Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Six months after liberation, Kuwait City was still a mess, with rubble piled up in the souk and Iraqi sandbags still facing out to sea where the US Marines had been wrongly expected to come from. Graffiti daubed on a roundabout in blood-red paint read ‘Tank U Thatcher’. (Although John Major had become prime minister by the time Kuwait was liberated, it had been Margaret Thatcher who formed the initial coalition with President George Bush Snr to free Kuwait. I took a photograph of this Anglophilic graffiti, thinking it would be amusing to present it to Mrs Thatcher the following week at a British Embassy reception. She was curiously unappreciative and asked me to give it to a tall, rather coarse-looking man beside her. ‘This is my son Mark. He’ll look after it.’)

  My boss Rupert Wise had come with me to Kuwait to show me round and he introduced me to a powerfully built young Kuwaiti with a muscular chest that strained against the clean white lines of his traditional dishdasha robe.

  ‘This is Sheikh Khaled Al-Sabah,’ said Rupert. ‘He stayed in Kuwait during the occupation and helped the resistance.’

  Khaled winced with embarrassment at so formal an introduction, mumbling something modest as we took our seats at an outdoor restaurant serving plates of sizzling grilled kebabs beneath a dusty date palm.

  The three of us drove up to Mutla Ridge, a low sand hill north of Kuwait bay where the retreating convoy of Iraqis had been caught by the US Air Force in a hail of cannon fire from the air, a so-called ‘turkey shoot’ that generated horrific images of blackened corpses frozen in agony as the looters had tried in vain to escape from their blazing vehicles. The hundreds of tanks, trucks and looted civilian vehicles had all been bulldozed off the road and now stood abandoned in the sand. Belts of live ammunition lay all around, there were unopened crates of rocket-propelled grenades and ammunition boxes marked ‘GHQ Jordan’. Some passing Scottish soldier had left his mark on Kuwait by graffiti-ing a lorry with the choice words ‘Fuck the Poll Tax’.

  Sheikh Khaled Al-Sabah suddenly became very animated. On a windswept sand dune he had come across an Iraqi military intelligence file. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he said, pointing at a weasel-faced man on the opened page that flapped in the breeze. ‘I know this man, he used to come to my house every day! I always knew he was an Iraqi intelligence agent but I never thought his own people were keeping tabs on him.’ Khaled told us how, as a member of Kuwait’s ruling Al-Sabah family, he had had to adopt a different name while he stayed on incognito during the Iraqi occupation. ‘I know you are a clever man and you know many people,’ the Iraqi agent had said to Khaled, ‘so we will pay you one thousand dinars for every Al-Sabah family member you can lead us to.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ bluffed Khaled Al-Sabah. ‘If I catch any of those rotten Al-Sabah I will kill them myself with my bare hands!’

  Soon after that Khaled and I set off to explore the war-ravaged northeast of his country, driving along the coast road that runs next to Kuwait’s Bubiyan Island, one of the two islands which Saddam claimed were Iraqi when he invaded. It was as if the Iraqi army had left yesterday. There were hastily abandoned sandbag trenches and small piles of antiquated Russian gas masks lying on the sand. Knocked-out T55 tanks were everywhere and we passed a bridge that had been destroyed in the middle by an RAF laser-guided air-to-ground missile. As we drove northward the sky grew darker and ever more menacing from the burning oil wells and we passed more than one black, stinking lake of oil. Just short of the Iraqi border we reached the oil field of Sabratayn, where the air was thick with the smell of sulphur. Our ears were deafened by the roar of half a dozen blazing well-heads, where multinational crews of specialist firemen were battling in vain to put out the flames. Pessimists predicted the fires would burn for years, but in fact the last one was snuffed out in November, nine months after they were started. The desert here was notoriously dangerous as it was littered with landmines, making it unsafe to stray off the road.

  We drove on, past a wrecked Iraqi tank that had been flipped upside-down like a toy. Some local wit had graffitied it with the Arabic words ‘Hadithat al-muroor faqat’, ‘Just a traffic accident’. We passed a torn barbed-wire fence, then a long low building with an Arabic slogan on it. There was an unfamiliar flag hanging limply from the flagpole: it was red, white and black, but was lacking the additional green of the Kuwaiti flag. ‘Oh my God!’ cried Khaled, slamming on the brakes and turning to face me. ‘We’re in Iraq! We’ve got to get out fast!’ As a Kuwaiti prince, Khaled would have been a rich prize for an Iraqi patrol, although he had taken the precaution of placing a false ID on the dashboard just in case.

  As we hurtled back across the Kuwaiti border we ran into a Kuwaiti army jeep that had come after us to warn us that we were straying into enemy territory. They took us to their base, a forward observation post a mile from the border, where they served us tea in a shallow shell-scrape, an office swivel chair perched incongruously behind a heavy machine gun that pointed towards Iraq. ‘Sometimes they do some shooting at us,’ said their officer, Captain Al-Otaibi. ‘Then we shoot a few rounds back. But praise be to Allah no one has been hurt so far.’

  We had been foolish and lucky. Iraqi raiding parties were active in the area, crossing the unmarked border at night and probing deep into Kuwait, often retrieving military hardware left behind in Desert Storm. A few weeks after our visit some Western caterers were captured by the Iraqis, who claimed they had strayed over the border. After a lot of huffing and puffing from Baghdad they were eventually released, but to avoid such incidents Kuwait built a broad sand berm and trench all along the border from the Gulf to the edge of Saudi Arabia.

  It took a long time after Desert Storm for the BBC to be allowed back into Iraq, but the charms of the BBC’s Rageh Omar eventually led to the opening of an office in Baghdad.

  In November 1998, only a month before the Pentagon’s Desert Fox bombing campaign against military targets around Baghdad, I had the opportunity to slip once again into Iraq through the back door and find out what life was really like in the country’s second city, Basra, unencumbered by some government minder tugging at my elbow. With the blessing of the UAE government, a ferry company in Dubai had decided to reopen the old maritime passenger and cargo service to Iraq’s port of Umm Qasr, right at the top of the Gulf between the Kuwaiti and Iranian borders, on the few short miles of coastline Iraq possessed.

  There were over 100,000 expatriate Iraqis living in the Emirates, and with no commercial airlines flying into sanctions-bound Iraq this new route promised to be a lifeline for them, offering a comfortable forty-hour voyage instead of having to fly first to Amman in Jordan and then make the bone-jarring twelve-hour drive across the desert to Baghdad. At first the US Consulate in Dubai was very unhappy about this scheme, fearing it would allow Iraq to break UN sanctions, but they arranged for the ferry to be inspected and on a warm autumn evening we slipped out of Dubai’s Port Rashid and steamed north for Iraq.

  After a day and night at sea, we passed the Kuwaiti coastline on our left, then an Iraqi oil terminal on our right that jutted far out into the Gulf. As the ship slowed to negotiate the narrow channel that led to the port of Umm Qasr, we drew level with a flat, steamy marshland littered with triangular signs warning of mines; clusters of dead, decapitated date palms stretched to the horizon. This was the scene of the dreadful battles of attrition between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, where hundreds of thousands perished in slow-moving trench warfare that gained little ground for either side. Everyone on deck fell silent, lost in thought as we passed this ghostly battlefield.

  Long before we docked we could see the lines of buses parked beside the harbour. This was a tremendous PR opportunity for Saddam’s regime and it was not going to be passed up. Hardly anyone lived in the tiny port of Umm Qasr, so the government had bussed in hundreds of citizens from Basra to form a welcome crowd on the jetty. There were the posters of Saddam plastered on to wooden signs and waved before the cameras, there were the moustachioed, green-clad security people watching everyone from behind big,
aviator sunglasses, and there, for the first time I had heard it, the crowds were chanting their patriotic ode to Saddam: ‘With our blood, with our souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam.’ A hapless sheep was dragged to the water’s edge where it had its throat slit; watched by nodding policemen, some very overexcited young Iraqis put their hands in the blood then smeared it over the ship’s hull. Watching and filming all this, I sensed already that this was a very different country from freewheeling, apolitical Dubai, and I was eager to disembark and explore.

  Incredibly, nobody had told the Iraqis there were Western journalists on board, so after a brief discussion with the ship’s owners port passes were issued to myself and an Australian reporter writing for Gulf News. We walked down the gangplank, hired a taxi, headed for Basra and that was it: we were inside Iraq with no visas and no minders. There were several military checkpoints on the short journey up to Basra – the Iraqi military was on high alert, expecting a major US assault from the air, and there had indeed been a recent bombing raid on a radar installation nearby – but our port passes got us through; the soldiers took us for sailors.

  Basra in 1998 was in a terrible state. As the principal city of the Shi’ite-dominated south, it had been starved of investment for nearly a decade, suffering both from sanctions and the displeasure of Saddam Hussein. Saddam loathed the southern Shi’ites, exacting terrible vengeance on them for their short-lived uprising following the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait. Thousands were rounded up, interrogated, tortured, executed and buried in shallow graves. Now, a city that had once been rather wistfully dubbed the Venice of the Gulf had its canals clogged with garbage, old prams and a thick green scum. A foul stench rose up from these foetid waterways, yet a few desperate fishermen still cast their lines into the canals; I made a mental note not to eat fish here. Yet there was a palpable vitality and resilience on the streets. Basrans were getting by somehow, haggling and trading in the street markets, clutching fistfuls of dinars, all imprinted with the face of Saddam. The telephone system was so dilapidated that I could not find a line clear enough to file my radio report, so I spent much of my time perched on a footbridge filming the pedestrians down below as they thronged near a blue-tiled mosque, mingling with olive-uniformed soldiers and villagers on horse-drawn carts. My last memory of Basra in 1998 was of waiting for a taxi beside the Shatt Al-Arab waterway, close to a crossroads and a hospital. I never imagined I would return to that same spot five years later and see it swarming with khaki-clad British troops.

  I have had mixed feelings about the invasion and war in Iraq. Writing this now, in 2006, after watching the litany of mistakes by the Coalition and the ensuing carnage suffered by Iraqi civilians, it is all too easy to say the whole thing was an ill-conceived disaster. Certainly, the primary reasons given by the US and British governments for the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein have proved to be fallacious. More than three years after the invasion none of the alleged weapons of mass destruction had been found, showing that Western intelligence analysis on Iraq – or the government’s presentation of it – was catastrophically wrong. The US-led invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab and predominantly Muslim country was always going to be deeply unpopular in the Arab world, but the situation could just have been salvaged had the Coalition got it right in the ensuing months. Instead, far too little planning was undertaken for the ‘post-combat phase’; too many people in Washington appear to have believed the story spun to them by certain Iraqi exiles that the Iraqi population would welcome the invaders with flowers and goodwill.

  Amongst the many strategic mistakes made by the Coalition since April 2003, the following have been the most serious. Allowing widespread looting and ransacking of government offices, museums and other public buildings in areas under Coalition military control sent a message to the Iraqi population that the often brutally enforced system of order and control they had known all their lives had now been replaced by one of anarchy and uncertainty. The idea was to give Iraqis a ‘taste of freedom’ after decades of dictatorship, but in practice, emptying the ministries of their facilities, fittings and files greatly complicated the task of getting Iraq’s infrastructure back on its feet. Then the decision to disband the Iraqi army created at a stroke 400,000 disgruntled, armed and unemployed young men who became instant potential recruits for the insurgency. Banning members of Saddam’s ruling Baath Party from taking up senior posts may have been popular with much of the population, but these were the only people on the ground with practical experience of managing the country. Thirdly, the lack of any effective border controls in the first few months allowed nationalist and Islamist insurgents to bring in thousands of new recruits to their cause across the Syrian and Iranian borders. Cross-border smuggling had existed for years before the US-led invasion, so Al-Qaeda and other groups were able to capitalize on established routes and connections to stoke the insurgency, as if breathing new life into glowing embers.

  Then there was Abu Ghraib. The scandalous abuse of Iraqi prisoners by sadistic US jailers in a prison already notorious for its brutality under Saddam has played right into the hands of the insurgents. Likewise, the isolated but still damaging reports of occasional human-rights abuses of Iraqi civilians by British forces in the south. Whatever else the Arab world thought of America and Britain, it at least respected their human-rights records. Arabs are acutely aware of their own governments’ appalling track history in this department and they believed that, by comparison, Western democracies had an in-built respect for justice and fair treatment for those in captivity. Abu Ghraib shattered that belief. To the Arab world it was immaterial that the scandal involved only a tiny handful of wayward individuals amidst an army of 150,000; the damage was done. The well-publicized photographs and details of naked human pyramids of Iraqi prisoners, some tethered like dogs on leashes, were abhorrent to the whole world, but in the Middle East they crossed major cultural taboos. Public nudity is considered haraam, forbidden by Islam, especially in the presence of a female jailer, while dogs are largely considered low and unclean animals; one of the worst Arabic insults is ‘ya kalb!’, ‘you dog!’ So with the revelations of Coalition prisoner abuse in Iraq, one of the last pillars of the Coalition rationale for invasion collapsed in Arab eyes: the notion that Western forces came in to protect Iraqi human rights sat uncomfortably beside pictures of a hooded prisoner who had been told that his fingertips were wired up to an electric generator and that if he lost his balance and fell off a box he would receive several thousand volts. There was no possible justification for these abuses. Even if you were to believe that torture is warranted if it can prevent mass casualties in a future terrorist attack, these prisoners were hardly the master planners of Al-Qaeda; they were, at most, low-level insurgents with no proven connections with international terrorism. Their mistreatment was purely for sport, of the sickest, most degrading kind. In early 2006 I heard a senior US Army officer concede the damage done. ‘We must operate in an environment of consent,’ he told a London conference, ‘and Abu Ghraib reduced that environment considerably.’

  Yet back in March 2003, on the eve of the US-led invasion, it was not just Western intelligence that was wrong about Saddam’s alleged WMD. Even countries like France and China that opposed the war had their suspicions about what Saddam was up to. What else, they reasoned, could possibly account for his continual obstruction and defiance of UN weapons inspections? Ever since the Gulf War of 1991 Saddam’s government had lied and obfuscated over the true nature of its attempts to acquire banned weapons programmes, owning up to them only when it was presented with incontrovertible evidence that they had been discovered. So when Iraq said it had destroyed all its weapons after 1991, frankly, nobody believed it.

  For the Bush and Blair governments, it was obviously extremely embarrassing that years after the invasion still no WMD had been found, but we should not forget the other perspective. UN sanctions were placing an intolerable burden on ordinary Iraqis and if Saddam’s regime had remained in pl
ace it would only have been a matter of time before UN sanctions were either lifted or ceased to be effective. Once that time came, either Saddam or his son Qusay would, in all probability, have accelerated Iraq’s programme to acquire the components for WMD, and there is ample proof from the work of the Iraq Survey Group, which scoured Iraq from 2003–4, that Saddam’s regime maintained an active interest in acquiring banned weapons. So when I say that I had mixed feelings about the Iraq war, on the one hand I felt that the invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab country was both risky and wrong, and on the other I accepted that, thinking long term, the overthrow of Saddam’s murderous dynasty had removed any possibility that the Hussein family may one day acquire WMD. After all, a regime that had invaded Iran, invaded Kuwait, slaughtered the Kurds and Shi’ites inside its own borders, and used both Scud missiles and chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980s could not be trusted not to use nuclear weapons if it could acquire them.

  As a journalist, I had a bad Iraq war. A few days before US tanks rolled across the Kuwaiti border in March 2003, my boss Jonathan Baker gathered all the foreign correspondents together in a BBC room known as the Bridge Lounge. The cream of BBC journalists was being dispatched to the Middle East to cover this war and like a general on the eve of battle he ran through final preparations and plans, wishing everyone good luck and safe assignments as they departed for Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar and Iraqi Kurdistan. I was the only one in that room who spoke near-fluent Arabic and I felt I knew the terrain well, but because of the overriding fear that there would be some sort of revenge terrorist attack in Britain it was decided that as Security Correspondent I should be kept back at base in London. It was not necessarily a bad decision at the time, but for me it was intensely frustrating watching other correspondents trying to converse with the first Iraqis they met across the border; the Iraqi civilians usually spoke no English and my colleagues spoke no Arabic. ‘No!’ I would find myself shouting in the edit suite. ‘That’s not what he’s trying to tell you!’ Instead I had to content myself with reporting on how the Arab media was covering the war, a less dramatic story but one which was to have huge significance for Al-Qaeda’s recruiting efforts. Whereas Western news bulletins tended to lead with the latest military advances towards Baghdad, the Arab networks often focused on some human tragedy, like an explosion in a marketplace that was being blamed on a US air-to-ground missile. Their TV pictures spared the viewer no grisly detail, beaming footage of dead, blood-spattered Arab babies and their mothers into living rooms right across the Middle East, while crowds of obedient Iraqis chanted their opposition to the war. The US and British forces had almost no Arab journalists embedded in their midst, partly because the military did not trust them, whereas Arab networks like Al-Jazeera had camera crews poised inside Iraqi cities and they were able to rush to whatever scene of human suffering the Iraqi Ministry of Information chose to let them film. The net result was that the Arab world saw a very different war from the one that Western viewers saw. In Britain we saw M1 Abrams tanks ‘liberating’ towns like Nasriyya, or lines of US Marines hunkered down on a sand berm and exchanging fire with Feddayeen troops loyal to Saddam. In Arab living rooms they saw a bloody invasion of a fellow Arab nation and the humiliating collapse of what was supposed to be one of the largest, most powerful armies in the world. Almost nobody liked Saddam, but he was the Arabs’ problem and, naively or not, most Arabs would have preferred to deal with him in their own way. The final humiliation was the covering up of the face on Saddam’s statue in Firdaws Square in Baghdad with an American stars-and-stripes flag. It did not remain there long – like President Bush’s post-9/11 gaffe when he used the word ‘crusade’, it was quickly withdrawn – but the damage was done. The image was transmitted instantly around the world and the symbolism was disastrous for the Coalition: ‘US global superpower conquers Arab country, humiliates its ruler and makes it a colony.’ Osama Bin Laden must have been rubbing his gnarled hands together in glee at that image, knowing that recruits to Al-Qaeda would come pouring in after that. And they did. One bizarre moment in all of this was when I monitored Syrian TV to see how it was covering the defeat of a one-party Arab regime built around the cult of a dictator. On the day that Saddam’s statue was torn down in Baghdad, Syrian TV aired an extensive documentary about early Islamic architecture. Next door’s news was clearly not good news for the nervous regime of Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad.