CHAPTER EIGHT
... the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
—W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”
IT IS A LONG WAY FROM WASHINGTON to the Mossan Food and Fruit Cold Store in Bandar Abbas. The Pentagon’s clinical details of the last flight of Iran Air IR655 on 3 July 1988 cannot reflect the appalling human dimension of the charnel house in which I am standing, where three-year-old Leila Behbahani lies in her cheap, chipboard coffin. She was a very little girl and she still wears the small green dress and white pinafore in which she died three days ago when the United States Navy missile struck the Iranian Airbus over the Gulf, killing Leila and her 289 fellow passengers. She was pulled from the water only minutes after the explosion and she looks as if she has fallen asleep, her left wrist decorated with two bright gold bangles, her feet still in white socks and tiny black shoes. Her name is scrawled in crayon on the coffin lid that is propped up beside her. Her equally small brother—a dark-set, handsome boy with very short black hair—lies a few inches from her, cradled inside another plywood coffin.
Only the ice in their hair proves that they are awaiting burial. The central cold storage hall of the fruit depot is strewn with the same pale wooden coffins. “Yugoslav,” it says on one. “Still unknown” on another. In a corner, a middle-aged man is peering at some corpses. He recognises three members of his own family— two he cannot find—and an Iranian in a pair of jeans trundles into the hall with three more coffins piled haphazardly on a trolley. There are fifty-eight intact corpses here, fringed by a row of human remains so terrible that they could only be described with accuracy in a doctor’s report or a medical journal. Limbs, torsos, heads—eyes open—lie half-folded in blankets and plastic sheets. Iranian Pasdaran, normally the most voluble of revolutionaries, are reduced to silence. “Come, you are a lady,” one says to a female reporter. “Come and see this woman who was killed.” There is tampering in a coffin and a woman’s face, pale with wet hair, emerges through the plastic sheets.
Yet if this might seem in Western eyes a gesture of bad taste, an intrusion into grief, there is no avoiding some terrible conclusions: that so many of the dead— sixty-six—were children, that some of the coffins are so very small, that one twenty-year-old girl lies in the same wooden box as her year-old baby. Fatima Faidazaida was found in the sea three hours after the Americans shot down the plane, still clutching her child to her breast; which is why the baby, Zoleila-Ashan, is beside her now. “That is why we put them in together,” an Iranian official says quietly. “We found them together so they must stay together.”
I come across another middle-aged man clutching a handkerchief to his face, walking unsteadily through the cold store, looking for his relatives. Several corpses he rejects; though terribly disfigured by the blast of the two American navy missiles that destroyed the aircraft, the bodies are clearly unknown to him. Only later does he discover his sister and brother-in-law beneath some plastic and kneel to touch their faces gently, weeping as he does so. Just a few hours ago, President Reagan has stated publicly that he has apologised enough for killing all these innocent people. His expressions of regret, he tells the world, are “sufficient.”
It is extraordinary here in the boiling southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas how the official explanations of condolence, sorrow and self-absolution in Washington seem both hollow and opportunistic. What in Washington is called a “tragedy”—as if some natural disaster overwhelmed these dead airline passengers around me—seems in Bandar Abbas to be an outrage. In the United States, it was possible for newspaper editors to suggest that the Airbus might have been on a suicide mission, that the pilot was deliberately trying to crash his passenger-packed airliner into the American frigate that shot it down. Even my own paper, The Times, has disgracefully made the same claim. But in Bandar Abbas, where the pilot’s friends and colleagues have spoken openly to me without official prompting, these suggestions are offensive, obscene. An entire family of sixteen Iranians were on the Airbus, travelling to a wedding in Dubai, the children in their wedding clothes. They are still dressed in the same bright, joyful colours in the coffins in the cold store as Reagan sends a letter to Congress announcing that he now regards the matter of the Airbus destruction as “closed.”
We walk in churchlike silence down the aisles of the dead, Westerners with no excuses, cameramen filming the dead in long-shot for audiences who will not be able to accept—to “cope”—with the reality of what the U.S. Navy has just done. Only those passengers obliging enough to have died without obvious wounds, or who were lucky enough to have been killed without their faces being disfigured by the explosion of the two Standard missiles fired at their plane by the USS Vincennes, would be honoured with photographs in Western newspapers. Our response was predictable: we didn’t mean to do it; the destruction of the airliner was a mistake. But it was Iran’s fault.
I can remember so well that phone call from The Times. I am holidaying in Ireland that bright warm summer Sunday, and I have spent the morning in Dublin, talking to John Grigg, the historian who will be writing volume VI of the history of The Times from 1966 to 1981, during which Rupert Murdoch took over the paper. Over coffee, I recall for Grigg my four years as a correspondent in Northern Ireland and—although it falls outside his volume—the infamous story of the “Hitler diaries.” Murdoch had been bamboozled into serialising these totally fictitious papers—supposedly the Nazi Führer’s ravings on Chamberlain, his mistress Eva Braun, et al.64
“I’m sure you know what’s happened,” the duty desk editor says from London. “The editor wants to know how soon can you get to the Gulf.” Every reporter hates that moment. What had “happened”? I hadn’t listened to the news that morning. Sometimes it is possible to bluff this out, to reply vaguely and then hurriedly tune to the radio news to find out what I am supposed to know. This was not one of those occasions. “The Americans have shot down an Iranian passenger jet over the Gulf,” came the voice over the phone. “The American ship was called Vincennes and it fired two heat-seeking missiles at the aircraft . . . They say it was a mistake.” Well, they would, wouldn’t they? I mean, the Americans could hardly claim that the airliner was packed with “terrorists.” Or could they? Sure enough, the Pentagon was already suggesting that the pilot might have been trying to fly his plane into the American warship. The American ship’s captain would travel to Bahrain to explain how he had fired at a civilian plane.
This was just the sort of “tragedy” I had predicted in my dispatch to The Times from the Gulf in May 1987, an American warship panicked into believing that a civil airliner was an attacking jet. What was it the Broadsword’s lieutenant commander had told me that sweltering night as his British radar operators were checking the transponder numbers over the Gulf? “If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you’ve got to be bloody careful.” But this was not a private jet. This was a packed airliner which had been blasted out of the sky. I flew to Paris with Lara Marlowe, who would write a brilliant, scathing dispatch for the International Herald Tribune on the slaughter. Harvey Morris, now of The Independent, was at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, dragging on his usual cigarettes. “Now they’ve really copped it,” he said, without explaining who “they” might be. The Iranians or the Americans? We would soon find out. We took the Emirates flight to Dubai—the nearest non-Iranian city to the scene of the mass aerial killing.
It was an eight-hour flight, hot and stuffy and crowded. In front of me sat a reporter for a London radio station, writing feverishly into his notebook. He was, he said, drafting his first report so that he could go on air the moment our flight landed next morning. And what, I couldn’t help asking—since he had not even arrived in Dubai to make a single inquiry—would be the thrust of this dispatch? “The danger of the Iranians using suicide boats to take revenge on the Americans,” he said. He readily admitted he was making this story up on the plane, but said he also planned to write a report suggesting that the Iranians would try to assassinate the captain of the Vincennes. When I asked if he shouldn’t also be questioning American naval competency, he replied, “We might be challenged on that story.” Already the machinery was turning. The Americans who had destroyed the passenger jet were the potential victims; the real victims—all of them dead—were the aggressors.
Iran Air flight IR655, piloted by Captain Mohsen Rezaian, had taken off from Bandar Abbas on a scheduled passenger flight to Dubai with 290 passengers. The Americans, as usual, got their version out first, although it would change many times over the coming days. We were told that the Iranian Airbus was not on a normal flight path, then that its pilot failed to respond to warnings from the Aegis-class cruiser USS Vincennes, then that the plane was diving towards the American warship and that its identification transponder was not working. Captain Will Rogers the Third, the captain of the Vincennes , believed—according to the Pentagon—that he was under attack by an Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft. But the American story began to crumble when the Italian navy and another American warship, the frigate Sides, confirmed that the plane was climbing—not diving to attack—at the time of the missile strike.
So the story changed again. The Pentagon now said that the plane’s transponder might not have been giving out correct signals. Later, this was subtly changed; the transponder was identifying the Airbus A300B2 as a military aircraft, because the Iranians had earlier changed the coding when they used the same plane to take troops to the war front—and had forgotten to revert to the civilian code afterwards. Why the Iranians would have used the Airbus to conceal their troop movements from the Iraqis but blown their own cover by obligingly giving the aircraft a military identification that would reveal its true purpose was never explained by the Pentagon. The all-important issue was to justify the frightfulness of what had happened, to talk of the “tragedy” of the passenger jet’s destruction. Tragedies are forgivable. The advantage for the Americans was that the Iranian side of the story would never be fully told—because those most intimately involved were all dead.
In Dubai, I went straight to the British air traffic controllers who had so often helped me during the “tanker war.” They had heard the radio traffic over the Gulf on that fatal Sunday morning—and their story was horrifying. For weeks, they told me, they had been appalled at the apparent lack of training and efficiency of U.S. naval personnel challenging civilian aircraft. The pilots of airliners on scheduled flights down the Gulf from Kuwait were being repeatedly and aggressively challenged by American warship crews who seemed not to know that they were cruising beneath established air lanes.
In one incident—well known to the controllers but kept secret from the press— a U.S. frigate had stationed itself off the Emirates coast and radio-challenged every civilian flight approaching Dubai International Airport. In desperation, the British duty controller at the airport called the U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi and told American diplomats to instruct the ship to move away because it was “a danger to civil aviation.” Civilian helicopter pilots off the coast had often complained that American warships challenged them on the wrong radio frequencies. The controllers in Dubai could hear some of the U.S. Navy’s traffic. “Robert, the Americans knew at once that they’d hit a passenger airliner,” one of them told me quietly. “There was another American warship close by—we have its coding as FFG-14. Its crew reported seeing people falling at great speed out of the sky.”
I sat behind the Dubai control tower thinking about this. Yes, the passengers would all fall out of the sky like that, over a wide area, together, in clumps, in bits, from 10,000 feet it seemed. I could imagine the impact with the sea, the spouts of water, some of the passengers—no doubt—still fully conscious all the way down. Three days later, in the emergency Bandar Abbas mortuary, I would look at Fatima Faidazaida and realise with horror that she must have been alive as she fell from the heavens, clutching her baby as she tumbled and spilled out of the sky in the bright summer sun, her fellow passengers and chunks of the Airbus and burning fuel oil cascading around her. And she held on to her baby, knowing—could she have known?—that she must die.
From Dubai that Sunday night, I sent three reports to The Times , the longest dispatch a detailed account of the record of the U.S. Navy’s constant misidentification of civil aircraft over the Gulf and the near-panic that the air-traffic controllers had heard over the airwaves from the American warships. The Vincennes had claimed it was under attack by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in motor boats at the time it destroyed the airliner. I knew that U.S. warships carried the timetables of civil airliners in their “combat information centres” (CICs). Had Captain Rogers and his crew not had time to look at their copy? Iran Air flight IR655 flew to Dubai every day from Bandar Abbas. Why should it become a target on 3 July?
Captain Rogers himself said that he would have to live for ever with the burden of his own conscience at what he had done. Four years later, he would publish his own account of the destruction of the Airbus.65 This would include a vivid description of an attack on the Vincennes by Iranian motor boats, the first alert of an aircraft taking off from Bandar Abbas—a military as well as civil airport—and the information that the aircraft was issuing two transponder codes, one used by passenger aircraft, the other a military code “known to have been used by Iranian F-14 fighters.” The plane was also being monitored by the frigate USS Sides, naval coding FFG-14—this was the ship whose crew, according to the Dubai traffic controllers, would see bodies falling out of the sky.
Before the Airbus was 40 kilometres from his warship Rogers had sent a routinely worded warning—but addressed it to a fighter aircraft: “Iranian aircraft . . . fighter on course two-one-one, speed 360 knots, altitude 9,000 feet, this is USNWS [United States Navy warship] bearing two-zero-two from you, request you change course immediately to two-seven-zero, if you maintain current course you are standing into danger and subject to USN defensive measures . . .” Rogers says he asked for further identification of the aircraft when it was 25 kilometres from his vessel. At 9:54 and 22 seconds in the morning, he launched his two missiles. Twenty-one seconds later, they exploded against Rezaian’s passenger jet, which vanished from the Vincennes ’s radar screen. “The bridge reported seeing the flash of missile detonation through the haze,” Rogers wrote. “There was a spontaneous cheer, a release of tension from the men.” But crewmen on another U.S. warship would moments later see a large wing of a commercial airliner, with an engine pod still attached, crashing into the sea.
Later investigation would reveal that staff of the CIC on the Sides correctly identified the Airbus’s commercial transponder code at virtually the same moment that Rogers fired. For Captain David Carlson, commanding the Sides, the destruction of the airliner “marked the horrifying climax to Captain Rogers’ aggressiveness, first seen just four weeks earlier.” On 2 June, two of Rogers’s colleagues had been disturbed by the way he sailed the Vincennes too close to an Iranian frigate that was carrying out a lawful though unprecedented search of a bulk carrier for war materiel bound for Iraq. On the day the Vincennes shot down the Airbus, Rogers had launched a helicopter that flew within 2 to 3 miles of an Iranian small craft—the rules stated that the chopper had to be no closer than 4 miles—and reportedly came under fire. Rogers began shooting at some small Iranian military boats, an act that disturbed Captain David Carlson on the Sides. “Why do you want an Aegis cruiser out there shooting up boats?” he later asked in an interview with an ex-naval officer. “It wasn’t a smart thing to do. He was storming off with no plan . . .” Rogers subsequently opened fire on Iranian boats inside their territorial waters. The Vincennes had already been nicknamed “Robocruiser” by the crew of the Sides.
When Carlson first heard Rogers announcing to higher headquarters his intention to shoot down the aircraft approaching his cruiser, he says he was thunder-struck. “I said to the folks around me, ‘Why, what the hell is he doing?’ I went through the drill again. F-14. He’s climbing. By now this damn thing is at about 7,000 feet . . .” But Carlson thought that the Vincennes might have more information—and did not know that Rogers had been told, wrongly, that the aircraft was diving. Carlson regretted that he did not interrupt Rogers. When his own men realised the Airbus was commercial, “they were horrified.” The official U.S. investigation report would later say that computer data and “reliable intelligence” agreed that Captain Rezaian’s airliner “was on a normal commercial air traffic plan profile . . . on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas.” Newsweek magazine would carry out its own investigation, branding the official report “a pastiche of omissions, half-truths and outright deceptions” and painting a dramatic picture of “an overeager captain, panicked crewmen and a cover-up . . .” In Newsweek’s report, books had been sliding off the shelves in the Vincennes’s information centre as it manoeuvred prior to the missile launching; little chance, then, that anyone had an opportunity to look up a scheduled airline timetable.
But in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, the Americans stuck to the tale of total innocence. Vice President Bush appeared before the UN Security Council to say that the Vincennes had been rushing to the aid of a merchant ship under Iranian attack—which was totally untrue. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher described the destruction of the Iranian Airbus as “understandable.” The Iranian consul in Dubai had a point when he asked me later whether Mrs. Thatcher would have considered it “understandable” if an Iranian warship had shot down a British Airways airliner over the Gulf and then claimed that it was an accident because its captain thought it was under attack by a U.S. jet. One key to the disaster lay in the American claims that a warning was sent to Captain Rezaian on both military and civilian wavelengths. Did Captain Rezaian hear these warnings? If not, why not?
The evidence of the aircraft’s destruction was laid out for journalists on a parade ground at Iranian naval headquarters in Bandar Abbas. Pieces of engine cowling, wings and flaps had been scored and burned by metal fragments; a jagged hunk of wing flap had a 12-centimetre hole punched through its centre. A section of the passenger cabin wall 3 metres square had been perforated by metal shards. Several of the bodies I saw had scarlet and red burns on their flesh; these passengers must have been sitting in the centre of the aircraft, close to the two engines onto which theVincennes’s heat-seeking missiles would have locked. Lying beside this wreckage was the nosecone of the Airbus, escape chutes, electrical circuitry and oxygen systems. The explosions had been catastrophic.
Three days after the Airbus was destroyed, I flew from Bandar Abbas to Dubai aboard the first Iran Air plane to resume operations on the route. It was, of course, flight IR655. I sat in the cockpit of the Boeing 707 alongside Captain Rezaian’s former Airbus navigator. Captain Nasser, who had been flying with Rezaian until six weeks ago when he transferred to Boeings—an act that probably saved his life—had marked the point of Rezaian’s destruction on his charts and insisted that his friend, on other flights over the Gulf with him, had always replied when he heard challenges from the U.S. Navy. “He was a sensible, very professional man,” he said. “He would never make a mistake or play games with the Americans. What the Americans did was very crude—they must have panicked.” Suggestions that Rezaian was on a suicide mission, Nasser added, were “disgusting.” Rezaian had flown the Dubai route on at least twenty-five previous occasions and had been piloting Airbus aircraft for almost two and a half years. So what happened on that Sunday morning?
The answer was not difficult to discover. In our Boeing, Captain Asadapur, the pilot, had to communicate constantly with three traffic-control centres—Tehran, Bandar Abbas and Dubai—which he did in fluent English. While talking to them, he could neither send nor receive on the civilian 1215 radio band to which our Boeing was tuned—the same wavelength on which the Vincennes said it tried to warn Captain Rezaian. Climbing from 12,000 to 14,000 feet—not descending in an “attack mode” as the Americans initially claimed—Rezaian would have been talking to Bandar Abbas when he was 50 kilometres out, when the first American missile blew off the port wing of his Airbus. Bandar Abbas ground control told me that Rezaian’s last message was that he was “climbing to one-four-zero” (14,000 feet). If Rezaian could not hear the Americans on his civilian waveband, he was certainly not going to hear them on the military net, a challenge that was anyway intended for the non-existent F-14 which was supposed to be closing on the American cruiser.
Then there was the mystery of the transponder. On our Iranian flight, a green light glowed beside the co-pilot’s left knee, showing that it was sending out our identification into the dark night above the Gulf. Any warship down there on the moonlit sea would know who we were. Asadapur repeatedly told Dubai control— for the benefit of all listeners—that we were flight IR655 “with forty-four souls on board.” If the transponder was not working, the light would have been out. Asadapur said he would never take off without checking it. Hossein Pirouzi, the Bandar Abbas ground controller and airport manager on 3 July, told me he “assumed” Rezaian’s transponder was working. Rezaian would scarcely have taken off without ensuring that it was glowing that comforting green light. Pirouzi, a middle-aged man with a smart brown moustache, wavy hair and a thorough training in air-traffic control from London’s Heathrow Airport, said that he did not know a naval engagement was in progress at the time of Rezaian’s take-off. But as we were later to discover, there was no battle as such taking place. “The Americans broadcast warnings every time they see a speeding boat—they go on ‘red alert’ when they see every plane,” Pirouzi said. “The Americans have no right to be in the Gulf challenging our legitimate right to fly our air routes—so why should we reply to them?”
His comment was devastating. If Pirouzi’s blithe assumption that the Americans would never fire at an Airbus was to be the basis of his air-traffic policy, how easy it was to understand why the U.S. naval crews, equally psyched up against the country which their president blamed for the Gulf War, should have panicked and fired at the first plane to approach their ship after they had engaged an Iranian patrol craft.
Was it panic, as Newsweek was to suggest four years later, that caused the officers of the Vincennes to misread the information on their own radar screens, to see an aircraft descending which was clearly ascending, panic and the oppressive heat that cloaks the bodies and energies of all naval crews in the Gulf? Besides, was not Iran the enemy? Was not Iran a “terrorist state”? Was it not, in Reagan’s words, “a barbarous country”? Unknown to them, Captain Rezaian and his passengers over the Gulf were flying across a cultural and emotional chasm that separated America from Iran, a ravine so deep and so dangerous that its updraft blew an Iranian Airbus out of the sky.
Nothing could have illustrated this more painfully than the American response to the Vincennes’s killing of 290 innocent civilians. Citizens of Vincennes, Indiana, were raising money for a monument—not to the dead Iranians, but to the ship that destroyed their lives.66 When the ship returned to its home base of San Diego, it was given a hero’s welcome. The men of the Vincennes were all awarded combat action ribbons. The air warfare coordinator, Commander Scott Lustig, won the navy’s Commendation Medal for “heroic achievement,” for the “ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire” that enabled him to “quickly and concisely complete the firing procedure.” Even Newsweek was constrained to describe this as “surreal.” Rogers retired honourably in 1991. Less than a year after the destruction of the Airbus, the captain’s wife, Sharon, was the target of a pipe-bomb which exploded beneath her Toyota van in San Diego. She was unharmed. Rogers was to write that the “centerpiece” of his book was formed by “the events of 3 July 1988 and 10 March 1989”—as if the bloodbath over the Gulf and the failed attempt on his wife’s life were comparable, a suggestion contained on the book’s cover, which described its contents as “a personal account of tragedy and terrorism.”
In fairness, however, Rogers was to quote in full in his book a long and bitter handwritten letter which he received from Captain Rezaian’s brother Hossein. “He was turned into the powder at the mid-air by your barrage missile attack and perished along with so many other innocent lives aboard, without the slightest sin or guilt whatsoever,” Hossein Rezaian wrote.
I was at the area of carnage the day after and unfortunately I saw the result of your barbarous crime and its magnitude. I used to be a Navy Commander myself and I had my college education in U.S. as my late brother did, but ever since the incredible downing I really felt ashamed of myself. I hated your Navy and ours. So that I even quit my job and I ruined my whole career . . . me and my family . . . could somehow bear the pain of tragedy if he [Mohsen] had died in an accident but this premeditated act is neither forgiveable nor forgettable . . . the U.S. government as the culprit in this horrendous incident, showed neither remorse nor compassion for the loss of innocent lives . . . Didn’t we really deserve a small gesture of sympathy? Did you have to say a pack of lies and contradictory statements about the incident in a bid to justify the case? . . . or it was the result of panic and inexperience. I do appreciate your prompt response.
It was much to Rogers’s credit that he gave this letter so much prominence in his book. “Despite the diatribe,” he wrote, “the pain and grief pouring from this letter struck me hard. All of the sorrow and grief that had haunted me since July returned in force.” He had wanted, Rogers said, to reply but a naval public relations officer warned that return correspondence “could be used by the Iranian government as some sort of political lever.” Again, the Iranians were the bad guys. Hossein Rezaian’s letter was handed over to the U.S. Naval Intelligence Service. Who knows, maybe they read it.
There certainly wouldn’t have been much to gain from reading my first report on the massacre. When a newspaper had been so loyal to a reporter as The Times had been to me over the past eighteen years—fighting off the British army in Northern Ireland, the Israelis and Palestinians, the American authorities and the Iranians and Iraqis whenever they complained about my reporting—there was a natural inclination to feel great trust in my editors. If my reports were cut, this was done for space reasons—I was usually given the chance to shorten my own dispatches—or because a breaking news story elsewhere in the world was forcing the paper’s night editors to change the pages after the first edition. But cuts were never made for political reasons.
Murdoch had already bought The Times when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, but I reported without any censorship on Israel’s killing of up to 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians—most of them civilians—and the subsequent butchery of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Christian allies. The Israeli embassy had condemned my dispatches, as they did the reporting of any journalist who dared to suggest that Israel’s undisciplined army killed civilians as well as soldiers. But under Charles Douglas-Home’s editorship, no foreign correspondent was going to have his work changed out of fear or bias or prejudice. His deputy, Charles Wilson, was a tough ex-Royal Marine who could be a bully, but who did not mince his words about Israel or any other country which tried to impugn the integrity of the paper’s journalists. “What a bunch of fascists,” he roared when I had proved to him that an Israeli statement condemning my work was riddled with factual mistakes.
Israelis are not fascists, but it was good to have a deputy editor who was unafraid of a reporter’s antagonists. After Douglas-Home’s death from cancer, Wilson became editor. He remained a bully but could also be immensely kind. To members of staff who suffered serious illness, he was a rock of strength and compassion. He wanted to be liked. He was immensely generous to me when, for personal reasons, I wanted to work for a year in Paris. But there was one afternoon in Beirut when I had filed a long and detailed investigative report on torture at Israel’s Khiam prison in southern Lebanon. About an hour after I had sent my story, a foreign desk staffer came on the telex to ask if I could not add a paragraph to the effect that allegations about torture of the kind I had described—beatings and electrical currents applied to the genitals—were typical of the propaganda put out by Israel’s enemies. I protested. I had United Nations evidence to support my investigation—all of which was subsequently confirmed in a compelling report by Amnesty International. In the end, I inserted a paragraph which only strengthened my dispatch: that while such allegations were often used against Israel, on this occasion there was no doubt that they were true.
I had won this round, and thought no more about it. Then an article appeared on the centre page of The Times, which was usually reserved for comment or analysis. It purported to explain the difficulties of reporting the Middle East—the intimidation of journalists by “terrorists” being the salient argument—but then ended by remarking that anyone reporting from Beirut was “a bloodsucker.” I was reporting from Beirut. I was based in Beirut as Middle East correspondent—for The Times, for goodness’ sake. What did this mean? The foreign desk laughed it off. I did not. Was Wilson trying to “balance” my dispatches by allowing the enemies of honest reporting to abuse me in the paper? It seemed impossible. I don’t believe in conspiracies. Besides, I knew Wilson often did not read the centre page of The Times.
But it was a much more serious matter on 4 July 1988, when I discovered that my lead report for The Times—which I had been asked to write for the front page—was not appearing in the next day’s paper. All the investigative work on the panic and inefficiency of U.S. warship crews in the Gulf, all the evidence that U.S. personnel had been placing civilian airliners in peril for weeks—the long and detailed conversations with the Dubai air traffic controllers who had actually heard the radio traffic between U.S. naval officers as the Vincennes was shooting down the Airbus—had been for nothing. If there had been any doubts about my report, they should have been raised with me on the evening I filed. But there had been silence. Two other routine dispatches—on Iran’s public reaction to the destruction of the plane and possible retaliation—were printed inside the paper.
Next morning, I spoke to Piers Ackerman on the foreign desk. He told me that my story had been dropped in the first edition for space reasons but that the later, reinserted and shortened version contained “the main points.” When I asked if cuts had been made for political reasons, he said: “My God, if I thought things had reached that stage, I would resign.” I told him that if it transpired that the cuts were political, I would resign. The Times took days to reach the Gulf and I would be away in Iran, so I had no chance to read the paper for several days. When at last I did see the later editions, every element of my story that reflected negatively on the Americans had been taken out.
Journalists should not be prima donnas. We have to fight to prove the worth of our work. Neither editors nor readers are there for the greater good of journalists. But something very unethical had taken place here: my report on the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus had been, in every sense of the word, tampered with, changed and censored. Its meaning had been distorted by omission. The Americans, in my truncated report, had been exonerated as surely as they had been excused by Mrs. Thatcher. This, I felt sure, was a result of Murdoch’s ownership of The Times. I did not believe that he personally became involved in individual newspaper stories—though this would happen—but rather that his ownership spread a culture of obedience and compliance throughout the paper, a feeling that Murdoch’s views—what Murdoch wanted—were “known.”
I had been very struck by the fact that the foreign desk staffer who had been so keen to add the “propaganda” paragraph to my Khiam torture story was previously a very left-wing member of the National Union of Journalists—the very union which had done so much to undermine owner Lord Thomson’s faith in The Times and to truss up the paper for Murdoch to buy. A socialist lion had now turned into a News Corp. mouse. I am neither a lion nor a mouse, but I can be a tough dog, and when I get a rope between my teeth I won’t let go until I shake it and tug it something rotten to see what lies at the other end. That, after all, is what journalists are supposed to do. Further enquiries to the foreign desk of the paper elicited ignorance. Wilson’s compliant foreign editor, George Brock, was unavailable to take my calls. Days had now passed since my original report was filed, the subs on that night were never on duty when I telephoned, Wilson had gone on holiday. But my concerns did not go away. It is one thing to have an article cut for space—or “trimmed” or “shaved” as the unpleasant foreign desk expression goes—but quite another to risk one’s life for a paper, only to find that the courage necessary to report wars is not in evidence among those whose task it is to print those reports. And so in the Gulf that steamy summer, I lost faith in The Times.
I decided I would try to join a brash, intelligent, brave, dangerously underfunded but independent new newspaper called—well, of course— The Independent. It would be months before I persuaded Andreas Whittam Smith, the editor and part-owner, to take me aboard, or to “draw rations” as he was to put it, but within a year I would be reporting from the Middle East for a new editor, a new newspaper and new colleagues—although many of them would turn out to be fellow refugees from The Times.
Only after I had written to Wilson to tell him that I was resigning from The Times, however, did I learn that I had transferred my allegiance for the right reasons. Just after New Year of 1988, I received a call from one of the senior night editors on the paper. He wanted to talk to me about theVincennes story:
At the Sunday 5 p.m. conference, I advised the editor that your story would make a “hamper” [a large box across eight columns at the top of the front page]. Wilson said he wanted to see the story. It was about the incompetence of the crew of the Vincennes. I read it and said to myself: this is the clearest story I’ve yet read about what really happened. Later I saw the editor on the back bench. Wilson said to me: “Is this the story you’re talking about?” I said it was. He said: “There’s nothing in it. There’s not a fact in it. I wouldn’t even run this gibberish.” Wilson said it was bollocks, that it was “waffle.” I remember saying to Charlie: “Are you sure? This is a terrific story.” I was shocked. I’ve looked up my diary for the night of July 3rd. It says: “Shambles, chaos on Gulf story. Brock rewrites Fisk.”
It didn’t run in the first edition, but in the second edition the story ran but with all the references to American incompetence cut out. I looked it up on the screen. George [Brock] had edited the story. He had taken out all those references. At the top, he had written a note, saying that “under no circumstances will the cuts made in this story be re-inserted.” I wanted to resign. I considered resigning over this. I didn’t, and perhaps I should have done. I told Denis [Taylor] about this on the desk. He was disgusted. All the foreign desk knew about it. But none of them would do anything about it. They were frightened. Nobody told you about this. I thought: “Well, it might be better for the paper if Bob didn’t know.” I thought you might resign if you knew.
On the day I filed the first Vincennes story, I had spoken to Piers Ackerman, asking him to pass on to the leader writers my advice that—whatever our editorial response to the disaster—we should not go along with the line that Mohsen Rezaian had been a suicide pilot, which would, I said, be rubbish. Ackerman said he passed on the message. But our editorial subsequently said that the plane might have been controlled by a “suicide” pilot. This was totally untrue. And so was the thrust of my story, once it had appeared in bowdlerised form in the paper that same morning. Readers ofThe Times had been solemnly presented with a fraudulent version of the truth.
There are rarely consolation prizes for a journalist when a paper doesn’t run the real story, but Vincent Browne, the hard-headed editor of the Dublin Sunday Tribune, an old friend and colleague from Northern Ireland, had none of Wilson’s fears about events in the Gulf. He invited me to write the fruits of my investigations for his own paper. Half the next issue of the Tribune’s front page carried a photograph of an American Aegis-class cruiser firing a missile into the sky; superimposed on the picture was the headline “What Really Happened,” with my full-page report inside. Which is how the people of County Mayo were allowed to read what subscribers to The Times of London could not.
It’s easy for a journalist to become self-important about his work, to claim that he or she alone is the bearer of truth, that editors must stand aside so that the bright light of a reporter’s genius may bathe the paper’s readers. It’s also tempting to allow one’s own journalistic arguments to take precedence over the ghastly tragedies which we are supposed to be reporting. We have to have a sense of proportion, some perspective in our work. What am I doing—what is Fisk doing, I can hear a hostile reviewer of this book ask—writing about the violent death of 290 innocent human beings and then taking up five pages to explain his petty rows with The Times ? The answer is simple. When we journalists fail to get across the reality of events to our readers, we have not only failed in our job; we have also become a party to the bloody events that we are supposed to be reporting. If we cannot tell the truth about the shooting down of a civilian airliner—because this will harm “our” side in a war or because it will cast one of our “hate” countries in the role of victim or because it might upset the owner of our newspaper—then we contribute to the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place. If we cannot blow the whistle on a navy that shoots civilians out of the sky, then we make future killings of the same kind as “understandable” as Mrs. Thatcher found this one. Delete the Americans’ panic and incompetence—all of which would be revealed in the months to come—and pretend an innocent pilot is a suicidal maniac, and it’s only a matter of time before we blow another airliner out of the sky. Journalism can be lethal.
But I also ask myself if, standing in that charnel house in Bandar Abbas, I did not see the genesis of another mass killing, five months later, this time over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. Within hours of the destruction of the Airbus on 3 July 1988, President Khamenei of Iran declared that Reagan and his administration were “criminals and murderers.” Tehran radio announced: “We will not leave the crimes of America unpunished.” And it continued: “We will resist the plots of the Great Satan and avenge the blood of our martyrs from criminal mercenaries.” I didn’t have much doubt what that would mean. Back in Beirut, I found no one who believed that the Vincennes had shot down the Iranian aircraft in error. I started to hear disjointed, disturbing remarks. Someone over dinner—a doctor who was a paragon of non-violence—speculated that a plane could be blown up by a bomb in the checked baggage of an aircraft. It was a few days before it dawned on me that if people were talking like this, then someone was trying to find out if it was possible.
The Iranians, after all, had a motive. The destruction of the Iranian passenger jet, whatever Washington’s excuses, was a terrible deed. But would someone so wickedly plot revenge? I was in Paris when the BBC announced that a Pan Am jet had crashed over Lockerbie. This time it was 270 dead, including 11 on the ground. I didn’t need to imagine the corpses—I had seen them in July—and not for a moment did I doubt the reason. There were the usual conspiracy theories: a cover-up CIA drug-busting scheme that had gone crazily wrong, messing with the evidence by American agents after the crash. And Iranian revenge for the Airbus killings.
In the United States, this was a favourite theory. The news shows repeated the video—taken by a U.S. Navy team—of the Vincennes firing its missiles on 3 July. Captain Rogers saw the film again, writing later that he “felt a knot in my stomach and wondered if it was ever going to stop.” The parallel was relevant but had no moral equivalence. The annihilation of the Airbus had been a shameful mass killing but Lockerbie was murder. In Beirut, an old acquaintance with terrifying contacts in the hostage world calmly said to me: “It’s [Ahmed] Jibril and the Iranians.” Jibril was head of the Damascus-based “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command.” Diplomatic correspondents in Washington and London—always the stalking horses for government accusations—began to finger the Iranians, the PFLP-GC, the Syrians. In Tehran, people would look at me with some intensity when I mentioned Lockerbie. They never claimed it. Yet they never expressed their horror. But of course, after the Airbus slaughter, that would have been asking a bit much.
In Beirut, the PFLP-GC became known, briefly, as “the Lockerbie boys.” I didn’t count much on that. But then, more than two years later, a strange thing happened. Jibril held a press conference in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, initially to talk about the release by Libya of French and Belgian hostages seized from a boat in the Mediterranean. But that was not what was on his mind. “I’m not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing,” he suddenly blurted out. “They are trying to get me with a kangaroo court.” There was no court then. And no one had officially accused Jibril of Lockerbie. But scarcely nine months later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the diplomatic correspondents no longer believed in the Syrian–PFLP-GC–Iranian connection. Now it was Libya that was behind Lockerbie. Iran was the enemy of the bestial Saddam, and Syria was sending its tanks to serve alongside the Western armies in the Gulf. Jibril’s men faded from the screen. So did the only country with a conceivable motive: Iran.
In the aftermath of the shooting down of the Airbus, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, who was intended to be Khomeini’s successor, said that he was “sure that if the Imam orders, all the revolutionary forces and resistance cells, both inside and outside the country, will unleash their wrath on U.S. financial, political, economic and military interests.” But the Vincennes attack finally convinced most of the Iranian leadership that the United States had joined the war on Iraq’s side. The Americans had destroyed Iran’s oil platforms, eliminated the Iranian navy and were now, it seemed, determined to use missiles against Iran’s passenger planes, all of which had previously been targets for Saddam Hussein. Iran’s economy was collapsing and, so Rafsanjani warned Khomeini, even the resupply of Iran’s vast armies was impossible. There could be no more Iranian offensives against Iraq, Khomeini was told by the country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Mohsen Rezai, until 1993. So to protect the Islamic revolution—to ensure its survival—Khomeini accepted UN Security Council resolution 598 and a ceasefire to take effect on 22 July 1988, “in the interests of security and on the basis of justice.” For the old man, it was a personal as well as a military catastrophe. “Woe upon me that I am still alive,” he concluded bleakly, “and have drunk the poisoned chalice of the resolution.”
But worse was to come. Seven days after Khomeini’s 18 July acceptance of the UN resolution, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq’s “National Liberation Army” swept across the Iranian border in Iraqi-supplied tanks and armour to overthrow the Khomeini regime. It was the ultimate treachery and the Iranians fought back against their invaders—who were, of course, themselves Iranians—with fury; across Iran, the government’s secret police began the wholesale liquidation of the Mujahedin’s supporters. The Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji, many of whom felt betrayed by the ending of the war, turned upon the mujahedin, summarily hanging their captured militiamen in Bakhtaran, Kangavar and Islam Abad. Now thousands of mujahedin militants and their supporters in jails all over Iran—many of whom had long ago been tried and sentenced to many years of imprisonment— were to be re-tried and hanged.
“We ask the Leader to deal harshly with murderers and as soon as possible, rid the people of their presence,” Resalat newspaper pleaded. Ayatollah Musavi Ardebili, the head of the supreme court, gave a Freisler-like speech at Friday prayers in Tehran. Themonafeqin—the “hypocrites”—he said, “don’t know that people see them as less than animals. People are so angry with them; the judiciary is under extreme pressure of public opinion . . . people say they should all be executed . . . We will judge them ten at a time, twenty at a time, bring a file, take away a file: I regret that they say a fifth have been destroyed. I wish they all were destroyed . . .” “Hypocrites” was a word that embraced the idea of heresy or apostasy rather than mere double standards. To be one of the monafeqinwas a capital offence.
Even before the war had ended, Iran’s prison population was re-interrogated and divided into those who still recognised the resistance to the Islamic Republic and those who had repented—the tavvab—and between those who prayed and those who refused to pray. At some point, Khomeini ordered that political prisoners should be liquidated en masse. Although this order was kept secret, we know that Ayatollah Montazeri protested vehemently against the massacres, an act that ensured his dismissal as the future Imam. “. . . As to your order to execute the hypocrites in prison,” Montazeri wrote in a private letter to Khomeini, “the nation is prepared to accept the execution if those arrested [are] in relation to recent events [i.e. the Iraqi-backed mujahedin invasion] . . . But the execution of those already in prison . . . would be interpreted as vindictiveness and revenge.”
In some prisons, inmates were lined up on opposite sides of a corridor, one line to be returned to their cells after “repenting,” the other taken straight to a mass gallows. On 30 July, Revolutionary Guards at Evin began their executions with mujahid women prisoners. The hangings went on for several days. Male communist prisoners were hanged at the mosque in Evin. “When [they] are taken to the Hosseinieh to be hanged,” an ex-prisoner testified, “some [are] crying, some swearing and all shivering but hiding their shivering. Some smile hopelessly . . . a number of the guards vie with each other to do the hanging so as to score more piety. A few are upset by seeing so many corpses. Some prisoners fight and are savagely beaten. The execution is swift.” The bodies of the hanging men were paraded in front of female prisoners to break their spirit. In Tehran alone, an Iran-based human rights group published the names of 1,345 victims of the “national disaster.”
Exile magazines opposed to the regime would, years later, publish terrifying eyewitness accounts of the prison hangings. Up to 8,000 inmates may have been put to death in the summer of 1988, perhaps 10,000. Secret executions were followed by burials in secret graves. A former female prisoner was to recall how:
One tavvab woman was taken from the block below us to witness the execution of her husband. She had seen the rope on her husband’s neck and another woman who had her chador tied round her neck. She herself was due to be executed but had escaped that fate by being tavvab and surrendering . . . Afterwards she became psychologically unbalanced . . .
Another ex-prisoner wrote of a militant leftist prisoner called Fariba who was taken to a dungeon beneath Dastgerd prison to see her husband. This was Fariba’s description:
What I saw terrified me . . . There in front of me was Massoud, my husband, bent and sickly with eyes that flickered from deep black crypts. I screamed Massoud my darling, and leaped towards him. They held me back . . . A Pasdar warned: “Be silent! You can only look. You can only witness how accounts are settled here—or your place is next to him.” . . . Massoud, hands tied behind his back, noose round his neck, standing on a stool, looked at me with his whole being. A tired look but full of love, full of consciousness, trying to smile. In a weak and exhausted voice he said: “It was so good to see you Fariba!” . . . The voice of the interrogator rose from behind me . . . he said: “If you would be prepared to push the stool away and hang this apostate I will set you free this very second. I promise on my honour!” . . . I looked straight into the interrogator’s eyes and screamed: “Do you have any honour? Fascist! Executioner!” . . . The Pasdars grabbed me. The interrogator pulled out his Colt and shot Massoud. Another Pasdar kicked the stool from under him. Between my distress and my unbelieving eyes Massoud was hanged . . .
There is overwhelming evidence from ex-prisoners that female prisoners who were virgins were raped by their interrogators before execution. Of 1,533 Iranian female prisoners who were hanged or shot in the two decades that followed the 1979 revolution and whose names have been catalogued by a German women’s group—a fraction of the actual number of executed women—163 were twenty-one years old or under, 35 of them pregnant. The youngest was Nafiseh Ashraf Jahani, who was ten years old. Afsaneh Farabi was twelve, three girls were thirteen years old. Akram Islami was seventy. One woman, Aresteh Gholivand, was fifty-six when she was hanged and left six children behind her.
WHAT CAN ONE SAY TO THE FAMILIES of these thousands? We journalists have to take the regime seriously. We interview the ayatollahs and the hojatolislams and the more humble mullahs and we ask questions about human rights and we are lectured about the iniquities of the Shah and of our—Western—responsibility for his “Satanic” rule. Almost every Khomeini prison governor was imprisoned by the Shah. So, for that matter, were many of the mujahedin prisoners who were executed in 1988 and the years before. I am sitting in a north Tehran house and a widow is slowly turning the pages of a family photograph album. She points to a Kodak shot of a handsome young man in a brown shirt. “He was in the opposition and they arrested him. They killed him,” she says simply. The young man in the picture seems to come alive as she speaks, leaning forward towards the camera, one arm draped round his sister’s shoulder, the other in a gentle way around his mother. “His mother never got over it,” the woman says. Her young daughter is watching in silence. She is perhaps five years old, a pert, cheerful little girl with fluffy brown hair and a pixie smile. “She wears a chador to school,” her mother says. “Fereshteh, let’s see what you look like when you go to school.” Fereshteh runs into her bedroom and emerges in a kind of mourning, head to toe in black cloth, her hair invisible beneath the material. Then she becomes serious and walks slowly back to the bedroom to become a child again.
BUT NOT ONLY IN IRAN had the war masked a nation’s internal killing machine. Amnesty was able to list the names of 116 people executed by Saddam’s regime between 11 November and 31 December 1997, the youngest of them fourteen years old. In total during December 1997 and January 1998 at least 700 prisoners were executed in Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, many of them bearing the marks of torture. The victims were from Baghdad, Suleimaniya and Baquba; most were under eighteen.
But for those millions who participated in the Iran–Iraq conflict—as for every soldier—the war never ended. After the 18 July 1988 ceasefire, Iran and Iraq would exchange 90,000 prisoners-of-war, but many other thousands would remain in captivity for almost another decade. Iran was still releasing POWs in 1997. At least 500 men, some of them held in prison camps for seventeen years, were freed by Iran in advance of the December 1997 Islamic summit conference in Tehran. But in 1999, Baghdad was still claiming that Iran held 20,000 of its soldiers, including 8,700 who it said were registered with the International Red Cross. Iran said that at least 5,000 of its own men were still POWs in Iraq.
When Khadum Fadel returned to Baghdad after sixteen years of incarceration, he could remember only sorrow and hunger and rheumatism in an Iranian camp surrounded by barbed wire and mines, often lying in chains. Many thousands of the Iraqi prisoners came home after ten years of near-starvation in Iranian camps, only to find that American-backed sanctions after the 1991 war in which they had played no part were now starving their families. A whole angry army of ex-prisoners—filled with hatred of Iran, of Saddam and of the United States— were now living in misery and impoverishment in Iraq. Amid the mud and sand, they and the millions of Iraqis who avoided both imprisonment and death had learned to live and to die. They learned to fight. Under the lethal imagination of their dictator, they held the line against Iran. They used their tanks as static gun platforms dug into the desert and they burned their enemies with gas or swamped them with tidal rivers or electrocuted them in the marshes. A whole generation of Iraqi lieutenants and captains came to regard war—rather than peace—as a natural element in their lives. If ever the day came when Saddam was gone, what would these lieutenants and captains and their comrades from the trenches do if they faced another great army? What would they be capable of achieving if they could use their own initiative, their own imagination, their own courage—if patriotism and nationalism and Islam rather than the iron hand of Baathism was to be their inspiration?
Of course, there were also the dead. More than three years before the war ended, Saddam began construction of a space-age monument to his greatest blunder. From the air it looked like a rocket platform. From the ground it had the appearance of a giant sea-shell, two acres of sloping, marble-topped concrete surmounted by an umbrella of cement. Visitors to Baghdad—and there were many tens of thousands of Iraqis who came here to try to mourn their lost relatives— climbed the lower lip of the structure, then descended into a fridge of air conditioning in a vault beneath the canopy. Here, said an inscription in gold Arabic letters, lay the unknown Iraqi warrior, the hero of the Arab nation, the martyr of the Second Qadisiya. Even five years after the end of the Iran–Iraq War, the memorial had still not been completed.
In 1993, I would visit the monument again to find an army of Iraqi stonemasons chipping into marble slabs, each slice—and there were thousands—containing the names of sixteen Iraqis who never returned from the titanic war. Private Ahmed Katem’s name was neatly carved onto a slab, and alongside him Mohamed Jadi, Abdullah Ahmed and “combatant” Salah Younis. Saddam’s martyrs were worthy, it seemed, of nothing but the highest honours; in Baghdad, they were building Saddam Hussein’s “Vietnam wall.” True, the marble was pale yellow rather than black. True, it was being constructed around the circular vault rather than below an ellipse near a presidential palace. True, the Iraqi “wall” was said to be Saddam’s brainchild. But then again, America’s dead in Vietnam numbered a mere 56,555; Saddam’s between 1980 and 1988 might have reached a conservative half million.
At that time, Saddam’s “martyrs’ wall” remained an official secret in Iraq. No one had been told of its construction and the wall would be revealed only at its completion in 1995, when families would be able to grieve before the names of their loved ones. “It is forbidden for you to take photographs,” a resolute young lady from the memorial’s executive announced uncompromisingly when I requested a snapshot of the unfinished palisade of names. “We may give you no information. We cannot talk to you about this. We have no details, no figures. Nothing must be said until this is completed. This instruction comes from the highest authority.” There was no doubt about who that might be. But could one not perhaps know just how many names would appear on the wall? The lady was adamant. “It is impossible to give any figure while so many of our soldiers remain prisoners of Iran, even five years after this war has ended.”
Quite so. Nor were the dead of the Second Gulf War—of the battle between Iraq and the American-led armies in 1991—likely to be commemorated here. Nowhere in Baghdad were they officially remembered. For it was the eight-year Iran–Iraq War that had been enshrined in Baathist history as the most important, the most strategic, the most historic, the most glorious—more to the point, the most necessary—battle in Iraq’s history. The more the Second Gulf War was questioned by Iraqis, the more the First Gulf War was off-limits to all criticism. Even the 1990 Iraqi draft constitution demanded that any future president must accept that the Iran–Iraq War “was the only way to guarantee the integrity of Iraq and the safety of its sacred places.”
Thus might history be safely locked up. There were whole families, brothers, fathers and sons, listed together on the marble slabs of Saddam’s martyrs’ wall, the monstrous death toll broken up by carved quotations from the Koran, in their turn guaranteeing—as no constitution can—eternal paradise for those who were cut down by shells and bullets or who drowned in the mud at Howeiza and Fish Lake, Ahwaz, Khorramshahr, Qasr-e Shirin and Fao. In the defence of Fao, an Iraqi official blurted out to me in March 1993, Iraq lost 58,000 men.
Just one of the half million had been preserved—in chemicals that would supposedly prevent his decomposition for a hundred years—in a coffin suspended above the Unknown Soldier’s Museum 5 kilometres away, draped in an Iraqi flag amid the tattered remains of his dead colleagues’ battledress. Stained uniforms, ripped open by surgeons in their vain attempts to save Iraqi lives, were encased in glass, along with the long-dried bloody bandages of the deceased. “There are seventeen swords above us here—you see?” the young curator asked, pointing to the Arab swords suspended in black stone above the uniforms. “They represent the 17 July revolution and the stones represent the black hearts of our enemies.” Plaques were displayed around the hall, donated by the military attachés of socialist Romania, East Germany, the Soviet Union, Somalia, nations which had since died as miserably as any soldiers commemorated here.
It was all so simple, like the exhibition that lay before the martyrs’ wall. It portrayed in photographs the life—as attempted assassin, guerrilla fighter and leader—of one Saddam Hussein, from birth to Baathist throne. There was a picture of the mud hut in the Tikrit village of Ouja where he was born in 1937. There was the eight-year-old with a half frown who would one day lead the Arab Baath Socialist Party. A grainy photograph showed the young but creepily familiar features of a schoolboy Saddam, sitting on the step of a railway carriage. There were pictures of Abdul-Karim Qassim’s bullet-riddled limousine after Saddam Hussein had tried to kill the dictator in Rashid Street. More snapshots showed Saddam with girl students in his Egyptian exile, standing aloof before the Pyramids. His wife Sajida smiles from a wedding photograph. Saddam beams into the camera while behind him the hammers and chisels are chipping away at their thousands of names. Rarely has a president been so closely associated with those he sent to their deaths. They are “Saddam’s Qadisiya Martyrs.” Note the possessive—his personal property. But the little exhibition trailed off rather unexpectedly. There were photographs of Baath party officials and of Saddam’s homes—not of the interiors but of the outside walls, of steel-enforced gates and sentry boxes and perimeter fences. If power did not corrupt, it clearly loved high walls. The sunlight outside the great vault was blinding. Only after a few seconds did I notice, to the right, a massive courtyard filled with many more thousands of slabs, all awaiting the stonemasons’ testimony of blood.
Throughout the war, however, a more serious though less ostentatious memorial stood west of Baghdad, in the dusty military town of Fallujah. Here, in a series of refrigerated sheds, the Iraqi army maintained one of the world’s largest mortuaries, with space for 2,000 bodies at a time. It was to this dismal, hot little suburb that the families of Iraq’s war dead came to identify their sons and husbands and fathers. But even here, the authorities sometimes could not cope with the bloodletting. After the slaughter in the Howeiza marshes in the spring of 1985, there were so many corpses to transport to Fallujah that the government confiscated the licences of every taxi-driver in Baghdad and ordered all of them to drive south to Basra to collect the body of a soldier. Only when the driver turned up at the refrigeration sheds with his cadaver was his licence restored. Even then, the dead were still lying across the mud flats in their thousands; relatives were taken to the front line to identify their next-of-kin as they lay on the battlefield. Some said 8,000 Iraqis died in the marshes that spring, others 14,000. Some said 47,000.
I ALWAYS GO BACK TO OLD WARS and talk to old soldiers. I go back to Northern Ireland, to Bosnia, to Serbia, to Algeria and southern Lebanon and Kuwait, to post-invasion Baghdad. I am trying, I suppose, to make sense of what I have witnessed, to place it in a context that did not exist for me when I was trying to stay alive, to talk to those with whom—however briefly—I shared these nightmares. I am looking, I think, for the kaleidoscope to stop turning, to see the loose flakes of memory reflected in some final, irremediable pattern. So that is what it was about! Sometimes, as I write this book, I hear the pieces of glass moving in the kaleidoscope, like the sound of the hard drive in my laptop as I write, searching for applications and programmes, ticking towards a conclusion, a clear screen with an undisputed memory.
I can sit on my balcony above the sea in Beirut and remember with absolute clarity how the Iranians—when we didn’t choose the train—would take us to their war in a Hercules C-130, blasting through the hot darkness to Ahwaz or Dezful, we journalists trapped in our bucket seats, sweating, notebooks and cameras on our laps, praying that the Iraqi air force didn’t sniff the engine exhausts in the dank night. We’d fly into the desert air base, see the oil fires burning—Bosch-like in the purple dawn, thick and tasting of dark, uneatable, cancerous chocolate—and hear that heavy rumbling of the Somme-like guns, and fear for the next thirty-six hours: the night in the underground bunker with the dust rising from the floor, a day of driving through battle lines with the shells cracking over our heads, corpses stinking by the roadside, the young men with no helmets and Korans in their hands.
Seven years after the war ended, it was easier to go back to the battlefields. I just turned up one summer’s morning in 1995 at Mehrabad Airport for Iran Air’s flight IR417 to Ahwaz, ate hot rolls with marmalade on the Airbus—yes, another A300—as my guide from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance snored beside me and, an hour later, circled the butane gas flames above the refineries before picking up Gholamreza’s Peugeot taxi to the deserts where we all lost years of our lives. The moment I pass the first sand revetments, the sun a white blister at seven in the morning, Gholamreza points into the grey immensity of dust and says: “Bang bang! Jang.”
Jang, of course, meant “war,” and “bang,” for all its clichéd, simplistic quality, is an accurate enough representation of the sound of the Iraqi field gun that destroyed so much of my hearing just across the desert to the west of here a decade and a half ago. As Gholamreza accelerates the Peugeot through the dawn, my tinnitus is ringing merrily away from that distant bombardment, as if those guns were still firing over these withered killing fields. To left and right of us, as the desert grows from grey to dun-coloured in the rising sun, the trenches and tank emplacements stretch away for scores of kilometres, some turned by farmers into wind-breaks for corn, others untouched by a breeze in fifteen years, the track-marks of long-destroyed Iraqi and Iranian tanks still cut into the sand. Already it is 100 degrees in the shade; perspiration is slicking down my face. In the back of the car, the man from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance has fallen asleep.
Perhaps a million men died here and in the battle line that snaked over 900 kilometres to the north, to the snows of the Turkish border, almost twice the length of the 1914–18 Western Front and fought over for almost twice as long. A whole generation of Iranians and Iraqis walked up the line to death in villages that sound, to the survivors and to the families of the dead, as sombre as Ypres and Verdun and Hill 60, Vimy Ridge and Beaumont Hamel. The names of their calvaries are almost as familiar to me now: Kerman and Shalamcheh, Penjwin and Khorramshahr, Abadan and Fateh and Ahwaz and Fao and the battle of Fish Lake. The Iranians suffered most. I used to ask in my reports then, stunned by the resilience of the Iranian defenders, whether they had their Owens and Sassoons to write about war and the pity of war.
But—perhaps because the Iranians were so xenophobic, so alien in creed, so hostile to the West, even to us reporters who risked our lives to visit their trenches—we never really tried to understand their motivation, or the effect of this bloodbath upon their minds. Even today, we forget this. The Iranians do not. Did they, like so many soldiers in the First World War, return home broken in body and spirit, their faith abandoned in the blood-drenched desert? I asked a senior Revolutionary Guard Corps officer this question. What, I asked him over dinner in Tehran, was the worst moment of the war? “July eighteenth, 1988,” he snapped back at me. “It was the day we accepted the UN resolution to end the war, when our Imam said he had to eat poison and accept a ceasefire. I was driving a two-and-a-half-ton truck to the front at Shalamcheh and I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard the news on the radio. I drove off into the desert and switched off the engine and I lay down in the sand, on my back with the sun above me. And I asked God why I was here on this earth. This was the worst day of my life.”
Gholamreza’s car raced south, the temperature rising, past a massive stockade of decaying Iraqi armour and trucks, mile after mile of it, stretching to the horizon and beyond. An Iranian sentry stood guard at this enormous war park, a museum of Iraqi tanks and smashed vehicles that belittled anything we saw in the aftermath of Norman Schwarzkopf’s puny offensive against the same army back in 1991. On the right, a great train of burnt, twisted carriages lay on its side next to the Ahwaz–Khorramshahr railway line. The Iraqis had crossed and recrossed this bit of Iran; the trenches and gun-pits streamed away from the road, thousands of them, each year of desert warfare grafted onto the next. With a telescope, you could see this webbed terrain from the moon. We crossed the brown waters of the Karun River; the last time I was here, there were corpses floating in its hot currents. It was 110 degrees; they fought in this heat, died in these ovenlike winds, rotted in less than three hours. No wonder they buried the Iraqis in mass graves and freighted home the Iranian dead in less than a day.
The poetry they wrote—for they did write war poems in their thousands, the peasant Basiji volunteers and the Pasdaran and the artists drafted to the front—was not like Owen’s or Sassoon’s. In the volumes of war verse in the Tehran bookshops, old soldiers thank God who has matched them with His hour. Rifling through the shops near Tehran University, I found the ghosts of Rupert Brooke and W. N. Hodgson in these fat volumes. Here, for example, is the Iranian poet Mohamed Reza Abdul-Malikian, writing his “Letter Home” from the Ahwaz– Khorramshahr front, where twelve-year-olds led suicide attacks on the Iraqi wire:
Here on our front line,
Our gift of sacrifice is strewn around,
Their power greater than the Karun’s waves.
Right here, you can admire the children and old men
Who crave to walk the minefields.
It’s here for all to see.
There was something frightening in this: not just the terrifying image of child martyrdom, but what appeared—to my Western mind—to be a kind of stasis of maturity and development. True, Hodgson was writing like this in 1914:
Sons of mine, I hear you thrilling
To the trumpet call of war . . .
Steeled to suffer uncomplaining
Loss and failure, pain and death.
But by 1916, our war poets had comprehended the obscenity of war. Abdul-Malikian had written his lines after many more years of war. He hadn’t lost his faith. Was this because he was fighting to defend his own country or because Islam does not permit doubt in a believer? Or was it because in Iran a poem is supposed to be something holy, words that are intended to be spiritual rather than provocative? We in the West wait to be moved by a poem—simple patriotism and faith were not enough for Sassoon or Robert Graves. Wouldn’t they have said something more than Abdul-Malikian? After all, in the eight years that followed Saddam’s invasion of 22 September 1980, the war had embraced both poison gas and missile attacks, the worst horror of the First World War and one of the most terrifying potential weapons of the Second.
When I first wrote in The Independent about the “stasis of maturity” in Abdul-Malikian’s poem and the obscenity of war that pervaded the work of the later British war poets, I received a long and challenging letter from a British Muslim. If I wanted to comprehend the Iranian motivation and resilience, Zainab Kazim wrote, I must understand the meaning of the seventh-century battle of Kerbala:
I doubt whether I would be inaccurate in saying that the Iranians—in general—were aware of and understood the horrors of war before they were involved in the Iran–Iraq bloodbath. I think that Shias, on the whole, know a great deal more about the reality of martyrdom than the average non-Shia. I remember trying to explain the tragedy of Kerbala to my British friends at school and being astonished by their reaction. After all, I had already visualised the images of baby Ali Asghar with an arrow in his neck, Abbas with his arms slashed off, Akbar with a spear through his chest and Hussain picking up each body, weeping over it and carrying it back to the tents . . . I had imagined the ladies of Imam Hussain’s family being led through the bazaars after their bereavements and speaking out against the rulers. I have grown up with this history and it was and is a part of me. Most Shias are well aware of the price one may have to pay for standing by one’s principles . . .
Gholamreza’s car was hissing on the melting tar of the desert road when the man from Islamic Guidance tapped me on the shoulder. “Look over to your right,” he shouted. Gholamreza slowed the car, the blowtorch heat swarming through the open windows. There was a railway track beside the road, but beyond it was the detritus of an army in defeat: burned-out Iraqi tanks and armoured personnel carriers, barrels cracked open, machine guns rusting on tank turrets, Saddam’s monsters still decomposing in the desert. We walked across the railway and past a quicksand—the man from Islamic Guidance walked into it, up to his knees—and found ourselves among the wreckage of a great battle. Many of these vehicles had been driven into the sand and bogged down by their terrified drivers, their steel tracks snapping on rocks and concrete emplacements, their interiors turned into cauldrons by rocket-propelled grenades.
I climbed onto a T-62 tank, eased open the turret and lowered myself inside. The gun’s breech had been blown apart, the driver’s seat melted. A million tiny flies moved around this scorched, claustrophobic gunner’s compartment. Perched on top of the tank, I began taking photographs, but realised that I could find no colour through my camera lens. I put the camera down and still saw no colour. The sun, the sheer whiteness of the desert, had sucked colour out of my vision, turning Saddam’s armour into a dull monochrome. The man from Islamic Guidance was talking, more to himself than to me, but in English so that I would understand. “Think that he came here, Saddam, to our land, think of his arrogance, to think he would get away with this . . . How can you not understand why we had to fight him?”
On the other side of the main road, I recognised the skeletal outline of a Russian-made truck and walked across to it. Only the front of the driver’s cab remained, pin-pricked by a thousand shrapnel holes and rusted grey. Behind it, punched into the desert floor, was a massive crater littered with ammunition tins that had been torn apart by some long-ago explosion and, half buried in the sand, thousands of heavy machine-gun bullets, congealed and twisted into grotesque shapes—a direct hit on an ammunition lorry. On the lip of the crater was some flaky white powder, perhaps human bone. The man from Islamic Guidance was sitting on the sand nearby, exhausted.
We walked off into the desert. We found an Iranian helmet with a bullet hole through it, dozens of army boots, one of them torn off at the heel with something dark inside. There were shell holes filled with dirt, and barbed wire, and a line of dugouts behind a trench, the floors lined with the lids of wooden ammunition boxes, the sandbags burst open. Somewhere near here, the Iranian poet Ali Babchohi had written a strangely moving poem about a dream in which an old man from Nachlestan—a date-growing region in the south of Iran—appeared before him in the desert:
Hey, look over there!
I can see him with my own blind eyes.
Do you see him?
It’s old Shir Mohamed from the coast at Nachlestan
With the glint of the sun on his musket.
. . . I saw him with my own blind eyes.
And old Shir Mohamed said to me:
“I came to plant my rifle
Instead of wheat and barley
Across my land of dates.”
A few days earlier, in Tehran, I had talked to university students about the war. They were attending a philosophy seminar, fourteen young men and three women. Half of the men had fought during the eight-year war, one of the women had been a military nurse. Ex-Basiji volunteers, soldiers and Revolutionary Guards, they had been trying to analyse an impenetrable essay by an American sociologist. Then they tried to explain what the war had meant to them and why I did not understand it.
Shojae Ahmmadvande was bearded and looked to be in his thirties, though he must have been younger; he was just eighteen when he was sent to the front at Mehran on the Iraqi border, 170 kilometres east of Baghdad, in 1984. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with infinite care. “My involvement in the war was a reflection of the nature of our Islamic revolution. It was based on a new interpretation of religion—getting involved in the war was a sacred duty. We were led by a prophet-like statesman so this is how we perceived the war. This was the reason for our overwhelming commitment. The war could not be separated from our religion. I saw many incidents that cannot be described. I ask myself: ‘Was it real or not?’ There were extraordinary scenes that touched me.”
And here Ahmmadvande looked at the floor, speaking to the ground rather than to me.
There was one day at the beginning of our “Val Fajr 5 ” operation in 1984. We were in the Mehran area and I was sitting with several other soldiers on top of a small hill. There was a man sitting with us, about thirty or thirtyfive years old. And suddenly we all noticed that his head had fallen forward, just a little. We didn’t know what had happened. Then we saw blood running from his arm and then from his head. A bullet had hit him in the head. And at this moment, he turned slightly, knowing he was hit, and he put his hand in his pocket and took out a Koran and started looking at it, and the blood was all the while flowing down his arm. Three of us just stood there in amazement—we couldn’t do anything—this man was almost gone, he was in the seconds before his death, and he had taken out his Koran and was looking at it. It was a scene I will never forget all my life, the power of his commitment.
There was a long silence, and then one of the women, at the end of the room, dressed in a black chador, spoke. “In general, we were very proud of what we did in the war. Our nation of Iran proved its sovereignty. We know how people have returned home after other big wars. I’ve read about it in Hemingway. But this did not happen in Iran during the war. You have to understand the importance of morality in our war—morality was better than food. You think the number of deaths and casualties are important—you work these statistics out on your computers—but my impression is that here people died regardless of the material worth of their lives. It was their Islamic faith that mattered.”
Exactly how many men died in the war may never be known—the Iraqis have not given precise figures—but the man who was in charge of the Revolutionary Guards during the 1980–88 conflict insisted to me that the Iranians lost well under 500,000 men. Mohsen Rafiqdoost, who by 1995 was running a multi-million-dollar foundation for the war wounded and the families of dead soldiers, claimed to me that 220,000 Iranians were killed and 400,000 wounded. “We think the Iraqis lost five hundred thousand dead. We don’t know how many of their men were wounded. In addition to our Iranian war dead, we lost seventy thousand dead in the Islamic revolution the year before the war began.”
Even today, the figures must be constantly revised upwards. The bodies of at least 27,000 Iranian soldiers were found on the borders of Iraq after the end of the war in 1988. In July 1997—nine years after the ceasefire—Iran was holding mass funerals for another 2,000 soldiers whose remains had only recently been discovered near the frontier. Four hundred of them were given a state funeral in Tehran attended by President Mohamed Khatami, while the bodies of the other 1,600 were buried in ceremonies in twenty-two towns around the country. Many of the casualties died in the first months of the war when the Iraqi army entered Khorramshahr and attacked Abadan.
Among the soldiers trying to fight off the Iraqi invaders was Mujtaba Safavi. He told me his story as he sat in the back of a Tehran taxi, locked into one of the capital’s fume-clogged, traffic-jammed streets.
I was captured about twenty miles outside Abadan. We were surrounded at night. We had no chance. They took us to a big prison camp in Iraq, in Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein. Our first years there were very hard. They killed some of us, tortured others. It was a year before the Red Cross visited us, took our names and brought us books. The younger ones among us were stronger than the older ones. I think it was because the younger ones felt their life was still in front of them. But two of our men in the prison killed themselves; they couldn’t stand it any more. You know, if you are a prisoner, you have got to be very, very strong. I learnt a lot about myself in the prison, about how strong I could be. When the Red Cross brought me letters from home, they were already a year old. I wrote letters back and my mother still has them, but I do not want to read them now. They will remind me of terrible days.
When I asked Mujtaba the date of his release, he said it was the year after the war ended, 1989. He had been in prison camps for ten years—longer than any British Second World War POWs. When we met in 1995, Iran still maintained that 15,000 of its soldiers were being held in Iraq, some of them fifteen years after their capture.
When Gholamreza reached Khorramshahr, he shook his head at the ruins still strewn across the city. Fought over for two years and bombarded by the Iraqis for another six years, its brick-built apartments and factories were turned to dust by repeated Iraqi counter-offensives. It was Iran’s—not Iraq’s—Stalingrad. In the centre of the city, by a waterway littered with overturned, burned-out cargo ships, next to a mosque whose blue tiles were still being repaired, was a small museum of photographs marking the thirteenth anniversary of the city’s liberation. “The photographer who took these pictures was martyred later in the war,” the guide said. His right hand gestured to a corpse on the floor.
The soldier’s body was so graphically re-created in wax, the dark blood seeping through his back, his face buried in sand, his helmet covering most of his hair, that for a moment I believed the Iranians had preserved a real soldier’s remains. Next to the sand pit with its “martyr” stood a large portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini beneath the legend: “Martyrdom Is the Highest Point in Human Life.” The photographs were of splintered trees and smashed railway yards, of ruined mosques and pulverised homes and bodies in side streets.
Another poet who fought in the war caught the sense of fury when he wrote about Khorramshahr under Iraqi occupation. Parvis Habib Abadi used traditional Iranian symbols of love—the butterfly hovering round a candle—and the anger of Abu Zaher, loyal friend of the Prophet Mohamed, to illustrate his rage:
My friend, how lonely we are,
Away from this city that was ours,
The candle’s guttered out, the butterfly consumed by fire
Everywhere, in every alley, I see just ashes, rubble, blood,
A head here, over there some long, blood-matted hair,
No hands left to comb it with.
So until the time that head is recomposed upon the corpse,
I wear my clothes as a shroud, screaming like Abu Zaher
To put fear in all my enemies.
But one man who liberated Khorramshahr had not wanted to die. He sat with me in a restaurant in Abadan, munching on his fish and potatoes, his mouth open, making too much noise. “I was in the naval service of the army and we came in at the liberation. I didn’t see many bodies. You know, most of the Iraqis surrendered, 20,000 of them—can you imagine it? All with their hands up, like this.” And there in the restaurant, to the surprise of fellow diners, he stuck his hands on his head, palms down. “But we should have ended the war then, in 1982. Saddam had offered a ceasefire, the Saudis offered Iran $70 million to rebuild. If we’d have stopped then, Saddam would have been overthrown by his own people. But another group of people had the Imam’s ear and Khomeini decided to continue the war until Saddam was destroyed, to fight for Najaf and Kerbala and capture Basra. It was a big mistake. I decided to keep clear of the war then and got a job in Tehran. It went on for another six years. And we didn’t even win. We only got all our lost territory back when Saddam was facing you after his invasion of Kuwait.”
This was a rare voice of dissent. During the war, I remember, the dead would talk to the living, a permanent rebuke to those who might find fault with the military conduct of the conflict. The Revolutionary Guards had a house magazine, The Guardian of Islam, which carried memorial tributes to their newly dead comrades under an unimpeachable text: “Count not as dead those killed in the cause of God—but alive and living with their Lord.” Shortly before he fell on the Shatt al-Arab, Hossein Chair-Zarrin would write in ungrammatical Persian that “I am being dispatched for the first time to the front—I had heard about the attack so I wanted to take part in it . . .” But to his mother, he wrote as if already in the afterlife: “Dear Mother, your son has broken loose from the chains of [worldly] captivity, of slavery and self-betrayal . . . Yes, dear Mother, your child has become a captive of Islam and has reached obedience, devotion and sincerity—of course if God accepts.”
I was to grow used to reading these testaments with their convictions and—for want of a better word—their self-righteousness. Abulhassan As-Haq was almost blithe in his will. “Martyrdom is not a rank that everyone deserves,” he wrote just before his death. “I am writing this will even though I think the possibility of being martyred is remote—but anyway, there’s no shame in a young man having that ambition. I’m not frightened of the day of resurrection . . . when the first drop of martyr’s blood is spilt, all his sins are cleansed . . . Yes, my dear ones, death will eventually take us all—no one lives for ever in this world—so why give away this golden opportunity?”
Now Khorramshahr was being rebuilt. There were new schools, two new hospitals, new factories and apartment blocks under construction. But the port was still in ruins, its wrecked ships blocking the river. At the harbourside, I stood next to one hulk—the Race Fisher, registered in Barrow-in-Furness—taking photographs, until two cops in black shirts turned up. The man from Islamic Guidance sprang out of Gholamreza’s taxi to rescue me. “They are suspicious of foreigners with cameras,” he said meekly. “People were hurt very badly in this city.”
I toured one of the new hospitals where a doctor told me that the war was a “necessary” event in his life, as in the lives of all who fought. “I was twenty-one at the time and had a friend, Hossein Sadaqat from Tabriz. He was an Azeri, a good friend, very loyal. And one day during an advance, he was hit in the head by something and his brains came out all over me. I was right beside him, you see. I didn’t want to believe it. There were no last words, nothing. Then I got hit in the shoulder by a piece of eighty-millimeter mortar shell. I was half-conscious and felt nothing at first, the pain came later.” He pulled up his shirt to show me the wound. All over Iran, men showed me wounds, in their arms, their necks, their legs. One man talked to me through a false jaw—the original had been shot off—while another coughed through his words. He had been gassed. But when I asked the doctor if it had been worth it—all the pain, suffering, sacrifice—his face lit up. “Of course. We were defending our earth and our Islamic heritage. And we were angry, angry at our enemy.”
That was what the Dezful poet Ghaysar Amin Pour felt when his home city came under nightly air attack. Perhaps because of this anger, his poem seems closer to us than others, touched with spite, even cynicism:
I wanted to write a war poem
But I knew it wasn’t possible.
I would have to put down my cold pen
And use a sharper weapon.
War poems should be written with the barrels of a gun,
Words turned into bullets . . .
Here it’s always red alert,
The siren never ends its moaning
Over corpses that didn’t finish their night’s sleep,
Where bat-like jets which hate the light
Bomb the cracks in our blind blackout curtains . . .
We can’t even trust the stars in case they’re spies,
We wouldn’t be surprised if the moon blows up . . .
Sometimes, this sense of indignation becomes political. Here, for example, is what Yahya Fuzi—thirty-one years old now, twenty-four when he fought in the war—said at that same Tehran University philosophy seminar:
War taught us about why people in the West who say they believe in freedom and human rights were ready to relegate these ideas to the background during our war. This was a major lesson for us. When Saddam invaded us, you were pretty silent, you didn’t shout like you did when Saddam invaded Kuwait ten years later. But you were full of talk about human rights when he went to Kuwait. The crimes of Saddam were much more publicised then.
Another student, bespectacled, interrupted:
In our revolution in 1979, anti-dictatorial slogans were our cries against the Shah. But the war with Iraq completed this process of nation-building. At the top of a hill under shellfire, we would have guys from Baluchistan and Kurdistan and other provinces all together. We all had to defend the same hill. And we had a lot of immigrants because of the war, people from Khuzestan driven out of their homes by the Iraqis, who fled to Tehran and Tabriz. There was this interaction with the rest of the population, an ethnic infusion. In this war, we were isolated, abandoned by everyone else, so we came to the conclusion that it was good to be alone—and we learnt about our fellow citizens, we felt united for the first time.
The idea that the Iran–Iraq War was, in a sense, the completion of the Islamic revolution in Iran—at the least, an integral part of it—was widely felt. The middle classes, who tried their best to stay out of the war, cut themselves off from history. The sons of the rich, using their visas to Canada, the United States, Britain or France, saw no reason to participate in what they regarded as a war of madness. “I spent the war in Canada, watched it on television and was glad I wasn’t there,” a twenty-nine-year-old told me at a party in Tehran. I couldn’t dispute his logic but I wondered whether it had not deprived the rich, the old guard Iranians who regretted the revolution, of their claim to Iran. They, too, were isolated by the war, because they refused to defend their country.
But it is the dead rather than the survivors who speak most eloquently. South of Tehran, at Behesht-i-Zahra, close to the tomb of the old man who sent them to die, lie tens of thousands of Iranians who returned in body bags from the war. Still they arrive there today, in plastic bags, a skull or two with a body tag, recovered from the battlefields as the Iranians go on digging for lost souls along the western front. New graves are still being dug for corpses yet to be found.
The tombs are not marked, like those of our world war dead, with simple, identical gravestones, but with slabs of inscribed marble, engraved pictures, photographs, flags, sometimes even snapshots taken by frightened comrades in the minutes after death, the shells still falling around them, pictures of bodies covered in blood. I had seen this before at Chasar in the mountains above Tehran. But this graveyard is on a galactic scale, the Gone With the Wind of cemeteries, Iran’s city of the dead. There is even a fountain that squirts blood-red water into the sky, the polar opposite of Saddam’s seashell and concrete monument in Baghdad, although both, in their way, possess the same dull, frightening sanctity.
So here lies Namatallah Hassani. “Born August 1st, 1960, martyred October 30th, 1983 at Penjwin, student of the Officer’s College,” it says on his grave. “You have to sacrifice yourself before love—that is to say, you must follow the Imam Hossein.” A face printed on a cloth screen shows Hassani, young with a small goatee beard. And here lies Mohamed Nowruzbei, “Martyred 1986, place of martyrdom Shalamcheh,” and Bassim Kerimi Koghani, “Born 1961, martyred April 22nd, 1986, place of martyrdom Fakeh.”
Many of these young men wrote their last messages to their families just before they died, long rhetorical speeches that begin with flowery praise of Khomeini and then disintegrate into humanity when they finish with personal wishes to their family. “I hope that I have done my duty by sacrificing my blood in the name of Islam,” wrote Mohamed Sarykhoni, born 1963, killed in action March 17th, 1984, at Piranshahr in Iranian Kurdistan. But then he goes on:
Give my best wishes to my father and mother, my sisters, my brothers, my friends. I hope they have been satisfied with me. I ask God to protect, forgive and bless you. To my wife, I say: it’s true that my life was very short and I couldn’t do all that I intended to provide for you. But I hope this short time we were together will be a wonderful memory for you. Take care of my child because he is my memory—for you and for my family too.
They speak from among the dead, these men. Hassan Jahan Parto, who was twenty-one when he was killed at Maimak in 1983, writes to his parents: “I advise my generous father and my family not to cry if I am martyred—don’t be sad because your sadness would disturb my soul.” But they do cry, the families, praying over the graves each Friday afternoon, eating beside their dead sons and husbands and brothers.
Mustafa Azadi, a Basij volunteer, was fighting in the hot desert at Shalamcheh when he was given the news that his nephew Haj Ali Jasmani had been killed. He offers me dates at the graveside. “He was one of the first men to join the Revolutionary Guards, and he fought until his martyrdom. He was hit by a shell. I was in the battle front when I heard the news. We were close to each other but it wasn’t possible for me to see his body. What do I think now? That all the martyrs have put a responsibility on our shoulders to defend our faith.”
This sounds too anachronistic to us Westerners, too much like John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” whose martyrs warn the living that “If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders fields.” Today we have seen through this martyrocracy: dictatorship—as opposed to government— by the dead. We think now of waste rather than responsibility. Robert Parry, a British soldier of the Second World War who participated in “regime change” in Iraq and Persia—he was part of the occupation force in Baghdad and Basra after the overthrow of Rashid Ali in 1941—was to write to me in 2004 with his own observations about the “lie” that dead soldiers “gave their lives for their country”:
Some magnificent men did just that by volunteering for suicide missions. Others gave their lives to save comrades. But for the vast majority coming back alive was their sustaining hope. Death took them without asking whether or not they wished to give. I lost a cousin in the 1914–18 war. Little more than a boy, half-trained, he was marched up into the front line. Arrived there, and out of curiosity, he looked out over the parapet. A German sniper got him. No time, like Hamlet, to choose.
To give or not to give. That is the question.
I had taken Mujtaba Safavi, the ex-POW, with me to Behesht-i-Zahra, and he translated for each mourner, slowly, sometimes very moved by their stories. Bahrom Madani described his dead cousin Askar Tolertaleri, killed at Maout, as “fascinated by God.” Mohamed Junissian saw his son Said just ten days before his death. “We were talking at home. And his mother asked him: ‘Why are you going back to the front again?’ My son said he had to defend his country. His mother said: ‘But you can be more useful to us here.’ He said it was good to be at home but that the enemy was in our land and we have to push them back. I agreed with him.” An old man with a grey beard said he had lost his nineteen-year-old son Hormuz Alidadi in a minefield twelve years ago at Dashdaboz. “It was God’s will,” he said. “We thank God he fought for Islam and his country.”
Mohamed Taliblou only got his son Majid’s remains back in 1994, “a few bones” dug up in the mud at Penjwin. “I have no feelings. He went to defend Islam and his country. It was in 1985, and I heard he had been wounded. One of his friends who was with him at the front came to see me and said: ‘I saw Majid fall down, but I didn’t see if he died or not.’ It was during a counter-attack by the Iraqis. He was killed by a single bullet.”
Mohamed Reza Abdul-Malikian wrote of last goodbyes in a poem called “Answer”:
“Why are you fighting?” my son asked.
And me with my rifle on my shoulder and my pack on my back,
While I’m fastening the laces of my boots.
And my mother, with water and mirror and Koran in her hand,
Putting warmth in my soul.
And again my boy asks: “Why are you fighting?”
And I say with all my heart:
“So that the enemy may never take your light away.”
The war had been over seven years now. Iranian diplomats were visiting Baghdad. The sons of the revolution—those who came home from the war—didn’t find a land fit for heroes; it was they who were now angrily denouncing corruption in President Khatami’s new “civil-society” Iran. But they came back, it seemed, having found faith rather than lost it, after an ecstasy of martyrdom that must leave us—horrified at the slaughter of two world wars, fearful of even the fewest casualties when we at last intervened in Bosnia, fixated by our own losses in Iraq— aghast and shocked and repelled. We mourn lost youth and sacrifice, the destruction of young lives. The Iranians of the eight-year Gulf War claimed to love it, not only as a proof of faith but also as the completion of a revolution.
For Iraqi soldiers, the war remained a curse. Hussein Farouk, an Iraqi military policeman, remembers the ceasefire as the moment an officer told his men that if they wanted to take revenge for the death of loved ones, now was the time. “One of our soldiers went into an Iranian prison camp. He had a brother who was killed. He just chose one of the Iranians. Then he shot him. He was the only one who did this.” Farouk recalled the day he was himself guarding a group of Iranian prisoners. “They were all standing together and one of them asked me for some water. Of course, I gave him water. But then he picked up some soil from the ground and mixed it with the water and swallowed it. I watched in amazement. Then after a little while, the Iranian walked away, right past the guards. I ran after him and asked him what he thought he was doing. The Iranian looked puzzled. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Can you still see me?’ ”
Fati Daoud Mouffak, the Iraqi cameraman who had filmed the first casualties on the border in 1980, found that his experiences grew more crippling as the war continued. “We would go to the headquarters on the central front and they would say ‘battle in Fakr’ and they’d tell us the direction and we would go to the front and find a hole in the sandbags and point our lens through it. I saw many martyrs of both sides—I considered that both Iraqis and Iranians were martyrs.” Mouffak filmed Iraq’s prisoners—“Some were very young, fourteen or fifteen, they had gone through the minefields on motorbikes and were captured”—and saw an act of heroism that briefly lifted his spirits: an Iraqi soldier running onto the battlefield under fire to rescue a wounded Iranian, lifting his enemy onto his shoulder and bringing him to safety in the Iraqi lines. But he was to see other, more terrible things.
Outside Basra, an Iraqi military intelligence officer was screaming at an Iranian prisoner, demanding to know when the next attack would start. “The Iranian wouldn’t talk and so our officer said he’d cut off his ear if he didn’t give the information he needed. We journalists tried to stop this but we were told that this was none of our business. The Iranian still remained silent. So the Iraqi intelligence man cut off his ear. Then all the other Iranian prisoners started to talk.”
We were paid three dinars each day to be at the front—that was nine dollars then—and we would pay for our own food at a hotel behind the lines. We’d come back tired and start drinking gin and tonic and whisky. We had another cameraman with us, a friend of mine, Talal Fana. He was so worried that he never had breakfast; he just drank Iraqi arak— he wanted the power to die. He would get completely drunk—that was how he would go off to the front because he was sure he was going to die—but he survived. Many soldiers drank. At al-Mohammorah [Khorramshahr], one of our television cameramen Abdul Zahera was wounded in the hand and lost a finger. Abbas, another film crewman, was hit in the chest. In 1987, Abdul Zahera was killed filming on the front at Qaladis on a hill called Jebel Bulgha. Abbas was killed in Fao in 1988, in the last battle there.
At the battle of Shalamcheh, Mouffak was stranded between the Iraqi and Iranian front lines, trapped with Iraqi soldiers who would have to surrender, hiding in shell holes and protecting his drunken friend Talal. He was ordered to fly in a helicopter—on Saddam’s personal orders—to film close-quarters battles between Iraqi and Iranian troops outside Basra, “so close that they were stabbing each other with bayonets and we could not see which was an Iraqi martyr and which was an Iranian martyr. Saddam had ordered me to take two rolls of Arriflex [film] and I used two whole rolls and later Saddam rewarded me with $3,000 and a watch.” Attached to the 603rd Battalion of the Iraqi army in 1987, Mouffak found himself climbing a mountain in Kurdistan to film the scene of an Iraqi victory. But, lost on the mountain in the dark, he stumbled into a killing field. “There were so many bodies, I couldn’t tell whether they were Iraqis or Iranians.”
In 1985, Mouffak was to lose his own brother.
Ahmed was twenty-nine and one of his comrades had a wife who was expecting a child, so Ahmed volunteered to do his job for him while his friend went to Baghdad to see his newborn. It was May 5th, 1985. My brother escorted an ammunition convoy to the front and it was ambushed and we never learned any more. I went to the front there and spoke to his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Riad, and he said he did not know what happened. “I do not know his fate,” he said to me. Perhaps there was an explosion. We got nothing. No papers. No confirmation. Nothing. I was in Baghdad when the war ended in 1988. I heard shooting in the air. People said that the war was over. I went to have a drink—whisky and beer. I thought that people would be happy and we would survive. I thought of my brother—we had a hope that he would return if he was a prisoner. We waited for years and years but no one came. He was lost. There was no letter, nothing. He was married with two daughters and a boy and his family still wait for him to come home. They are still waiting for news. Because there was no body, because there were no details of his death, his name was not even put on the war memorial.
Mouffak would survive to film Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and then, under sanctions and no longer able to buy his beloved Kodak film—he still believes that film gives a definition that video will never provide—he was reduced to taping a documentary on reconstruction. Until, that is, he was reactivated as a news cameraman to film the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of his country. Yet he remains, even today, haunted by the brutality he witnessed, especially by two deeply painful experiences during the war with Iran. In Suleimaniya in northern Iraq, Saddam’s army suffered a serious defeat on Maout mountain in 1987.
There were military police on the roads below the mountain and they had express orders from Saddam: that anyone who was found retreating must be executed. Unfortunately, they caught three soldiers and they were to be shot. I didn’t have to watch. But I was a witness. I couldn’t film. They were between twenty and twenty-six years old. All three said the same thing: “Our brigades collapsed—we retreated with the commanders.” They were all crying. They wanted to live. They couldn’t believe that they would be executed. There were six or seven in the firing squad. Each of the men had his hands tied behind his back. They just went on weeping, crying and sobbing. They were shot as they cried. Then the commander of the firing squad went forward and shot each one of them in the forehead. We call this the “mercy bullet.” I vomited.
Yes, the “mercy bullet,” the coup de grâce . How easily the Iraqis learned from us. Outside Basra, another young soldier was accused of desertion and again Mouffak was a witness:
He was a very young man and the reporter from Joumhuriya newspaper tried to save him. He said to the commander: “This is an Iraqi citizen. He should not die.” But the commander said: “This is none of your business— stay out of this.” And so it was the young man’s fate to be shot by a firing squad. No, he did not cry. He was blindfolded. But before he was executed, he said he was the father of four children. And he begged to live. “Who will look after my wife and my children?” he asked. “I am a Muslim. Please think of Allah—for Saddam, for God, please help me. I have children. I am not a conscript, I am a reservist. I did not run away from the battle— my battalion was destroyed.” But the commander shot him personally—in the head and in the chest. Then he lit a cigarette. And the other soldiers of the Popular Army gathered round and clapped and shouted: “Long life to Saddam.”