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The forward dressing station of the Iraqi army’s southern front was a grim little place and the long smears of dried blood on the floor were witness to the sacrifice the Iraqi army was having to make for ‘the whirlwind war’. The senior medical orderly was quite matter-of-fact about it. ‘This is an old building and the Iranians have it on all their maps,’ he said. ‘They will fire at it and there will be more casualties.’ He gave me a mirthless grin. Three minutes later, the Iranian shells began coming in, sending the Iraqi gunners jumping into their pits.
The driver of an army jeep on the Khorramshahr-Shalamcheh highway – supposedly safe and long secure in Iraqi hands – was burned to death when Iranian shells rained down on his convoy. Not one major Iranian city had fallen to Baghdad and, with the exception of Qasr-e Shirin to the north, all that the Iraqis had so far captured was 3,000 square kilometres of brown, waterless desert, a shabby landscape of rock and sand from which the Iranians very sensibly withdrew to fight on from the hills.
When Gavin Hewitt and I asked to visit the military hospital in Basra, we were given permission within two minutes and nobody tried to prevent us talking to the wounded soldiers inside. All the casualties told the same stories, of surprise attacks by Iranian helicopter gunships – the Cobras sold to the Shah by the Americans – and Phantom jets suddenly swooping from the east. A badly burned tank crewman described how he heard the sound of jet engines only a second before a rocket hit his tank, covering a quarter of his body in blazing petrol. A private in the Iraqi army’s transport command was blown from his jeep south of Ahwaz by a rocket fired from an Iranian helicopter; as he lay in the road, a Phantom appeared from the sun and bombed his colleagues who were staggering from the wrecked vehicle.
By 5 October, the Iraqis entered Khorramshahr at last, and we went with them. We found a burning, smashed city and just one old Arab Iranian – sole representative of the millions of Arabs of ‘Arabistan’ whom Saddam was seeking to ‘save’ – squatting on the stone floor of his mud home, a man with deep lines on his face and a white beard, brewing tea for an Iraqi soldier and ignoring the questions of strangers. He had been ‘liberated’. This, after all, was the city where the representative of the Iranian embassy siege gunmen in London came from, the city he called al-Mohammorah. This was to be Saddam’s Danzig, the desert beyond was his Sudetenland. The Iraqis were going to rescue the Arabs of Iran, but we could only walk down one main street of the city, a battered thoroughfare of broken telegraph poles and blackened, single-storey shops where tired Iraqi troops, their faces stained with mud, sat on doorsteps and talked under the cover of sheets of corrugated iron.
General Adnan Khairallah, the Iraqi defence minister and Saddam’s first cousin, had offered a ceasefire to the Iranians – to show Iraq’s ‘peaceful intentions’ in front of the world rather than any Iraqi desire to withdraw from Iranian territory – but six and a half hours after the unilateral truce came into effect, the Iranians opened fire on occupied Khorramshahr. We had been sitting in the courtyard of a broken villa near the Karun river, listening to a Colonel Ramseh of the Iraqi army – his eyes bloodshot, head hanging with fatigue – as he claimed that his troops had taken control of the city and its harbour, when shells showered down onto the houses and orchards around us.
‘Please go now because it is not safe,’ a brigadier pleaded as explosions began to crash around the bridge at the end of the street. An Iraqi commando was led through the gate, blood dribbling down his right cheek from a shrapnel wound. The Iraqi Special Forces soldiers – no longer laughing and making their familiar victory signs at journalists – sat round the edge of an empty fish pond and stared at us glumly. Iranian Revolutionary Guards were still holding out in the heavily damaged buildings on the western side of the Karun and they drove six Chieftain tanks past the central post office, firing shells at the nearest Iraqi command post until one of them was hit by a rocket. Running from the villa, I had just enough time to see an Iraqi tank, its barrel traversing wildly and its tracks thrashing through the rubbish along the street as it drove towards the centre of the city.
The Iraqis now had tanks positioned along the Khorramshahr waterfront. They must have entered the port very suddenly, for the docks were still strewn with empty goods wagons, half-empty crates and burning containers hanging from damaged cranes. From some of the containers, Iraqi soldiers were stealing the contents, making off with a bizarre combination of Suzuki motorcycles, footballs, Dutch cattle-feed and Chinese ping-pong bats.
The ships along the quayside had been under fire for days. The chief officer of the Yugoslav freighter Krasica leant over the after-deck of his bullet-flecked ship and grinned broadly. ‘Both sides shelled us all the time – for fifteen days,’ he shouted. ‘We sat down below, played cards and drank beer – what else could we do?’ It must have been bad, because the man did not even look eastwards along the waterfront where smoke poured from a burning ship. The Italian freighter Capriella had had its bridge, funnel and superstructure gutted by fire. The crew of another Italian vessel had quenched the fires of a first bombardment but then fled to a Korean freighter whose crew refused to let them aboard; they were eventually given sanctuary on a Greek ship. The Chinese Yung Chun had rocket and bullet holes in its hull. Further east, there were larger vessels, all burning furiously.
None of these ships would ever sail again. They would remain, charred wrecks along the harbour-side, for eight more years. But in Basra, the ninety big freighters moored along the quays, their crews still aboard and keeping steam up for a quick escape if a real ceasefire took hold, would still be rotting away at the harbour almost a quarter of a century later. It was a mournful development for a port city founded by the Caliph Omar Ibn Khattab in 638, a harbour occupied by the British in 1914 and 1941 and 2003. British mercantile interests had been here since 1643, and behind the city’s six stinking canals it was still possible to find the carved wooden façades and elaborate shutters of Ottoman houses. The Caliph Omar had decreed that no one should be permitted to cut down the city’s date palms, although thousands of them now stood, decapitated or blackened by fire in plantations ribbed by streams into which nineteenth-century steamships had long ago been secreted, rotting museums of industrial technology which were no doubt launched with appropriate triumph when they went down the slipways of Birkenhead and Belfast two generations earlier. In what the Basra tourist office, in a moment of unfortunate enthusiasm, dubbed ‘the Venice of the East’, it was still possible to come across the relics of empire. The Shatt al-Arab Hotel had been a staging post for the British Imperial Airways flying boats that would set down on the Shatt and deposit their passengers in a lounge still decorated with scale models of British-built ships.
Every day now, the Iraqis were learning that victory would not be theirs – not at least for weeks, maybe months, even years. The Iraqi army around Khorramshahr moved forward only 8 kilometres in ten days. In the city, an Iraqi army colonel in a paratrooper’s red beret and carrying a swagger stick agreed with us that the Iranians were still fighting hard. Even as he spoke, a young soldier covered in blood was carried past us, the wounded man screaming that he was dying. ‘We thought the Iranians would not fight,’ another officer said to me that day. ‘But now I believe they will fight on, whatever happens.’
Officially, no one would suggest such a thing. ‘You must come – you must come,’ a ministry of information minder shouted to us in the lobby of the Hamdan Hotel. ‘You must see the Iranian prisoners.’ It was to be the first display of prisoners by both sides in the war, a theatrical presentation that would eventually involve thousands of captured soldiers, a press ‘opportunity’ which was a gross breach of the Geneva Convention. But we went along that bright October morning to see what the Iranians looked like. ‘Animals in a cell’ was Gavin’s apt comment.* (#)
They were sitting in the far corner of a concrete-walled barrack hut, a dishevelled group of dark-haired young men, some in bandages and all in the drab, uncreased khaki uniform of the Iranian army. Unshaved, the seventeen men gaped at the television cameras as they sat on the bare mattresses that had been their beds for the past three days. ‘You are not permitted to talk to them,’ an Iraqi army major announced, and the Iranians looked again at the lenses and microphones that were thrust expectantly towards them. Asked by a journalist if any of the prisoners spoke English, a young bearded man below the latticed window said that he spoke German but the major shut him up. ‘They were taken prisoner at Ahwaz and Mohammorah,’ the major said. ‘What more do you want to know?’
But the prisoners talked with their hands and faces. About half had been injured, their heads and arms in bandages. A thin young man by the wall slyly made a victory sign with his fingers. Five prisoners had been told to hold copies of a Baghdad newspaper that pictured Saddam Hussein on the front page, but they had folded the paper in such a way that the portrait was no longer visible. The Iranian soldier who spoke German smiled and nodded at us as we were herded from the barracks hut. Then the Iraqi major announced that two prisoners would talk to us if we promised to take no pictures. Two sad, drawn young men, one with his chest bandaged in plaster, were eventually led into a messroom where a picture of Saddam, a Gainsborough reproduction and a bunch of pink plastic flowers vied for space along the wall.
The two soldiers were seated on steel chairs in the centre of the room while government officials and the major stood round them in order to ‘translate’. The wounded prisoner clutched his hands nervously and began to shake. The major wagged his finger in front of the first soldier. ‘They are asking about your casualties,’ he said. The man shrugged and proclaimed his ignorance. ‘I am an Iranian soldier,’ he said quietly. Were the Iranian mullahs in charge of the Iranian army, journalists asked, and the major translated this question as: ‘Aren’t religious people influencing your officers?’ It was true, the prisoner said sullenly. ‘The spirit of our soldiers is not what it used to be.’
And what, the world’s press wanted to know, did the two prisoners think of Ayatollah Khomeini? The major mistranslated the question thus: ‘Now that things have gone so badly for you, what do you think of Khomeini?’ The first prisoner replied that ‘opinion’ of the Ayatollah would not be the same after the war. But the wounded man glanced quickly at us and said that ‘if Ayatollah Khomeini brought on a war between two Muslim countries, this was wrong.’ The conditional clause in this reply was lost on the Iraqi major who then happily ordered the removal of the prisoners.
The Iraqi army, it seemed, would go to any lengths to display proof of victory and it spent a further hour showing off Iranian hardware captured in Khorramshahr. There was an American-made anti-tank launcher – made by the Hughes aircraft company and coded DAA-HOI-70-C-0525 – a clutch of Soviet-made armoured vehicles and an American personnel carrier on which the Iraqis had spray-painted their own definitive and revealing slogan for the day. ‘Captured,’ it said, ‘from the racist Persian Asians.’ Captured armour was to become a wearying part of the now increasingly government-controlled coverage of the war.
They bussed us up to Amara, 160 kilometres north of Basra and only 50 kilometres from the Iranian border, to show us twenty Chieftain tanks seized on the central front around Ahwaz, a fraction of the 800 Chieftains that Britain had sold to the Shah. Some had been hit by shells or grenades but we clambered onto them. A partly damaged hulk was lying in a field with its hatch open, and in I climbed to sit in the driver’s seat. A pouch on the wall to my left still contained the British Ministry of Defence tank manual – marked ‘Restricted’ and coded WO 14557–1 – although how the Iranian crews were supposed to translate the English was a mystery. I had sat there for a minute when it occurred to me that the crew probably did not survive their encounter with the Iraqis and I turned my head slowly to the gunner’s seat to my right. And there, sure enough, lay the grisly remains of the poor young Iranian who had gone into battle a few days ago, a carbonised skeleton with the burned tatters of his uniform hanging to his bones like little black flags, the skull still bearing the faint remains of flesh.
But the Iraqis could not conceal their own losses. North of Basra I came across an orange and white taxi standing at a petrol station, the driver talking to the garage hand, not even bothering to glance at the long wooden box on top of his vehicle. Coffins in Iraq are usually carried on the roofs of cars, and all that was different in this case was that an Iraqi flag was wrapped around the box. A soldier was going home for burial.
According to the Baathist Al-Thawra, there had been only two Iraqi soldiers killed in the previous twenty-four hours, which meant that I had – quite by chance – come across 50 per cent of the previous day’s fatalities. But there were four other taxis on the same road, all heading north with their gloomy cargoes, the red, white and black banner with its three stars flapping on the rooftop coffins. We did not see these cars in the early days of the war, nor the scores of military ambulances that now clogged the roads. On just one day in the first week of October alone, the army brought 480 bodies to the military hospital mortuary in Baghdad. If these corpses came from just the central sector of the battle front, then the daily toll of dead could be as high as six or seven hundred. Even the Iraqi press was now extolling the glory that soldiers achieved when ‘sacrificing’ themselves in battle, and Saddam Hussein, visiting wounded civilians in Kirkuk on 12 October, described their injuries as ‘medals of honour’.
Iraqi television’s lavish coverage of the conflict – the ‘Whirlwind War’ theme music had now been dropped – was filled with tanks and guns and smashed Iranian aircraft, but there were no photographs of the dead of either side. When the station entertained its viewers with Gary Cooper in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the authorities clumsily excised a sequence showing the bodies of Spanish Republican troops lying on a road. Later the Iraqis would show Iranian corpses in large and savage detail.
Among the other British reporters in Basra was Jon Snow of ITN, whose courage and humour made him an excellent colleague in time of great danger but who could never in his life have imagined the drama into which he would be propelled in mid-October 1980. ‘Snowy’, whose imitations of Prince Charles should have earned him a place in vaudeville,* (#) was regularly reporting to camera from the bank of the Shatt al-Arab south of Basra. However, watching his dispatches in London was the owner of the Silverline Shipping Company, who had been desperately searching for six weeks for the location of his British-captained 22,000-ton soya bean oil carrier Al-Tanin.
And suddenly, there on the screen behind Snow’s shoulder, he spotted his missing vessel, still afloat but obviously in the middle of a battle. The Foreign Office could do nothing to help, so the owner immediately asked Snow to be his official shipping agent in Basra and telexed his new appointment to him for the benefit of the Iraqi authorities. There were fifty-six souls aboard, nine of them British, and they had only one way of contacting the outside world; among the dozens of ships marooned in the city’s harbour was a vessel captained by a Norwegian who was in daily contact with the Al-Tanin and who confirmed to Snow that the trapped captain and his crew were anxious to be rescued.
Snow decided to enlist the help of the Iraqi military and swim out to the ship at night to arrange the rescue of the crew. But neither the navy nor the Iraqi authorities in Basra could provide him with anything but a tourist map of the all-important waterway for which Saddam had partly gone to war. This, of course, was Snow’s exclusive story – a ‘spectacular’ if he brought it off, a human and political tragedy for the crew, Snow and ITN if it ended in disaster – but he told me privately of his difficulty in obtaining a map of the river. ‘Now listen, Fisky, old boy, if you can find a decent map, I’ll let you come along,’ he said. I immediately remembered my grandfather Edward, first mate on the Cutty Sark, and all that I had read about the merchant marine. Every ship’s master, I knew, was required to carry detailed charts of the harbours and waterways he used. So I hunted down a profusely bearded Baltic sea-captain whose freighter lay alongside in Basra docks, and he agreed to lend me his old British Admiralty survey of the Shatt al-Arab. This magnificent document – a work of oceanographic art as much as technical competence – was duly photocopied and presented to the frogmen of the Iraqi navy.
All the elements of high adventure were in place: the Al-Tanin’s captain with the splendidly nautical name of Dyke, who thought up the rescue mission in the first place; Jack Simmons, the British consular official with a round face and small rimless spectacles who arrived unannounced in Basra but could get no help from the Iraqis. There was even a handsome major in the Iraqi navy, a grey-haired, quiet man who gallantly risked his life for the crew of the British ship. He never gave us his name, so Snow always referred to him warmly as ‘our Major’. Then there was 32-year-old Snow, his crew – cameraman Chris Squires and soundman Nigel Thompson – and Fisk, who would come to regard this as the last journalistic Boy’s Own Paper story of his life. The rest of my reporting would be about tragedy.
The Al-Tanin had moored in the Shatt five weeks earlier to unload its cargo of cooking oil by lighter. But when the war began, it found itself – like all the other big ships in the river – trapped between two armies; machine-gun and rifle fire raked the waterway and on several days the crew watched low-level rockets skim the surface of the river around the Al-Tanin’s hull. Captain Dyke talked to Snow over the Norwegian captain’s radio and suggested Snow should try a rescue attempt on 15 October. This would be ’Operation Pear’; if it failed or was postponed, Snow could try again on 16 October when the rescue would become ’Operation Apple’. ‘Our Major’, however, wanted to visit Dyke aboard the Al-Tanin to discuss the escape. Dyke agreed to what he called a ‘fibre ascent’ – assuming any Iranian listeners to his conversation would not know this meant a rope – if they swam out to his ship.
At nine o’clock at night on 15 October, therefore, a strange band wound its way through the soggy, waterlogged plantation of an island on the Shatt al-Arab – not far from Um al-Rassas, from which Pierre Bayle and I had made our own escape just a few days earlier. The major and two of his frogmen, Snow – in black wet suit with flippers in hand – Squires, Thompson and myself. We must have made a remarkable spectacle, clopping along through the darkness of the tropical island to the stretch of river where we knew the Al-Tanin was at anchor, dragging with us a rubber boat for Snow’s rescue attempt. In the darkness, we slipped off mud tracks into evil-smelling lagoons, slithered into long-forgotten dykes and lumbered over creaking, rotten bridges. Once, when we set the abandoned village dogs barking, Iranian snipers opened up on the plantation and for more than a minute we listened to the bullets whining around us at hip height as the Iranians tried to guess where the intruders were.
Even before we reached the river bank, we could see the Al-Tanin, her superstructure fully lit up, her riding lights agleam, just as Captain Dyke had promised they would be. The ship’s generators echoed through the hot palm forest and her bright orange funnel appeared surrealistically through the shadows of the tree trunks. Snow and the major were the first to see what was wrong. Dyke had told them to board his ship at 9.30 p.m. on the starboard side of the vessel, when the tide would have turned it towards the western, Iraqi bank of the river. He had illuminated the starboard hull for this reason. But it was the darkened port side of the Al-Tanin that faced us. Every Iranian could see the brightly-lit starboard of the ship right in front of the Iranian lines. Snow sat on the bank, squeezed into his flippers and stared at the ship. ‘Bugger!’ he said. We all looked at Snow. He looked at the major. So did the frogmen. Snow would later come to regard the episode as ‘an act of unparalleled insanity’. Squires, Thompson and I were all profoundly grateful we would not be part of this shooting match.
Then Snow slid into the muddy waters, the major and the two other naval frogmen beside him, clambering into their rubber boat, pushing and paddling it out into the river. So strong was the current – the tide was now at its height – that it took them twenty minutes to travel the 200 metres to the ship and at one point, staring at them through binoculars, I could see they were in danger of being taken right past the vessel and out into the open river. But they caught a ladder on the darkened port side and climbed aboard.
Snow first encountered members of the Filipino crew who appeared ‘terrified of the apparition’ of the television reporter in black wet suit and flippers. But it was only when he met a surprised but otherwise exuberant Captain Dyke that Snow discovered he had not been expected for another three hours. Ships worked to GMT, not to local time, in their ports of call, and Iraqi time was three hours ahead of GMT. Had Snow and his Iraqi major turned up at half-past midnight according to Iraqi clocks – 9.30 p.m. GMT – the illuminated starboard side of the ship would have faced Iraq.
Snow, the major and Dyke agreed that twenty-three of the ship’s crew would head for the shoreline in a lifeboat at 3.30 a.m. and we watched Snow’s rubber boat moving silently back across the river towards us. So we all sat through the long hours of darkness, watching the Al-Tanin’s riding lights reflecting on the fast-moving water as the big ship at last turned on the tide, and seeing – behind the vessel – the fires of Abadan. Distant guns bellowed in the night as the mosquitoes clustered round us for greedy company. At one point, Snow looked at me. ‘One does feel this tremendous sense of responsibility,’ he said. I was wondering how the Prince of Wales would pronounce that – the phrase was pure Prince Charles – when two red torch flashes sparkled from the ship’s deck. ’Operation Pear’ had begun. Snow sent two lamp flashes back. A hydraulic winch – painfully loud over the river’s silence – hummed away, followed by a harsh, metallic banging. The gate to the lifeboat had jammed. We could see the crew waiting on deck to disembark and we shared their feelings as the tell-tale hammer-blows echoed over the river towards the Iranians.
Then the lifeboat was down, its gunwales dipping towards us, carving ripples of water which the Iranians really should have seen. But when the boat thumped into the mud of our riverbank at 4 a.m., even the Iraqi frogmen lost their edge of fearful expectation as an English girl appeared on the slippery deck and asked: ‘Will someone help me ashore?’ It was one of those quintessential moments so dear to Anglo-Saxons. The British were cheating danger again, landing on a tropical shore under a quarter moon with the possibility of a shell blowing them all to pieces and three young women to protect. And so delighted were we to see the little lifeboat that we tugged its crew onto the river bank with enough noise to awaken every dozing Iranian on the other side. The Iraqi naval men grinned with happiness.
Thirteen crewmen had remained behind to guard their ship, and true to the traditions of what we thought then was a post-colonial world, only seven of the twenty-three crew who were rescued were actually British. The rest were a tough but cheerful group of Filipinos, small men with laughing eyes who hooted with joy when, with the British, we tugged them ashore and pushed them unceremoniously into an Iraqi army entrenchment behind us. Many of the Filipinos handed up to me their duty-free treasures, radios and television sets and – in one case – a washing machine which I dumped in the mud. They were hastily led off by Iraqi troops into the forest.
The first officer expressed his concern for those crewmen left aboard, the engineer announced that he would take a long holiday. Teresa Hancock, a crewman’s bride from Stoke-on-Trent, had been honeymooning aboard and had celebrated her twenty-first birthday on the Shatt al-Arab three days earlier with a small party. But if ever there was a happy story, this was it. The Iraqi navy had acquitted itself with some glory – performing a genuinely humanitarian act with courage and professionalism – and ‘Snowy’ got his scoop. Indeed, Snow announced that he would henceforth be known as Al-Thalaj – Arabic for ‘snow’. As for ‘our Major’, we went to thank him later and found him in his air-conditioned office, sipping yoghurt and grinning from ear to ear, knowing full well that he had – in the tradition of Sir Francis Drake – singed the Ayatollah’s beard.
Snow packaged his film and gave it to me to take to Kuwait, where a private jet had been hired by America’s NBC to take both their own and ITN’s news film to Amman for satelliting to New York and London. As the Learjet soared into the air, the purser offered me smoked salmon sandwiches and a glass of champagne. From Amman I filed the story of the Al-Tanin to The Times. Then I sank into the deepest bed of the Intercontinental Hotel and woke to find a telex with a nudge-in-the-ribs question from the foreign desk in London: ‘Why you no swam shark-infested Shatt al-Arab river?’
But here the sweet stories must end. By the end of October, the Iraqis – realising that they were bogged down in the deserts of Iran with no more chance of a swift victory – were firing ground-to-ground missiles at Iranian cities. Early in the month, 180 civilians were killed in Dezful when the Iraqis fired a rocket into the marketplace. On 26 October, at least another hundred civilians were killed when the Iraqis fired seven Russian Frog-7 missiles at Dezful. The War of the Cities had begun, a calculated attempt to depopulate Iran’s largest towns and cities through terror.
The outbreak of war in Iran had been greeted even by some of the theocratic regime’s opponents with expressions of outrage and patriotism. Thousands of middle-class women donated millions of dollars’ worth of their jewellery to Iran’s ‘war chest’. Captive in the Iranian foreign ministry, US chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen ‘knew something was happening (#) when I heard a loudspeaker outside the foreign ministry playing American marching tunes – which the Iranians used on military occasions. I heard later that the Iraqis used them too. That night, there were anti-aircraft guns being used and the sky was full of tracer. They never seemed to hit anything. In fact, when we heard the air-raid sirens, we used to relax because we knew that the Iraqi planes had already been, bombed and flown away.’
The Iranians, like Saddam, had to fight internal as well as external enemies during the war, knowing that groups like the Mujahedin-e-Qalq had the active support of the Iraqi regime. The strange death of the Iranian defence minister Mustafa Chamran on the battle front has never been fully explained. But there could be no doubt what happened when, just before 9 p.m. on 28 June 1981, a 60-pound bomb exploded at a meeting of the ruling Islamic Republican Party in Tehran, tearing apart seventy-one party leaders as they were listening to a speech by Ayatollah Mohamed Beheshti, chief justice of the supreme court, secretary of the Revolutionary Council, head of the IRP and a potential successor to Khomeini. When the bomb destroyed the iron beams of the building and 40-centimetre-thick columns were pulverised by the blast, the roof thundered down onto the victims. Among them were four cabinet ministers, six deputy ministers and twenty-seven members of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis.
Beheshti, who died with them, was an intriguing personality, his thin face, pointed grey beard and thick German accent – a remnant of his days as a resident Shiite priest in Germany – giving him the appearance of a clever eighteenth-century conspirator. When I met him in 1980, I noted that he employed ‘a unique mixture of intellectual authority and gentle wistfulness which makes him sound – and look – like a combination of Cardinal Richelieu and Sir Alec Guinness’. He had for months been intriguing against President Bani-Sadr, although the date of the latter’s removal gave Beheshti little time for satisfaction: he was murdered a week later.
He was a man with enemies, unmoved by Iran’s growing plague of executions. ‘Don’t you see,’ he explained to me with some irritation, ‘that there have been very few people sentenced to death because of their failures in the [Shah’s] ministries. Those people who have been sentenced to death are in a different category – they are opium or heroin dealers.’ This was palpably untrue. Most of the executions were for political reasons. ‘When you study the history of revolutions,’ Beheshti said, ‘you will find that there are always problems. This is normal. When people here say they are unhappy, it is because they have not experienced a revolution before. There are problems – but they will be solved.’ Beheshti’s loss was the most serious the revolution suffered – until the death of Khomeini in 1989 – because he had designed the IRP along the lines of the Soviet Communist Party, capable of binding various revolutionary movements under a single leader.
By coincidence, the bloodbath on 28 June cost the same number of lives – seventy-two – as were lost at the battle of Kerbala in 680 by Imam Hossein, his family and supporters, a fact that Khomeini was quick to point out. Saddam and America, he concluded, had struck again through the Mujahedin-e-Qalq. ‘Suppose you were an inveterate enemy (#) to the martyred Beheshti,’ Khomeini asked sarcastically, ‘… what enmity did you bear against the more than seventy innocent people, many of whom were among the best servants of society and among the most adamant enemies of the enemies of the nation?’ But on 5 August, Hassan Ayat, another influential Majlis deputy, was killed. On 30 August a second bomb killed President Mohamed Rajai, who had just replaced Bani-Sadr, and the new Iranian prime minister, Mohamed Javad Bahonar. The prosecutor general, Ayatollah Ali Quddusi, was murdered on 5 September and Khomeini’s personal representative in Tabriz, Ayatollah Asadollah Madani, six days later.
The regime hit back with ferocious repression. Schoolchildren and students figured prominently among the sixty executions a day. One estimate – that 10,000 suspects were hanged or shot (#) – would equal the number of Iranians killed in the first six months of the war with Iraq. Just as Saddam was trying to destroy the Dawa party as a militant extension of Shia Islam, so Khomeini was trying to eliminate the Mujahedin-e-Qalq as a branch of the Iraqi Baath. This duality of enemies would force both sides in the war to take ever more ruthless steps to annihilate their antagonists on the battlefield as well as in their prisons and torture chambers.
When I visited Tehran in the spring of 1982 to make my own investigations into these mass executions, survivors of Evin prison spoke to me of 8,000 hangings and shootings, of fourteen-year-old Revolutionary Guards brutalised by their participation in the killings. Among the 15,000 prisoners who were spared and were now being released – partly, it seemed, because of Amnesty International’s repeated condemnation of Islamic ‘justice’ in Iran – several vouchsafed accounts of quite appalling savagery. At one point after the Beheshti, Rajai and Bahonar murders, inmates were told to demonstrate their repentance by hanging their friends. There were three stages in this purgation: they could actually strangle their fellow prisoners, they could cut them down from the gibbet – or they could merely load their corpses into coffins. Prisoners thus emerged from Evin with souls purified but blood on their hands. Islamic socialism was almost wiped out; only a few leftists escaped death, capable of shooting at Iran’s deputy foreign minister in April 1982. But the Mujahedin-e-Qalq was broken.
Saddam eventually claimed victory over Khorramshahr and the Iranians admitted they had ‘lost touch’ with their forces still in the city. Henceforth the Iranians would call it Khuninshahr – the ‘City of Blood’. The Iraqis never captured Abadan but Saddam invested tens of thousands of troops in Khorramshahr, and Iraq announced that it would become ‘another Stalingrad’. This was an early version of the ‘mother of all battles’ that Saddam always threatened but never fought. Fifteen months after the war began, the Iraqi army found that its supply lines were stretched too far and made a strategic decision to retreat, building a massive defensive line along its border with Iran and leaving behind it a carpet of destruction. Howeiza, with an Arabic-speaking population of 35,000, had been captured by the Iraqis on 28 September 1980, but when Iranian forces re-entered the empty town in May 1982 they found that it had been levelled; only two of its 1,900 buildings were still standing: a damaged mosque used as an observation post and a house that had been a command post. Even the trees had been uprooted. This is what the Israelis had done to the Syrian city of Kuneitra after the 1967 Middle East war. All of ‘Arabistan’ – Khuzestan – whose liberation had been another of Saddam’s war aims, was simply abandoned. The Iranians were winning. And Western journalists would now be welcomed in Iran as warmly as they once were in Iraq during the fictional ‘whirlwind war’.
Dezful was the first major Iraqi defeat. In a blinding sandstorm, 120,000 Iranian troops, Revolutionary Guards and Basiji (mobilised) volunteers plunged through the desert towards the Iraqi lines in late March 1981, taking 15,000 Iraqi soldiers prisoner, capturing 300 tanks and armoured vehicles and recovering 4,000 square kilometres of Iranian territory. When I reached the scene of the Iranian victory, an almost total silence enveloped the battlefield. There were wild roses beside the roads south of Dezful and giant ants scuttled over the desert floor. Iranian artillerymen sat beneath their anti-aircraft gun canopies, glancing occasionally at the empty sky. The smashed tanks of the Iraqi army’s 3rd Armoured Division, disembowelled by rocket fire, their armour peeled back as if by a can-opener, lay in the mid-afternoon heat, memorials already to what the dismissive Iranians insisted on calling Operation Obvious Victory’.
The silence of the desert indicated both the extent of Iran’s success and the extraordinary fact that with scarcely a shot fired in return, the Iranian army had halted its advance along a geometrically straight line about 65 kilometres in length. It stretched from a ridge of hills north-west of Dezful to the swamps of Sendel, where Iraqi tanks and armoured carriers lay axle-deep in mud, driven there in frustration and fear by Saddam’s retreating forces. The Iranians – at one point scarcely 5 kilometres from the Iraqi border – had effectively declared a halt to offensive action in the Dezful sector, forbidden to advance, on Khomeini’s orders, across the international frontier.
Colonel Beyrouz Suliemanjar of the Iranian 21st Infantry Division was quite specific when he spoke to us, baton in hand, in his dark underground command post beneath a ridge of low hills. According to the Imam’s guidance,’ he stated with military confidence, ‘we are not allowed to cross the border.’ He patted a blue, straggling river on his polythene-covered map. ‘Our troops could cross this last river but our Imam will not let them. Our strategic aim is to push the enemy troops back to their territory. But we will not cross the frontier.’ Whenever the colonel spoke – with apparent modesty – about the surprise attack on 22 March, his junior officers along with a mullah, standing at the back of the dugout, chorused, ‘God is great – Down with America – Down with the Soviet Union.’ No military briefing could ever have been quite like this.
Khomeini had already promised that his armies would not invade neighbouring countries. Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the Majlis speaker, had given his word that Iran ‘harbours no territorial ambition against Iraq’. All Iran wanted, according to Rafsanjani, was the satisfaction of four demands: the expulsion of Iraqi troops from all Iranian territory; ‘punishment of the aggressor’; compensation for war damage; and the return of war refugees to their homes. ‘Punishment of the aggressor’, the Iranians made clear, meant the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – something that neither the Arabs nor the Americans would permit. That the Iranians sought an end for Saddam every bit as bloody as that dealt out to the 4,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed at the battle of Dezful made this prospect even less likely.
The Iranians crammed John Kifner of the New York Times and myself into a Bell/Agusta helicopter gunship along with a bevy of mullahs – the pilots were trained in the United States, of course – and flew us across kilometre after kilometre of wreckage and corpses. A Cyclopean view of carnage, the whup-whup of the chopper blades, the sudden ground-hugging rush between hills and into wadis were so frightening that we placed superhuman faith in the pilot and thus became so confident that we almost enjoyed this flying madness. One pile of dead Iraqi soldiers had already been bulldozed into a mass grave – ‘Aggressor cemeteries’, the signs said above these muddy crypts – but others still lay out in the sun in their hundreds. Many lay where they fell, in dried-up river beds, their decomposition clearly visible from our helicopter. Several times, the pilot hovered over a pile of corpses as the odour of their putrefaction wafted into the machine, overpowering and sickening, the mullahs screeching ‘God is Great’ while Kifner and I held our breath. The dead were distended in the heat, bodies bloating through their shabby uniforms. We could see the Revolutionary Guards next to them, digging more mass graves for Saddam’s soldiers.
When we landed behind what had been the Iraqi front line – they ran like ant-hills, catacombed with dugouts and ammunition boxes – there was almost no sign of incoming shellfire, none of the traditional ‘softening up’ by heavy artillery that conventional armies employ. The Iraqi positions lay untouched, as if the occupants had been taken sleeping from their mattresses at night, leaving their trenches and revetments on display for the ghoulish visitors – us – who follow every war. The Iranians even invited us to enter the dugouts of their enemies. It was easy to see why. They were equipped with air conditioners, television sets, videos and cassette films and magazine photographs of young women. One officer maintained a fridge of beer, another had laid a Persian carpet on the concrete floor. This was Khomeini’s ‘saturnalia’ writ large. Saddam didn’t want his soldiers to revolt – as Khomeini had now repeatedly urged them to – so he gave them every comfort. But how could such a pampered army fight when the Iranians stormed towards them in their tens of thousands?
The Iranians had learned that opposing massed Iraqi armour with poorly maintained Chieftain tanks was suicidal – the wreckage of dozens of Chieftains destroyed in the initial battles outside Dezful more than a year earlier still littered the desert. At Ein Khoosh, I padded round the broken Iraqi tanks for more than an hour. I noticed one whose severed turret had been blown clean off the base of the vehicle, landing with its gun barrel intact beside a small field. Around the turret and the decapitated tank stood a cluster of Iranian troops and peasants, all holding handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses.
The dead crew were unrecognisable, burnt paper creatures from another planet who still lay in their positions, the gunner’s body crushed beneath the turret. A carpet of flies lay upon the scorched armour. An Iranian soldier looked to the sky and ran his hand briefly downwards over his short beard, a gesture of respect to God for the bloody victory that He had granted Iran over its enemies. But the tank itself had not been shelled to destruction – there was not a shell crater in the area, just a jagged hole in the armour near the turret plates. It had been destroyed by a hand-launched anti-tank rocket. In the desert, other Iraqi tanks had suffered an almost identical fate; they had ‘brewed up’ on the battlefield after one point-blank round.
It was clear that the Iranians had used scarcely any heavy artillery or tanks in their six-day battle. They simply poured men into the Iraqi lines and caught their enemies off guard. The Iranians had been experimenting with human-wave attacks. The Iraqi front line had been overwhelmed by thousands of young men holding only rocket-propelled grenades and rifles. ‘The West fought two world wars and gave us their military manuals,’ an Iranian officer smugly remarked to me. ‘Now we are going to write tactical manuals for the West to read.’ We noticed the lack of Iranian corpses in the desert, but could not help seeing from our helicopter small tyre tracks across the sand. Could these be the motorcycles of the boy soldiers we had heard about, the fourteen-year-olds and their brothers who were encouraged to wear the sword of martyrdom around their necks as they drove through the Iraqi minefields to clear them for the infantry, dressed in heavy winter coats so that their shredded bodies would be held together for burial in their home villages? Kifner and I asked to see the youngest survivors of the battle, and the Iranians immediately understood what we wanted.
Under shellfire, they took us to a new Iranian front line of earthen revetments on the Dusallok Heights and we ran down these trenches like any soldiers of the 1914–18 war. The Iran – Iraq conflict was increasingly coming to resemble the great mire of death that entombed so many hundreds of thousands on the Somme and at Verdun. The dugout in which we sought shelter was small and a thick dust hung in the air. There were weapons on the mud and wooden-framed walls – a captured Iraqi machine gun and an automatic rifle – and a few steel helmets piled in a corner. The light from the sandbagged doorway forced its way into the little bunker, defining the features of the boys inside in two-dimensional perspective, an Orpen sketch of impending death at the front. There was no monstrous anger of the guns, only a dull, occasional vibration to indicate that the Iraqis had not abandoned all their artillery when they retreated from Dezful.
There, however, the parallels ended. For the youngest soldier – who welcomed us like an excited schoolboy at the entrance – was only fourteen, his voice unbroken by either fear or manhood. The oldest among them was twenty-one, an Islamic volunteer from Iran’s ‘Reconstruction Crusade’, who expounded the principles of martyrdom to us as the guns boomed distantly away. Martyrdom, I was made to understand, was a much-discussed subject in this dugout because it was much witnessed.
Yes, said the fourteen-year-old, two of his friends from Kerman had died in the battle for Dezful – one his own age and one only a year older. He had cried, he said, when the authorities delayed his journey to the battle front. Cried? I asked. A child cries because he cannot die yet? Were we now to have baby-wars, not wars which killed babies – we had specialised in them throughout the twentieth century – but wars in which babies, boys with unbroken voices, went out to kill? The fourteen-year-old’s comments were incredible and genuine and terrifying at one and the same time, clearly unstaged, since we had only by chance chosen his dugout when we took cover from the shellfire outside.
There was no doubt which of these boy soldiers most clearly understood the ideology of martyrdom inside this claustrophobic bunker of sand and dirt. When I asked about the apparent willingness of Iranians to die in battle, the soldiers nodded towards a very young man, bearded and intense with a rifle in his hand, sitting cross-legged on a dirty rug by the entrance. In the West, he said, it was difficult – perhaps impossible – to understand Iran’s apparent obsession with martyrdom. So did he want to die in this war?
The young man spoke loudly, with almost monotone passion, preaching rather than answering our question. Hassan Qasqari, soldier of the volunteer Reconstruction Crusade, was a man whose faith went beyond such questions. ‘It is impossible for you in the West to understand,’ he said. ‘Martyrdom brings us closer to God. We do not seek death – but we regard death as a journey from one form of life to another, and to be martyred while opposing God’s enemies brings us closer to God. There are two phases to martyrdom: we approach God and we also remove the obstacles that exist between God and the people. Those who create obstacles for God in this world are the enemies of God.’
There was no doubt that he identified the Iraqis with these theologically hostile forces. Indeed, as if on cue from God rather than the army of Saddam Hussein, there was a loud rumble of artillery and Qasqari raised his index finger towards heaven. We waited to hear where the shell would fall, fearing that direct hit that all soldiers prefer not to think about. There was a loud explosion beyond the trench, just beyond the bunker, the vibration shaking the dugout. Then there was silence. I could not imagine this speech in an Iraqi dugout. For that matter, I could not have heard it in any other army. Perhaps a British or American military padre might talk of religion with this imagination. And then I realised that these Iranian boy soldiers were all ‘padres’; they were all priests, all preachers, all believers, all – now I understood the phrase – ‘followers of the Imam’. There was another pulsation of sound outside in the trench.
Qasqari seemed grateful for the shell-burst. ‘Our first duty,’ he proclaimed, ‘is to kill the enemy forces so that God’s order will be everywhere. Becoming a martyr is not a passive thing. Hossein, the third Imam, killed as many of his enemies as possible before he was martyred – so we must try to remain alive.’ If we could not understand this, Qasqari explained, it was because the European Renaissance had done away with religion, no longer paying attention to morality or ethics, concentrating only upon materialism. There was no stanching this monologue, no opportunity to transfuse this belief with arguments about humanity or love. ‘Europe and the West have confined these issues to the cover of churches,’ Qasqari said. ‘Western people are like fish in the water; they can only understand their immediate surroundings. They don’t care about spirituality.’
He bade us goodbye with no ill will, offering Kifner and me oranges as we left his dugout for the dangerous, bright sand outside. How should we say goodbye to them? We looked into their eyes, the eyes of children who were, in their way, already dead. They had started on their journey. The next shell landed a hundred metres behind us as we ran the length of the trench, a thunderous explosion of black and grey smoke that blew part of the roadway into the sky and frightened us, not so much for our peril but because it put martyrdom into a distinct and terrible perspective.
We returned to the jubilant city of Dezful just an hour before Saddam’s revenge came screaming out of the heavens, two massive blasts followed by towering columns of black smoke that spurted into the air from one of the poorest residential areas of the city. It was the tenth ground-to-ground missile attack on Dezful since the start of the war, and by the time I reached the impact point the images were as appalling as they were banal. A baby cut in half, a woman’s head in the rubble of her home, a series of arms and legs laid out beside each other next to a series of torsos in the hope that someone might be able to fit the correct limbs onto the right bodies. Hundreds of men dug through the crushed yellow bricks with their hands. Most Iranian homes in Dezful were built of these cheap, thin bricks, without concrete or structural support. They were made for destruction.
By early 1982, the Iranians were threatening to move across the border. Khomeini’s promises of non-aggression – that Iran would not violate Iraqi national territory – had given way to a new pragmatism. If by entering Iraq the war could be ended, then Iranian troops would do what Iraq had done in September 1980 and cross the international frontier. Khomeini spoke repeatedly of the suffering of Iraqi Shiites, releasing their century-old political frustrations. Would he any longer be satisfied with just the head of Saddam? He would surely want an Iraqi regime that was loyal to him, a vassal state of Iran, or so the Arabs began to fear.
It was not hard to fathom what this might involve. The largest community in Lebanon – though not a majority – was Shia. Syria was effectively ruled by the Alawites, a Shia sect in all but name. If Iraq was to fall to its own majority Shiites, there could be a Shia state from the Mediterranean to the borders of Afghanistan, with both oil and the waters of the two great rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates. With both Iranian and Iraqi oil, Khomeini could undercut OPEC and control world prices, let alone dominate the waters of the Gulf and the Arab peninsula. That, at least, was the nightmare of the Arabs and the Americans, one that Saddam was happy to promote. Now he was portraying himself as the defender of the Arab lands, his war with Iran the new Qadisiya, the battle in ad 636 in which the Arab leader Saad bin Ali Waqqas vanquished the far larger Persian army of Rustum. In Baghdad’s official discourse, the Iranians were now the ‘pagan Zoroastrians’.
In Basra, the Iraqis had displayed their seventeen Iranian POWs to us. Now the Iranians took us to meet their Iraqi POWs – all 15,000 of them. At Parandak prisoner-of-war camp in northern Iran, they sat cross-legged on a windy parade ground in lines a quarter of a mile deep, many of them with well-trimmed beards, all of them wearing around their necks a coloured portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. Their eyes moved in a way that only captivity can control, studying each other nervously and then staring at their prison guards, awed by the enormity of their surrender. When Iran’s army chief of staff, grey-haired and bespectacled, told them of Iraq’s iniquities, the Iraqis roared back: ‘Down with Saddam Hussein.’
This was not brainwashing in the normally accepted use of the word. It was scarcely indoctrination. But there could be no doubt what the Iranians were trying to do at Parandak: to make Saddam’s own soldiers more dangerous to his Baathist regime than the Iranian army that was fighting its way towards the Iraqi frontier. When Khomeini’s name was mentioned, it echoed over the massive parade ground, repeated by thousands of Iraqi soldiers who then knelt in prayer and homage to the Islamic faith that overthrew the Shah.
True, there were some dissidents among the Iraqi troops, men who still retained their political as well as their Islamic identity. At the far back of one line of older prisoners – captives now for more than a year – an Iraqi soldier shouted ‘Saddam is a very good man’, and a few of his comrades nodded in agreement. ‘The man did not say “Saddam” – he was greeting you with the word “Salaam”,’ explained an Iranian official with the confidence of mendacity. Several hundred prisoners refused to pray. ‘They had probably not washed before prayers,’ said the same official. ‘They had not been purified.’
From his residence in north Tehran, Khomeini had given specific instructions that Iraqi prisoners-of-war were to be well treated and given all the rights of captive soldiers. The POWs were visited by the International Red Cross, but they were also being lectured in Arabic each day by Iranian officers who explained to them that the United States, France, Britain and other Western nations had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1980 attack on Iran. There were, naturally, no contradictions from their vast audience. When the Iraqi prisoners knelt to pray, they took Khomeini’s portrait from around their necks, placed it upon the ground in front of them and rested their heads upon it. In the barracks, these men – including Iraqi paratroopers who arrived from the war front on the very day of our visit, still wearing their blue berets – were to be given weekly lessons by mullahs on the meaning of Islam. They were already receiving the daily Tehran newspaper Kayhan, specially printed in Arabic for their convenience.
When these prisoners eventually returned to Iraq, some of them, perhaps a goodly proportion, must have carried these lessons with them, an incubus for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – or an inspiration to oppose any other army that dared to take control of their country in the years to come. We were not told how many of these young Iraqi soldiers were Shiites and what percentage were Sunni.
The Iranians would not permit us to speak to the prisoners, although they produced more than a hundred captives – or ‘guests’ as they cloyingly called them – from Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Nigeria and Somalia, who had been taken among the Iraqi prisoners. A bearded Lebanese librarian from Zahle – a Christian town – claimed to have been forced to enlist while working in Baghdad. A Somali, Fawzi Hijazi, frightened but smiling, pleaded with me to tell his embassy of his presence. He had been a scholarship student at Baghdad University, he said, when he had been press-ganged into the Iraqi army. He had not been visited by the Red Cross. But at this point, an Iranian guard ordered him to stop speaking.
Now on our chaperoned visits to the Iranian front, we could see the country’s newly established self-confidence made manifest. The Revolutionary Guard Corps had become the spine of Iran’s military power, drawing on a huge pool of rural volunteers, the Basiji, the schoolboys and the elderly, the unemployed, even the sick. An official history of the Guard Corps (#) was published in booklet form in Tehran during the war, claiming that it was ‘similar in many respects to the combatants of early Islam, in the days of the Holy Prophet … Among the important and prevalent common points of the two is … life according to an Islamic brotherhood; the story of the travellers and the followers. The travellers … migrated to the war fronts, and the followers … support their families in the cities during the war.’ An ‘important and popular activity’ of the Guards, the pamphlet said, was ‘the military, political, and ideological training of the Baseej [sic], in which the limitless ocean of our people are organised.’* (#)
Both the ‘Guards’ and the ‘travellers’ were now in convoy towards the borders of Iraq, singing and chanting their desire to ‘liberate’ the Iraqi Shia holy cities. One trail of trucks, jeeps and tanks 5 kilometres long, which I overtook near the Iranian city of Susangerd, was loaded down with thousands of Basiji, almost all of them waving black and green banners with ‘Najaf’ and ‘Kufa’ written across them. Jang ta pirouzi, they shouted at me when I took their pictures. ‘War until victory.’ Another convoy was led by a tank with a placard tied above its gun muzzle, announcing that it was the ‘Kerbala Caravan’. These men, most of them, were going to their deaths in Iraq but they were doing so with an insouciance, a light-heartedness – a kind of brazen stubbornness – that was breathtaking.
I suppose the soldiers of the 1914 war had something of the same gaiety about them, the British who thought the war would be over by Christmas, the French who painted ‘Berlin’ on the side of their troop trains, the Germans who painted ‘Paris’ on theirs. In Frederic Manning’s semi-autobiographical Her Privates We, a unit of British soldiers marching through a French village at night during the First World War awakes the inhabitants:
… doors suddenly opened (#) and light fell through the doorways, and voices asked them where they were going.
‘Somme! Somme!’ they shouted, as though it were a challenge.
‘Ah, no bon!’ came the kindly, pitying voices in reply … And that was an enemy to them, that little touch of gentleness and kindliness; it struck them with a hand harsher that death’s, and they sang louder, seeing only the white road before them …
No wonder that boy soldier on the Dusallok Heights had lectured me about spirituality and materialism. There comes a point, I suspect, in a soldier’s life when the inevitability of death becomes more pressing than the possibility of life.
Now the Arab leaders who had expressed such confidence in Saddam were fearful that he might lose the war they had so cheerfully supported. King Hussein of Jordan arrived hurriedly in Baghdad for talks with Saddam, speaking boldly of standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Iraqis but privately expressing his fears that their army would soon fall back even further, allowing the Iranians to enter Iraq. The Kuwaitis and Saudis bankrolled Saddam’s new armoury. Egyptian-made heavy artillery shells (#) were sent by air to Iraq from Cairo, overflying Saudi airspace.* (#)
But the Arabs were not alone in their fears that Iraq might collapse. The United States had been furnishing Iraq with satellite imagery of the Iranian battle lines since the first days of the war, and a steady stream of unofficial US ‘advisers’ had been visiting Baghdad ever since. When Mohamed Salam, a Lebanese staff correspondent for the American Associated Press news agency in Beirut, was posted to Iraq in 1983, ‘Donald Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to meet Saddam and I was treated like a king, like all the people connected to the Americans. The Iraqis couldn’t be more cooperative.’ At Muthanna, the old military airport in the centre of Baghdad, the Iraqis held an arms fair (#) and ‘everyone was there, from the British to the South Koreans,’ he recalled. Around May 1985, a US military delegation (#) travelled to Baghdad with twelve ranking officers, according to Salam. ‘The embassy wouldn’t talk about it. They stayed for three days and they came on a special Pan Am plane.’
At the time, Salam – we had both covered the Lebanese civil war together – could not travel unaccompanied in Iraq, but he told me in Baghdad at the time how the Americans were concentrating on Iraq. ‘The US is beginning to regard Iraq as its main card in the area … So far, Saddam has been successful in suppressing the communists, the Shiites and all the opposition. That suits the Americans quite well. King Hussein is useful in promoting Iraq to the West. But the US would not want Iraq to be a post-war regional power. Nothing is clear at the embassy here. There’s a USIS guy called Jim Bulloch, the deputy chief of mission is Ted Katouf and Dean Strong is their military affairs man. But they’re cut out of the loop of what the Pentagon is doing.’ Salam recalls now that he ‘saw satellite photos of the Iranian forces – I saw these pictures at the US interests section in Baghdad in 1984.’
Iraq’s 15 million population was now facing Iran’s 35 million, outnumbered on the battlefield itself almost five to one. Saddam’s army could not fight against these odds in open battle – Dezful was proof of that – so a new and merciless logic was adopted in Baghdad. Iraqi troops would dig in along the front lines, embed their thousands of tanks in the earth and use them as mass artillery to wipe out the human-wave attacks. But in 1984, through the swamps of Howeiza and the rivers that run through the land of the Marsh Arabs, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards led an attack – along dykes and using power-boats – deep into Iraq. At one point – the Iraqis only admitted this eight months later but Salam was to see the evidence with his own eyes – the Iranians pushed armour across the main eastern Baghdad – Basra highway at Qurnah. They had traversed the Tigris river and began destroying Iraqi tanks by firing at them from the highway bridges.
Baghdad’s response was as successful as it was devastatingly cruel. Because he was one of the only journalists to witness the result, the account of what happened next belongs to Mohamed Salam:
There had been a major battle (#) at Azair, Sada and Baida in the Howeiza marshes south of Amara – the Iraqi commander was Major General Hisham Sabah al-Fakhry. He got the Iranians into a pocket in the marshes then the Iraqis built a big dam to the east of them. It was still early ’84. Al-Fakhry brought huge tanker trucks down and pumped fuel into the marshland and then fired incendiary shells into the water and started the biggest fire I’ve seen in my life. He burned and killed everything, the whole environment.
Then when the fire was out, he brought electrical generators and put huge cables into the marsh waters and electrified everything so that there was no source of life left in that place. When I was there, I needed to take a leak and walked over to an embankment and one of the soldiers said ‘Don’t piss in the water’ and pointed at the cables. He asked me: ‘Do you want to be a piss-martyr?’
Gutted bodies were floating everywhere, even women and children were among them – marsh people, people who knew what a toad was, people who’d lived among ducks and buffaloes and fished with spears, this civilisation was being wiped out. I saw about thirty women and children, all gutted open like fish, and many, many Iranians. The innocent had to die along with the living.
But petrol and electricity alone could not annihilate the invaders. In the battle of Qadisiya, Sardar and his fellow Arabs were astonished to see Rustum’s army advancing towards them on massive animals they had never before seen, beasts six times the size of a horse with vast bones protruding from each side of their noses, their feet so great that they sank into the sand. Sardar told his archers to fire their arrows – and his soldiers to throw their spears – into the eyes of the elephants; to this day, the Iraqis believe that this was the key to their victory. So what was to be Saddam’s weapon against the frightening hordes now moving into Iraq? What spear was poisoned enough for the ‘racist Persians’?
I am on an Iranian military hospital train, trundling through the night-time desert north of Ahwaz, returning from another trip to the front, eating chicken and rice and drinking warm cola in the restaurant car. It is 1983. Rumsfeld is shaking hands with Saddam, asking to reopen the US embassy. The train is slow, its un-oiled bogies shrieking on the curves, making heavy weather of the gradients, bumping over the unmaintained permanent way. Occasionally, a light moves slowly past the window, a distant village, no doubt with its own crop of martyrs. The man from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance is asleep, knowing that I cannot stray from a moving train.
But I cannot sleep and so I walk through the carriages. It is cold and the windows are shut against the night breeze off the desert but there is a strange, faint smell. At first I think it must be a deodorant, something to ameliorate the shitty stench of the blocked toilets at the end of each car. Then I pull open the connecting door of the next carriage and they are sitting in there by the dozen, the young soldiers and Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic, coughing softly into tissues and gauze cloths. Some are in open carriages, others crammed into compartments, all slowly dribbling blood and mucus from their mouths and noses. One young man – I thought he could be no more than eighteen – was holding the gauze against his face. It was already stained pink and yellow but in his left hand he was holding a Koran with a bright blue cover. From time to time, he laid the gauze on his knee and coughed and a new streak of red would run in a line from his nose and he would turn the page of the Koran with his right hand and put the cloth back to his face to sop up the new blood and then pick up the Koran to read again.
Carriage after carriage of them, they sit without talking, uncomplaining, accepting – so it seems – what has happened to them. Only after ten or fifteen minutes do I realise that the smell that bothered me is not deodorant. It’s a kind of sick perfume and the men are coughing it out of their lungs. I go to the windows of the carriages and start pulling them down, filling the corridors with the sharp night air. I don’t want to breathe into my lungs what is coming out of theirs. I don’t want to be gassed like them. I go on opening the windows but the soldiers don’t look at me. They are enduring a private hell into which, thank God, I cannot be admitted.
Iran’s own official history (#) of the war says that Iraq first used chemical weapons against its combatants on 13 January 1981, killing seven Iranians. In 1982, the Iranians recorded eleven chemical attacks by Saddam’s army, in 1983, thirty-one. Dr Naser Jalali, a dermatologist and head of the dermatology ward at the Loqman al-Doleh Hospital in Tehran, examined a number of soldiers brought to the Iranian capital after a chemical weapons attack against Piranshahr and Tamarchin on 9 August 1983. ‘The injuries of those involved have been caused by exposure to toxic agents which have been released in the atmosphere in the forms of gas, liquid or powder,’ he said. ‘… the weapons of delivery had released a toxic chemical called “Nitrogen mustard” or “mustard gas”.’ At around 9.30 in the evening of 22 October 1983, between Marivan and Sultan, an Iraqi artillery shell exploded on the Iranian lines, giving off a smell of kerosene. Next morning, eleven Iranians – soldiers, Revolutionary Guards and Basiji – were afflicted with nausea, vomiting, burning of the eyes, blurred vision, itching, suffocation and coughing. Taken to a medical centre, they were found to have blisters all over their skin. Between 21 and 28 October, three Kurdish villages sympathetic to Iran came under chemical attack; an Iranian medical report stated that ‘many villagers of this Kurdish district, including women and children, were severely injured’. Between 28 December 1980 and 20 March 1984, the Iranian official history of the war lists sixty-three separate gas attacks by the Iraqis.
Yet the world did not react. Not since the gas attacks of the 1914–18 war had chemical weapons been used on such a scale, yet so great was the fear and loathing of Iran, so total the loyalty of the Arabs to Saddam Hussein, so absolute their support for him in preventing the spread of Khomeini’s revolution, that they were silent. The first reports of Saddam’s use of gas were never printed in the Arab press. In Europe and America, they were regarded as little more than Iranian propaganda, and America’s response was minimal. Only in March 1984 did Washington condemn Iraq for using poison gas – but even that criticism was mild. It was 1985 before the New York Times reported that ‘United States intelligence analysts (#) have concluded that Iraq used chemical weapons in repelling Iran’s latest offensive in the Gulf War.’ True to that paper’s gutless style, even this report had to be attributed to those favourite sources of all American reporters – ’Administration officials’.
Preliminary evidence suggested that the Iraqis had been using bis(2-chloroethyl)sulphide, a blistering agent that damages all human tissues. The New York Times report continued in the same cowardly fashion: ‘Iran flew purported [sic] victims of the attacks to Austria and West Germany, where some doctors were quoted as saying [sic] the wounded showed signs of having been under attack by mustard gas …’ Four days earlier, US Secretary of State George Shultz had met the Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in Washington, but uttered no criticism of the chemical weapons attack. Despite the mass of evidence now available, my own paper, The Times of London, was still able to carry a photograph in March 1985 of an Iranian soldier in a London hospital covered in terrible skin blisters, with a caption saying only that he was suffering from ‘burns which Iran says [sic] were caused by chemical weapons’.
Mohamed Salam was again one of the few correspondents to obtain first-hand, almost lethal evidence of this latest poison gas attack. Again, he should tell his own awesome story:
I was invited (#) with Zoran Dogramadjev of the Yugoslav Tanjug news agency to go down to Basra where there had been a major offensive by the Iranians. The 3rd Army Corps under Major General Maher Abdul Rashed was faced by this huge attack, totally overwhelming, so the only way of handling it was by mass killing. Rashed had crushed the Iranian offensive. There had been no flooding, no fire, no electricity. Zoran and I wandered around the desert where all this had happened and we came across hundreds and hundreds of dead Iranians, literally thousands of them, all dead. They were still holding their rifles – just think, thousands of them dead in their trenches, all still holding their Kalashnikovs. They had their little sacks of food supplies still on their backs – all the Iranians carried these little sacks of food. There were no bullet holes, no wounds – they were just dead.
We started counting – we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting. We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again. All the dead Iranians had blood on their mouths and beards, and their pants below the waist were all wet. They had all urinated in their pants. The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination of nerve gas and mustard gas. The nerve gas would paralyse their bodies so they would all piss in their pants and the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That’s why they spat blood.
We described all this in our reports, but we didn’t know what it was. We asked the Iraqi soldiers. They had been eating – tomatoes and cucumbers – but when they weren’t eating, they would wear gas masks. From that visit, I developed an infection in my sinus and went to see a friend of mine in Baghdad who was a doctor. He said: ‘This is what we call “front line infection” – I would advise you to leave Iraq immediately.’ I went to see Eileen and Gerry [Eileen Powell and Gerry Labelle, a husband-and-wife AP team in Nicosia] and they put me into the Cyprus Clinic. They gave me antibiotic injections.
But what I saw was a killing machine. Zoran and I, in the end, we thought we had seen about 4,700 Iranian bodies. You know, the things that happened in that war, you would need centuries to write about it.
Every evening at 6 p.m., the Iraqis would broadcast their official war communiqué for the day. I remember word for word what it said in early 1985: The waves of insects are attacking the eastern gates of the Arab Nation. But we have the pesticides to wipe them out.
So where did the ‘pesticides’ come from? Partly from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994 the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs of the US Senate produced a report, United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War. The ‘Persian Gulf War’ referred to the 1991 war and liberation of Kuwait, but its investigations went all the way back to the Iran – Iraq war – which was itself originally called the ‘Gulf War’ by the West until we participated in a Gulf war of our own and purloined the name. The committee’s report informed the US Congress about government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis – which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli (E. coli). The same report stated that ‘the United States provided the Government of Iraq with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile-system programs, including … chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans), chemical warfare filling equipment …’
In the summer of 1985, the Iraqi information ministry took Salam close to the Syrian border, where there was a quarry with the name Al-Qaem-ukashat. The government ‘minders’ told Salam it produced fertilisers. ‘There was an American engineer there from Texas,’ he was to recall.
I interviewed him and he said they were making fertilisers there. Actually, they were producing the mustard and nerve gas there. Many people in Iraq knew about this. There was a kind of artificial town next to it with a restaurant and chalets. The place was bombed by the Americans in the 1991 war. The regime people stayed there for a while immediately after the American invasion in 2003. But at the time they wanted us to write about this wonderful fertiliser plant. They laid on this big banquet with lots of wine and whiskey.
