by Kim Ghattas
In the years and decades that followed, that invasion would be remembered as the starting point, a provocation. But it was also a reaction, part of the competition of the Cold War. The score was ever changing: America had lost Vietnam; the proxy war was still raging in Lebanon; but Egypt, as part of its peace dance with Israel, had turned its back to Moscow and joined the US camp. The Soviets could not afford to lose more territory. They had to preserve their hold on Afghanistan, where the Communist Party had seized power in April 1978 but was facing an ongoing insurgency. Some rebel leaders, mostly Islamist, had sheltered in Pakistan, where, by early February 1979, some two thousand were already getting military training. The Saudis had also been pushing the United States to help the insurgents, and even offered to fund the effort. In July 1979, President Carter approved a small program of covert assistance: radio transmitters and propaganda support, no weapons. The small but mounting support for the insurgency was enough to provoke Moscow.
A month after the Soviet invasion, the Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal, who had just overseen the operation to take down Juhayman in Mecca, traveled to Peshawar. He was briefed on the Afghan resistance by his Pakistani counterparts and visited Afghan refugee camps. The Saudis were worried that the Soviets would push further and invade Pakistan. But they also saw an opportunity: a playground where they could export the countless Juhaymans their system had created, and a noble cause around which these zealots could rally, shifting focus away from the sins of the royal family. Most important, with the House of Saud’s credentials as custodians of the two Holy Mosques lying in tatters after the siege, the Saudis could now rebuild their reputation by being the champions of Islam against the godless communists. They could impress the Muslim world with more than just oil money. They could lead the faithful into a holy war. Or at least pay for it.
* * *
In 1979, Yassin al-Haj Saleh was a third-year medical student at Aleppo University, both hopeful and fearful about the future. His eyes sparkled but drooped slightly; even his smile had an edge of seriousness to it. He was hopeful, because these were heady days of change across the region, and change always carried hope within it, the possibility of a positive outcome. But he was worried because there was violence. The atmosphere at the university was tense, with secret police everywhere and the cult of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad silencing people’s minds. Yassin was an active member of the Syrian Communist Party, independent of the Soviets and closer to European communism. The party was fiercely opposed to Assad’s dictatorship.
Assad had come to power in a bloodless palace coup in November 1970, building on previous coups by his own party, the nationalist, socialist, and ostensibly secular Baath Party. A former commander of the air force and former defense minister, he came from Syria’s tiny Alawite minority, a tenth-century offshoot of Shia Islam deemed heretical by some Muslims. Assad now ruled over a Sunni majority. The Alawites, long Syria’s rural downtrodden, were climbing the social and military ladders. Assad had brought relative stability after years of repeated coups; he built schools and brought electricity to poor villages. But this was still an impoverished country, in the Soviet camp with a socialist economy. The Baath Party had been ruthless from the start in quelling all opposition, and Assad was no different. The struggle against Israel was used to justify everything: it was why military expenditures were so high, draining the state coffers. In the face of the enemy, the nation had to close ranks, and no one was allowed to speak out and demand freedom. Prisons were filling up. Resentment was building, and simmering social unrest also pushed young Sunnis into the arms of the Islamists.
In 1973, Assad announced a new constitution, which for the first time in Syria’s history did not require the president of Syria to be a Muslim. The Muslim Brotherhood organized protests in Hama against the secular Baathists. The riots spread to large cities like Homs and Aleppo. Assad backed down and amended the constitution, though he rejected demands that Islam become the religion of the state. Unrest continued for years, building up with hit-and-run acts of violence against Alawite officers, doctors, sheikhs, and intellectuals. The violence was not all Islamist. Local gangs of young men, disenfranchised losers, school dropouts, all those alienated by the oppression of Assad, were also engaged in the popular insurgency. The opposition to Assad was political and peaceful, with protests, union strikes, and student marches in cities across the country. But the dictator was ruthless.
“The good are silent, and violence has spiraled as the government’s secret police have viciously repressed dissent or potential dissent,” wrote an American professor, Samuel Pickering Jr., who was in Syria in 1979 with his wife, on a Fulbright grant, teaching English in the coastal town of Lattakiah. “At times during the year, Aleppo and Hama seemed foreign countries brought back under Damascus’s rule only by tank law. ‘You don’t know,’ a student told me with tears in her eyes. ‘The people die like rain.’”
Then came a declaration of war against Assad. One June 16, 1979, possibly inspired by events in Iran, a Sunni captain at the Aleppo artillery academy and a squad of gunmen fired on uniformed cadets, most of them Alawites. Government-run newspapers didn’t report it until a week later, putting the death toll at thirty-two, with no mention of the sectarian targeting. Even before the news was printed, Yassin had felt fear in the air. There were even more security forces on the street, more checkpoints. Unofficial sources had put the toll of the artillery school massacre at eighty-three. The Brotherhood would always deny any involvement, but the Assad regime still blamed them and launched a widespread clampdown on the group, netting hundreds and executing dozens. Assad would furthermore claim that all of the opposition to his rule was nothing more than an Islamist insurgency, using that as an excuse to silence all his critics.
Sa’id Hawwa, the Brotherhood ideologue who had gone to Tehran in May 1979 to meet Khomeini, was in exile in Jordan, still waiting for the ayatollah’s help. There would be no answer. In 1982, the Assad regime would crush the Muslim Brotherhood by leveling whole parts of the city of Hama and killing more than fifteen thousand people. Hawwa and the Syrian Brotherhood would never forget, nor forgive, Khomeini and Iran for abandoning them. After praising Khomeini and his revolution, Hawwa would soon begin to lambast the ayatollah as a danger to the Sunni Muslim world.
Khomeini may have been an Islamic revolutionary, but he was pragmatic, as politically shrewd as he was ruthless. He supported Islamists, Sunni or Shia, who could serve in his anti-Western, anti-Israeli front—and always on his terms. He would even help revolutionaries with dubious Islamic credentials (like Arafat), so long as they served his purposes. He had no use for pro-American leaders like Sadat, but Assad was already in his camp. Together they would form what would be known as the axis of resistance for decades ahead. Assad, in turn, had learned a lesson from watching the shah diddle: crush your opponents ruthlessly. And with a new ally in Iran, the Syrian president saw the potential of a Shia-Alawite geographical axis, with which to scare and blackmail countries like Saudi Arabia.
Before even graduating, Yassin was arrested. He had been in hiding for two months but the security forces found him on December 7, 1980, at one in the morning. He was clearly not an Islamist—he was as secular as they came—but everyone who opposed Assad was a target, including the left. Hundreds were arrested. Across the region, leaders differed about how to handle the rise of Islamic fervor, but they all agreed on one thing: leftists and communists were a threat to their grip on power and therefore had to be crushed. The intellectuals, the writers, the student activists were still an alternative to the authoritarian rulers, with ideas and ideals. Yassin would spend sixteen years in Assad’s darkest dungeons. Once out of prison, he would rise as one of Syria’s foremost intellectuals, advocating relentlessly and fearlessly for inclusive democracy. But he would find that, as the decades went on, the enemies of freedom multiplied within his own country, as did the battlefronts. By 2013, his struggle, and that of millions of Syrians, against dictatorship
would be submerged by the Saudi-Iran rivalry. He would witness how Iran would again stand in the Assad camp, knees deep in blood.
* * *
In the summer of 1979, Saddam Hussein decided it was time to consolidate his rule. He knew the ayatollah and the pull this man could have on Iraq’s Shia community. He forced his cousin, the aging and ailing president Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, to resign, and on July 16, 1979, Saddam became the fifth president of Iraq. He went on to crush anyone who represented an alternative. He squeezed the Shias tighter, expelling hundreds to Iran, putting clerics under house arrest. They had no recourse anymore against the brutality of the Baath regime. They were now stuck between two crazy men: Saddam and Khomeini. The Iraqi president also dismantled the backbone of a progressive Iraqi society, the left, by harassing and jailing people in droves: intellectuals, professors, journalists, artists, women’s activists—all went into exile. Finally, he went after Kurds, pursuing guerrilla fighters even across the border into Iran, with air raids. Saddam was hollowing out his own society.
There was one group that had been forming that Saddam couldn’t quite figure out. They dabbled in religion, they organized around prayer, they preached. Though they declared the secularism of the Baath Party to be heresy, there were no calls to overthrow him. He rounded some of them up and charged them with illegally organizing a charity. They would be released after a few years, then jailed again. In prison, they’d recruit others, form cells, and expand their network through the country’s mosques. They called themselves al-Muwahidoun, those who enforce absolute monotheism, just as Ibn Abdelwahhab had preached. They revered one man: Sheikh Abdelaziz bin Baz. They called him al-sheikh al-waled, the father sheikh. Saddam’s oppression was not sectarian per se at the outset; he focused his ire on the Shias because as the oppressed majority they were the greatest threat to his grip on power. Meanwhile, the Muwahidoun would continue to grow, organize, preach, and lay low. Their time would come.
On April 1, 1980, Saddam’s vice president, Tariq Aziz, escaped an assassination attempt in Baghdad. Iraq blamed Shia activists backed by Iran. Saddam chose the targets of his retribution carefully. On April 8, 1980, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Sadr and his sister Amina bint al-Huda al-Sadr were executed. Sadr had founded the Islamic party Da’wa (Islamic Call), modeled after the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. He was the only leading cleric in Najaf who had openly supported Khomeini’s wilayat al-faqih, and he had been agitating against the Iraqi government, issuing religious edicts against joining the Baath Party. His supporters described him as the future Khomeini of Iraq. Now he was a martyr. Khomeini called for the overthrow of Saddam.
On August 6, 1980, Saddam went on a surprise twenty-four-hour visit to Saudi Arabia to meet King Khaled at his summer retreat in Taef, in the cool six-thousand-foot-high mountains outside Mecca. Saddam rarely traveled; this was his first foreign trip as president and the first visit of an Iraqi president to Saudi Arabia since the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958. Iraq was in the Soviet camp, and Moscow was the country’s chief supplier of arms. Iraq didn’t even have formal diplomatic ties with America. The state-run newspapers in Saudi Arabia and Iraq gave the usual bland reports: the leaders had discussed affairs in the Gulf and Arab unity in the face of the Zionist enemy. Israel had just unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem and declared Jerusalem the undivided eternal capital of the Jewish state. This was in contravention of international law and UN resolutions. Mostly, it rubbed salt in the Arab wound. Crown Prince Fahd called for a holy war against Israel.
Instead, at noon on September 22, Saddam declared war on Iran. Two hundred Soviet-made Iraqi jets bombed dozens of targets inside Iran. Iraqi tanks and ten thousand infantry soldiers crossed into Iranian territory at nine points along the border. The Saudis always denied they had given Saddam a green light, but the timing of his visit to Taef remains a mystery. Perhaps it involved nothing more than a silent nod of acquiescence to finding ways to contain Khomeini. Either way, within a year, Gulf countries had given oil-rich, prosperous Iraq a $14 billion loan to help war efforts. The battle lines were drawn: Jordan sent volunteers to fight with Saddam. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia continued to give him billions. The ranks of Iraq’s army were filled with Shias who fought for their country—this was a war between nations. Syria sided with Iran. Chamran was Iran’s defense minister, and several hundred of his former comrades from Amal in Lebanon flew to Iran to fight by his side. They left when he was killed in 1981 on the battlefront. They had idolized him but could not relate to Khomeini’s Iran. There were rumors that Chamran had in fact been shot in the back, another treacherous act in the campaign to eliminate Khomeini’s rivals.
An Iraqi military assessment had declared Iran weak and isolated, unable to defend itself or conduct offensive operations. Most of all, it did not have powerful friends. Saddam thought he could win the war quickly and easily, emerge even more powerful while cutting Khomeini’s ambitions down to size. But the war was a gift for the ayatollah, who could now use it to solidify his grip on the country in the face of an external enemy, sending thousands of young Iranians, boys even, to their deaths. Old wounds, long buried and forgotten, were reopened by Saddam and Khomeini, two men with delusions of grandeur reaching into ancient Persian and Arab history to justify their modern murderous campaigns. The mighty Persian Sassanid Empire had succumbed to Arab conquest in 636 during the Battle of al-Qadisiyya. Now, over a millennium later, Khomeini and Saddam wanted a redo. Or revenge. Iraq would begin to refer to the war as Saddam’s Qadisiyya. And so began an eight-year conflict, one that would devastate Iran and provoke and solidify deep fissures in the region. If 1979 was a turning point, 1980 was the point of no return.
* * *
In 1980, the shah was still roaming the earth, a monarch without a country. After his quick stop in Aswan in 1979, he had traveled onward to Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, and New York, seeking refuge and medical attention. His admission to the United States for medical care had triggered the hostage crisis in Tehran. Fearing extradition, the shah had flown to Panama and finally landed back in Egypt, in March 1980. Sadat thought Cairo would provide his friend a good base to mount a counterrevolution, or at least wait for the demise of a man Sadat had dismissed as a crazy cleric who was bound to fall soon. But in Egypt, too, there were those who looked to Iran and felt inspired by the ayatollah.
PART II
COMPETITION
5
I KILLED THE PHARAOH
EGYPT
1977–81
Do not reconcile
Even if it is written in the stars
And the astrologers break the news to you
I would have forgiven if I had died inadvertently
Do not reconcile
Until existence returns to orbit …
And the martyr to his waiting daughter.
—Amal Dunqul, “Do Not Reconcile” (1976)
Nageh Ibrahim was in awe of the Iranian Revolution, mesmerized by the masses on the street and the sight of people power at work, bringing down a tyrant, a traitor to his people and to Palestine. The medical student with the bushy black beard and intelligent eyes was in his final year at the Asyut University in Upper Egypt. He watched the news reports of the crowds thronging the streets for weeks, the departure of the shah, the triumphant return of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the exhilarating victory of Islam. He liked what he saw—it gave him and his friends ideas. The year of the revolution was also the year of Migrant Birds, a blockbuster starring the actress Shams al-Baroudi that was showing in all the cinemas. Nageh didn’t watch that.
No one had banned the film, no one had stopped Nageh from going to the movies or burned down the theater. This was neither revolutionary Iran nor puritanical Saudi Arabia. As a child, Nageh had read Shakespeare and Agatha Christie; he had listened to the concerts of Umm Kulthum on the radio every first Thursday of the month, like millions of Egyptians in the country. Daughter of a cleric, named after a daughter of the prophet, Umm Kulthum had developed her singing sk
ills reciting the Quran as a child. From the 1930s until her death in 1975, the woman known as Kawkab al Sharq, the Star of the Orient, sang about undying and unrequited love. She also sang about war and nationhood. She ruled the Arab world with her voice; her concerts brought millions to tears and her country to a standstill.
In the years since the Six-Day War, there had been much upheaval in Egypt. Nasser had died in 1970, and Sadat had taken over and moved Egypt from the Soviet camp to the American camp. He had gone to Jerusalem and made peace with Israel. His aggressive reforms, copying the West, and economic programs, which led to solid growth but also deep inequalities, were causing much angst and poverty, a sense of dislocation, similar to what Iran had experienced. The country’s pride was still mortally wounded from the loss of territory to Israel. This had led Nageh, and many others, in search of answers down a more militant path where there was no leisure reading and no music. Nageh had always been devout; by 1979 he was a fundamentalist, a founding member of the recently formed Gama’a Islamiyya, or Islamic Group, that sought the strict application of Islamic laws in society. He disapproved of cinema and all this acting nonsense. He was restless.
Shams al-Baroudi, the actress, came from a different world. She was one of Egypt’s biggest movie stars. A brunette with long hair, she was glamorous and made heads spin. In Migrant Birds, she played the role of a young working woman who follows a co-worker to Australia for love. Even the movie poster was offensive in the eyes of Islamists: Baroudi in a low-cut pink dress, leaning against a man kissing her on the cheek. It didn’t matter that the man in question was her husband in real life. Egypt’s actresses were among the best in the Middle East, beloved across the region and in their own country. Frank Sinatra concerts by the pyramids were for the elite, but everyone went to the movies in Egypt, for slapstick comedies or social dramas. Once frowned upon as a profession, an acting career was what little girls now dreamed of. In a region with different Arabic dialects, Egyptian crossed all borders as the lingua franca during the golden age of Egyptian cinema, from the 1940s to the early 1970s. By the 1950s, Egypt’s movie industry was the world’s third largest—the Arab world’s Hollywood.
