the Iranian air force deliberately killed Iraqi children.
He strode into a children’s ward, a long, curtained room where tiny, awe-struck faces peered from beneath swaths of bandages while silent mothers stared with peasant intensity at the white-coated doctors. ‘Take, for example, this little girl,’ said the good doctor, pausing for a moment beside a child with beautiful round brown eyes and curled black hair. ‘She is only three years old and she has lost a leg.’ With these words, al-Tikriti seized the sheets and swept them from the child to reveal that indeed her left leg was nothing but a bandaged stump. The little girl frowned in embarrassment at her sudden nakedness but al-Tikriti had already moved on, preceded by a uniformed militiaman. In civilian life, the militiaman was a hospital dresser but his camouflage jacket and holstered pistol provided a strange contrast to the hospital as he clumped around the beds, especially when we reached the end of the second children’s ward.
For there in a darkened corner lay a boy of five, swaddled in bandages, terribly burned by an Iranian incendiary bomb and clearly not far from death. There were plastic tubes in his nostrils and gauze around his chest and thighs, and his eyes were creased with pain and tears, the doors to a small private world of torment that we did not wish to imagine. The boy had turned his face towards his pillow, breathing heavily; so the militiaman moved forward, seized the little bandaged head and twisted it upwards for the inspection of the press. The child gasped with pain but when a journalist protested at this treatment, he was told that the militiaman was medically trained.
Dr al-Tikriti then briskly ushered us to the next bed and the child was left to suffer in grace, having supposedly proved a measure of Iranian iniquity that he would certainly never comprehend. An air raid siren growled and there was, far away, a smattering of anti-aircraft fire. There were other wards, of Bangladeshi seamen caught by strafing Iranian jets, thin men who scrabbled with embarrassment for their sheets when Dr al-Tikriti stripped the bedding from their naked bodies, a new generation of amputated, legless beggars for the streets of Dacca. There were oil workers caught in the cauldron of petroleum tank explosions, roasted faces staring at the ceiling, and for one terrible moment the doctors began to take off the bandage round a man’s face. Al-Tikriti smiled brightly. ‘Some of these people speak English,’ he said, gesturing at the huddles on the beds. ‘Why not ask them what happened?’
No one took up the offer but Iraq’s deputy health minister was already ushering his guests to the training hospital by the Shatt al-Arab, a six-storey block that looked more like a government ministry than a medical centre. Iranian cannon fire had punctured the fourth floor, wounding four patients, and the doctor claimed that this, too, was a deliberate attack, since the hospital had flown white flags with the red crescent on them. But the flags were only six foot square and the dark crescent painted upon the flat roof by the doctors merged with the colour of the concrete. Al-Tikriti pointed to the splashes of blood on the ceiling. ‘Arabs would never do this,’ he said. ‘They would never attack civilians.’ But as he was leaving the building, a battered, open-top truck drew up. There were two corpses in the back, half-covered by a dirty blanket, four bare brown feet poking from the bottom. The driver asked what he should do with the bodies but Dr al-Tikriti saw no journalists nearby. ‘Take them round the back,’ he told the driver.
The first commandos of the Iraqi army broke through to the west bank of the Karun river on the Shatt al-Arab at 12.23 Iraq time on the afternoon of 2 October, four small figures running along the Khorramshahr quayside past lines of burned-out and derailed trucks, bowling hand grenades down the dockside. I was able to watch them through Iraqi army binoculars from just 400 metres away, peering above sandbags in a crumbling mud hut while an Iraqi sniper beside me blasted away at the Iranian lines on the other side of the Karun river.
Pierre Bayle of Agence France-Presse was beside me, a tough, pragmatic man with a refusal to panic that must have come from his days as a French foreign legionnaire. ‘Not bad, not bad,’ he would mutter to me every time an Iraqi moved forward down the quayside. ‘These guys aren’t bad.’ It was an extraordinary sight, an infantry attack that might have come from one of those romanticised oil paintings of the Crimean war, one soldier running after another through the docks, throwing themselves behind sandbags when rockets exploded round them and then hurling grenades at the last Iranian position on the river bank. The Iranians fought back with machine guns and rockets. For over an hour, their bullets hissed and whizzed through the small island plantation on which we had taken refuge, smacking into the palm trees above us and clanging off the metal pontoon bridge that connected the island to the Iraqi mainland. Only hours earlier, the Iraqis had succeeded in crossing the Karun 4 kilometres upstream from the Shatt al-Arab, sending a tank section across the river and beginning – at last – the encirclement of the Iranians in Abadan. Iran’s own radio admitted that ‘enemy troops’ had ‘infiltrated’ north of the city.
The Karun river runs into the Shatt al-Arab at right angles and it was almost opposite this confluence – from the flat, plantation island of Um al-Rassas in the middle of the Shatt itself – that we finally watched the Iraqis take the riverfront. Behind them, Iraqi shells smashed into a group of abandoned Chieftain tanks, deserted by their Iranian crews when their retreat was cut off by the Karun. All morning and afternoon, the Iraqis fired shells into Abadan, an eerie, jet-like noise that howled right over our heads on the little island.
Shells travel too fast for the naked eye, but after some time I realised that their shadows moved over the river, flitting across the water and the little paddyfields, then dropping towards Abadan where terrific explosions marked their point of impact. I could not take my eyes off this weird phenomenon. As the projectiles reached their maximum altitude before dropping back to earth, the little shadows – small, ominous points of darkness that lay upon the river – would hover near us, as if a miniature cloud had settled on the water. Then the shadow would grow smaller and begin to move with frightening velocity towards the far shore and be lost in the sunlight.
On the other bank of the river, one of these shells set a big ship ablaze; a sheet of flame over 100 metres in height ran along its deck from bow to stern. Its centre was a circle of white intensity, so bright that I could feel my face burning and my eyes hurting as I stared at it. At times, the din of Iraqi artillery fire and the explosion of Iranian shells around our little mud hut was so intense that the Iraqi troops crouched behind the windows and alleyways of the abandoned village on the island could not make themselves heard. An army captain – the small gold medallion on his battledress proof of his Baath party membership – was fearful that his riflemen might shoot into their own troops on the far side of the river, and repeatedly gave orders that they should turn their fire further downstream. One Iraqi sniper, a tall man with a broad chest, big, beefy arms and a scar on his left cheek, walked into our shabby mud hut holding a long Soviet Dragunov rifle with telescopic sights. He grinned at us like a schoolboy, scratched his face, placed his weapon at the broken window and fired off two rounds at the Iranians. Whenever a shell landed near us, the palm trees outside shook and pieces of mud fell from the ceiling.
At last, it seemed, the Iraqis might be marrying up reality with their propaganda. If they could take Khorramshahr and Abadan and so control both banks of the Shatt al-Arab, they would have placed their physical control over the entire waterway – one of the ostensible reasons for the war. There were reports that the Iraqis were now making headway towards Dezful, 80 kilometres inside Iran, as well as Ahwaz, although claims that they had already captured the Ahwaz radio station were hard to believe. They had originally captured it twelve days earlier, but journalists later watched it blown to pieces by Iranian shells. And there was no denying the ferocity of Iran’s defence of Abadan. Even in Khorramshahr, they were still fighting, their snipers firing from the top of the quayside cranes.
The Iraqi soldiers in our hut had warned us of them as we were about to leave Um al-Rassas. Although they could not see us near the hut, the Iranians had a clear view over the top of the palm plantation once we arrived at the lonely iron bridge that linked the island to the western shore of the Shatt al-Arab. Pierre Bayle and I walked quickly between the trees, hearing the occasional snap of bullets but unworried until we reached the river’s edge. There again, I could see the shadow of the shells moving mysteriously across the water. ‘Robert, we are going to have to run,’ Bayle said, but I disagreed. Perhaps it was the bright sunlight, the heavenly green of the palms that made me believe – or wish to believe – that no one would disturb our retreat across the bridge.
I was wrong, of course. As soon as we set off across the narrow iron bridge, the bullets started to crack around us, many of them so close that I could feel the air displacement of their trajectory. I saw a line of spray travelling across the river towards us – I was running now, but I still had the dangerous, childish ability to reflect that this was just how it looked in Hollywood films, the little puffs of water stitching their way at speed towards the bridge. And then they were pinging into the ironwork, spitting around us, ricochets and aimed shots. I actually saw a square of metal flattened by a round a few inches from my face. I ran faster but was gripped by a kind of stasis, a feeling – most perilous of all – that this cannot be happening and that if it is, then perhaps I should accept whatever harm is to come to me. Within seconds, Bayle was beside me, taking the cassette recorder from me, screaming ‘Run, run’ in my left ear, physically pushing me from behind and then, when we neared the end of the bridge, grabbing me by the arm and jumping with me into the water of the Shatt al-Arab, the bullets still skitting around us. We waded the last metres to shore, scrambled up the bank and plunged into the palm grove as a cluster of mortar shells burst around the bridge, the shrapnel clanging off the iron.
Amid the trees, an Iraqi platoon was banging off mortars towards Khorramshahr. The sergeant beckoned to Pierre and myself, and there, amid his soldiers, we lay down exhausted in the dirt. One of his men brought us tea and I looked at Bayle and he just nodded at me. I thought at first that he was telling me how bad things had been, how closely we had escaped with our lives. Then I realised he was thinking what I was thinking: that Saddam had bitten off more than he could chew, that this might not be a whirlwind war at all but a long, gruelling war of aggression. When we returned to the Hamdan Hotel that afternoon, I typed up my story on the old telex machine, sent the tape laboriously through to London, went to my room and slept for fifteen hours. The smell of adventure was beginning to rub off.
So why did we go back for more? Why did I tell the Times foreign desk that although I was short of money, I would stay on in Basra? To be sure, I wanted to see a little bit more of this history I was so dangerously witnessing. If it was true that Saddam had grotesquely underestimated the effect of his aggression – and the Iranians were fighting back with great courage – then eventually the Iraqi army might heed Khomeini’s appeal and revolt. This could mean the end of Saddam’s regime or – the American and Arab nightmare – an Iranian occupation of Iraq and another Shiite Islamic Republic.
But war is also a vicarious, painful, attractive, unique experience for a journalist. Somehow that narcotic has to be burned off. If it’s not, the journalist may well die. We were young. I was fresh from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, already immersed in covering the Lebanese civil war and the effects of Israel’s first 1978 invasion. I had covered the Iranian revolution, the very crucible of this Iraq – Iran conflict. This was my war. Or so I felt as we set off each morning for the Iraqi front lines. And thus it was one burning morning along the Shatt al-Arab, this time with Gavin and his crew, that I almost died again. Once more, I was carrying CBC’s recording equipment and so – before writing these paragraphs – I have listened once more to that day’s tape; and I can hear myself, heart thumping, when I first began to understand how frightening war is.
Most of the ships on the far side of the river were now on fire, a pageant of destruction that lent itself to every camera. But again, we had to approach the river through the Iraqi lines and the Iranians now had men tied by ropes to the cranes along the opposite river bank who were holding rocket-propelled grenades as well as rifles. Here is the text of the audio-track that I was ad-libbing for CBC:
FISK: We’re walking through this deserted village now, there really doesn’t seem to be anybody here, just a few Iraqi soldiers on rooftops and we can’t see them. But there’s a lot of small-arms fire very near. Sound of gunfire, growing in intensity. Yes, the car’s just over there, Gavin.
HEWITT: Down here.
FISK: Yes, there they are. Sound of shooting, much closer this time. I’m beginning to wonder why I got into journalism. My heartbeats are breaking up my commentary. Going through the courtyard of what was obviously a school – there are school benches laid out here.
The sound of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade followed by a thunderous explosion that obliterates the commentary and breaks the audio control on the recorder.
FISK: Back over here, I think, round this way. Dozens of shots and the sound of Gavin, the BBC crew and Fisk running for their lives, gasping for breath. Just trying to get back to the car to get to safety. Ouch, that’s too near. I think they can see us wandering around. Let’s go! Let’s go! There’s …
HEWITT (to crew): Yah, c’mon, c’mon, we’re getting out of here. Can we go? Damn!
And then, listening to this tape, I hear us urging our Iraqi driver to leave, shouting at him to leave. ‘Go, just go!’ one of us screams at him in fury and, once we are moving away, I talk into the microphone, giving a message to George Lewinski and Sue Hickey in the CBC office in London:
George and Sue, I hope you’ve now listened to all that. Please, please, use as much as you can ’cos you can tell how dangerous it was. And please would you keep this cassette whatever happens – it’s a memory I want to remember for the rest of my life, sitting in my Irish cottage. Whatever you do, don’t throw it away!
The tape never made it. I gave it to our Iraqi taxi-driver in Basra to take across the border to send from Kuwait airport, but he was turned round at the frontier and arrived back four hours later outside our hotel, smiling ingratiatingly and holding my tape out of the driver’s window like a dead fish. I later transmitted it down a crackling phone line. Heaven knows what the Canadians made of it – although I was later told that a truck-driver in White Horse, Yukon, pulled over to a phone booth, dialled CBC in Toronto and asked: ‘Was that for real?’
In one sense, it was. The recording was the actual sound of four comparatively young men risking their lives for … Nothing? I’m not sure that would be true. By putting our lives on the line, we did, I suspect, give an authenticity to our work that also gave us a credibility when we came to challenge what governments – or other journalists – claimed to be true. This experience had proved to me beyond all doubt that Iraq was not going to ‘win’ this huge war. An Iranian artillery counter-attack was being sustained and, as I wrote that October – accurately but six years prematurely – ‘if this is carried to its logical conclusion, then it will not be Khorramshahr that is under shellfire from Iraqi guns but Basra that will be hit by shellfire from the Iranians.’
Across the Bailey bridge in Basra came now a steady stream of military ambulances. I ventured out to the border post at Shalamcheh again and there now were the Iraqi wounded, lying in the sand while an artillery battery beside them lobbed 155-mm shells across the border. An ambulance came bumping out of the desert and bounced to a halt in a sandy basin half surrounded by palm trees. They brought an infantryman out of it on a stretcher, pulled the blood-soaked bandages off his shoulder and laid him on a makeshift bed in the shade of the old police station. The man, shot by an Iranian sniper, was still in pain but he made no sound as three army medical orderlies fussed with drip-feed bags above him, the guns firing off a round every minute, a slamming explosion that shook the walls of the building and had the doctors wincing.
A second Iraqi casualty was brought out of the sands, a private from a tank crew who had been blasted from his vehicle, a severely shell-shocked soldier whose head lolled from side to side and whose knees buckled when his comrades carried him into the courtyard of the police station. The soldier with the shoulder wound moaned a little, and every time the big guns fired and the shells soared off towards Khorramshahr, the shell-shock victim rolled his eyes around, his arms flopping from side to side like a dummy with the stuffing knocked out of it.
