The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Saddam tolerated the Shah once he withdrew his support for the Kurdish insurgency in the north—the Kurds, like the Shia, were regularly betrayed by both the West and Iraq’s neighbours—and agreed that the Iraqi–Iranian frontier should run down the centre of the Shatt al-Arab River. He had been prepared to allow Ayatollah Khomeini to remain in residence in Najaf where he had moved after his expulsion from Iran. The prelate was forbidden from undertaking any political activity, a prohibition that Khomeini predictably ignored. He gave his followers cassettes on which he expressed his revulsion for the Shah, his determination to lead an Islamic revolution and his support for the Palestinian cause. One of his closest supporters in Najaf was Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi—later to be the Iranian ambassador to Syria who sent Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon in 1982—who was imprisoned three times by the Iraqi authorities.44 Khomeini’s theological ambassador was Ayatollah Sayed Mohamed Bakr Sadr, one of the most influential and intellectual of the Shia clergy in Najaf, who had written a number of highly respected works on Islamic economy and education.

  But Bakr Sadr also advocated an Islamic revolution in Iraq, relying—like Hussain Shahristani—on his own political importance to protect him from destruction. Once Khomeini was expelled by Saddam—to Turkey and ultimately to Paris— Bakr Sadr was in mortal danger. With an Islamic revolution under way in Iran, Saddam would have no qualms about silencing Khomeini’s right-hand man in Najaf, let alone his followers. They were to suffer first. Bakr Sadr, sick at his home, was arrested and imprisoned in Baghdad—only to be released after widespread demonstrations against the regime in Najaf. The Baath then announced the existence of the armed opposition Dawa party and pounced on Bakr Sadr’s supporters. The Iranians were later to list the first martyrs of “the Islamic Revolution of Iraq” as Hojatolislam Sheikh Aref Basari, Hojatolislam Sayed Azizeddin Ghapanchi, Hojatolislam Sayed Emaddedin Tabatabai Tabrizi, Professor Hussain Jaloukhan and Professor Nouri Towmeh. The Baath decided to crush the influence of the Shia theological schools in Najaf by introducing new laws forcing all teachers to join the party. Bakr Sadr then announced that the mere joining of the Baath was “prohibited by Islamic laws.” This determined his fate—although it was a fate that Saddam was at first unwilling to reveal.

  For months, reports of Bakr Sadr’s execution circulated abroad—Amnesty International recorded them—but there was no confirmation from the regime. Only when I asked to visit Najaf in 1980 did a Baath party official tell the truth, albeit in the usual ruthless Baathist manner. It was a blindingly hot day—23 July—when I arrived at the office of the portly Baathist governor of Najaf, Misban Khadi, a senior party member and personal confidant of Saddam. Just before lunchtime on this lunchless Ramadan day, as the thermometer touched 130 degrees, the admission came. Had Ayatollah Bakr Sadr been executed? I asked.

  “I do not know an Ayatollah Bakr Sadr,” Khadi said. “But I do know a Mohamed Bakr Sadr. He was executed because he was a traitor and plotted against Iraq and maintained relations with Khomeini. He was a member of the Dawa party. He was a criminal and a spy and had a relationship with not just Khomeini but with the CIA as well. The authorities gave his body back to his relatives—for burial in Wadi Salam. The family have not been harmed. They are still in Najaf.”

  I remember how, as Khadi spoke, the air conditioner hissed on one side of the room. He spoke softly and I leaned towards him to hear his words. This was enough to send a tingle down the spine of any listener. Khomeini’s lack of respect for his former protectors now smouldered at the heart of the Baathist regime that once did so much to help him. “Khomeini speaks about crowds of people flocking to see Bakr-Sadr in his absence,” Khadi said softly. “But in court that man admitted that he spied. He was hanged just over five months ago. But these are small things to ask me about. We execute anybody who is a traitor in Iraq. Why do reporters ask unimportant questions like this? Why don’t you ask me about the development projects in Najaf?”

  This was a bleak, dismissive epitaph for the man who accompanied Khomeini into fourteen years of exile. Wadi Salam—the Valley of Peace—is the cemetery where so many millions of Shiites wish to be buried, within a few hundred metres of the golden shrine of the Imam Ali. The family were permitted to give him a traditional Muslim funeral and he now lay in a narrow tomb amid the hundreds of thousands of tightly packed, hump-shaped graves whose swaddled occupants believe that their proximity to Ali’s last resting place will secure the personal intercession of the long-dead holy warrior on the day of resurrection. But there was another grave beside that of Bakr Sadr, and it was a more junior Baath party official who took some delight in expanding the governor’s brutal story.

  “We hanged his sister, too,” he said. “They were both dressed in white shrouds for their hanging. Bint Huda was hanged around the same time. I didn’t see the actual hanging but I saw Bakr Sadr hanging outside the Abu Ghraib prison afterwards. They hanged him in public. He was in religious robes but with a white cloth over him and he was not wearing his turban. Later they took him down and put him in a wooden box and tied it to the roof of a car. Then he was taken back to Najaf. Why do you ask about him? He was a bad man.”

  The history of the Baath party in Iraq might be written in the blood of ulemas and their families and the demise of the Shia clergy was to become a fearful theme over the coming years. Already, Imam Moussa Sadr, the leader of the Shia community in Lebanon and a relative of Bakr Sadr, had disappeared while on a visit to Libya in August of 1978. A tall, bearded man who was born in Qom and who looked younger than his fifty years, Moussa Sadr had been invited to Libya to observe the ninth anniversary celebrations of Colonel Ghadafi’s revolution. All he would talk of in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, one Lebanese newspaper reported, was the situation in Iran. Had the Shah’s Savak secret police seized Moussa Sadr? Had Ghadafi “disappeared” him for Saddam? He was supposed to have boarded Alitalia Flight 881 to Rome on 31 August, on his way back to Beirut. His baggage turned up on the carousel at Fiumicino Airport—but neither Moussa Sadr nor the Lebanese journalist travelling with him were on the plane. Many Shiites in Lebanon still believe that their imam will return. Others are today trying to bring criminal charges against Ghadafi. Moussa Sadr, who founded the Amal—Hope— movement in Lebanon, was never seen again.

  In Najaf, the Shiites were cowed. No one openly mentioned Bakr Sadr’s name in the ancient dusty city with its glorious mosque, built around the solid silver casket of the Prophet’s son-in-law. One stall-holder shrugged his shoulders at me with exaggerated ignorance when I mentioned Bakr Sadr. The banners in the streets of Najaf that boiling July all praised Saddam’s generosity—each slogan had been personally devised by local shopkeepers, an Information Ministry functionary insisted—and in one road there hung a small red flag bearing the words: “May the regime of Khomeini, the liar and traitor, fall to pieces.”

  The elderly Grand Ayatollah Abulqassem al-Khoi, the rightful heir to the Shiite leadership in Najaf but a man who believed that the people should render unto God the things that are God’s and unto Saddam the things that are recognisably Baathist, had lacked the necessary influence to smother the unrest—just as he would fail to control the mobs during the southern Iraqi uprising in 1991. There were to be no interviews with the old man. But the governor was quite prepared to take me to the house in which Khomeini had once lived. A single-storey terraced building with walls of flaking blue paint, it stood in a laneway suitably named Sharia al-Rasoul—the Street of the Prophet—in the southern suburbs of Najaf.

  They tell you that the house has a varnished wooden front door and this is true; but the midday heat was so harsh that it sucked all colour from the landscape. The heat smothered us in the shade and ambushed us in fiery gusts from unsuspecting alleyways until all I could see was a monochrome of streets and shuttered houses, the fragile negative of a city dedicated to the linked identities of worship and death. Ayatollah Khomeini must have loved it here.

  But the city was changi
ng. The roads had been resurfaced, a construction project had erased one of Khomeini’s old “safe” houses from the face of the earth, and Iraq’s government was doing its best to ensure that the Shia now lacked nothing in this most holy of cities; new factories were being built to the north, more than a hundred new schools—complete with Baath party teachers—had been completed, together with a network of health centres, hotels and apartment blocks. The city’s beaming governor drove me through the drained and sweltering streets in his white Mercedes, pointing his pudgy finger towards the bazaar.

  “I know everyone here,” Misban Khadi said. “I love these people and they always express their true feelings to me.” Behind us, a trail of police escort cars purred through the heat. Khadi, though a Shiite, did not come from Najaf but from the eastern province of Diyala. He came to the Imam Ali mosque every day, he claimed, and gestured towards a banner erected over the mosaics of the shrine. It was from a recent speech by Saddam. “We are doubly happy at the presence here of our great father Ali,” it said. “Because he is one of the Muslim leaders, because he is the son-in-law of the Prophet—and because he is an Arab.”

  Baathist officials made this point repeatedly. All the Iraqis of Iranian origin had already been expelled from Najaf—“if only you had telephoned me yesterday,” Khadi said irritatingly, “I could have given you the figures”—and the message that Shia Islam is a product of the Arab rather than the Persian world constantly reiterated. Had not Saddam personally donated a set of gold-encrusted gates to the Najaf shrine, each costing no less than $100,000? The governor stalked into the bazaar across the road. Because it was Ramadan, the shutters were down, so hot they burned your skin if you touched them. But a perfume stall was still open and Khadi placed his mighty frame on a vulnerable bench while the talkative salesman poured his over-scented warm oils into glass vials.

  “Ask him if he enjoys living in Najaf,” the governor barked, but when I asked the salesman instead if he remembered Khomeini, his eyes flickered across the faces of the nearest officials. “We all remember Khomeini,” he said carefully. “He was here for fourteen years. Every day, he went to pray at the mosque and all the people of Najaf crowded round him, thousands of them, to protect him—we thought the Shah would send his Savak police to kill him so we stood round Khomeini at the shrine.” There was a moment’s silence as the perfume seller’s critical faculties—or lack of them—were assessed by his little audience.

  “But here’s a little boy who would like to tell you his view of Khomeini,” said the governor, and an urchin in a grubby yellow abaya shrieked, “Khomeini is a traitor,” with a vacant smile. All the officials acclaimed this statement as the true feelings of the people of Najaf. Khadi had never met Khomeini but confidently asserted that the imam had been a CIA agent, that even Grand Ayatollah Abolqassem al-Khoi of Najaf had sent a telegram to Qom, blaming Khomeini for killing the Muslim Kurds of northern Iran. Al-Khoi may have done that—his fellow teacher, Ayatollah Sahib al-Hakim, had been executed by the regime—but this did not spare his family. In 1994, just two years after al-Khoi’s death, his courageous thirty-six-year-old son Taghi was killed when his car mysteriously crashed into an unlit articulated lorry on the highway outside Kerbala. He had been a constant critic of Saddam’s persecution of the Shia and told friends in London the previous year that he was likely to die at Saddam’s hands. At the demand of the authorities, his burial—and that of his six-year-old nephew who died with him— went without the usual rituals.

  Four years later, Ayatollah Sheikh Murtada al-Burujirdi, one of Najaf’s most prominent scholars and jurists, a student of the elder al-Khoi and another Iranian-born cleric, was assassinated as he walked home after evening prayers at the shrine of Ali. He had been beaten up the previous year and had escaped another murder attempt when a hand grenade was thrown at him. Al-Burujirdi had refused government demands that he no longer lead prayers at the shrine. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the principal marja al-taqlid—in literal Arabic, “source of emulation”—was still under house arrest and the Baathists were promoting the more pliable Sayed Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, cousin of the executed Sadiq. But Sadiq al-Sadr himself was assassinated by gunmen in Najaf nine months later after he had issued a fatwa calling on Shiites to attend their Friday prayers despite the government’s objection to large crowds. Al-Khoi’s son Youssef—Taghi’s brother—blamed the Baathists, and rioting broke out in the Shia slums of Saddam City in Baghdad. But the history of Shia resistance did not end with the fall of Saddam. It was Sadiq al-Sadr’s son Muqtada who would lead an insurrection against America’s occupation of Iraq five years later, in 2004, bringing U.S. tanks onto the same Najaf streets through which Saddam’s armour had once moved and provoking gun battles across Sadr City, the former Saddam City whose population had renamed it after the executed Bakr Sadr.

  These were just the most prominent of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who would be murdered during Saddam’s nearly twenty-four-year rule. Kurds and communists and Shia Muslims would feel the harshest of the regime’s punishments. My Iraqi files from the late seventies and early eighties are filled with ill-printed circulars from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, from Iraqi trade unions and tiny opposition groups, naming thousands of executed men and women. As I thumb through them now, I come across the PUK’s magazine The Spark , an issue dated October 1977, complaining that its partisans have been jointly surrounded by forces of Baathist Iraq and the Shah’s Iran in the northern Iraqi village of Halabja, detailing the vast numbers of villages from which the Kurdish inhabitants had been deported, and the execution, assassination or torturing to death of 400 PUK members. Another PUK leaflet, dated 10 December 1977, reports the deportation of 300,000 Kurds to the south of Iraq. Yet another dreadful list, from a communist group, contains the names of 37 Iraqi workers executed or “disappeared” in 1982 and 1983. Omer Kadir, worker in the tobacco factory at Suleimaniya—“tortured to death”; Ali Hussein, oil worker from Kirkuk—“executed”; Majeed Sherhan, peasant from Hilla—“executed”; Saddam Muher, civil servant from Basra—“executed” . . . The dead include blacksmiths, builders, printers, post office workers, electricians and factory hands. No one was safe.

  This permanent state of mass killing across Iraq was no secret in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the West was either silent or half-hearted in its condemnation. Saddam’s visit to France in 1975 and his public welcome by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, who bestowed upon the Iraqi “my esteem, my consideration, and my affection,” was merely the most flagrant example of our shameful relationship with the Iraqi regime. Within three years, agents at the Iraqi embassy in Paris would be fighting a gun battle with French police after their diplomats had been taken hostage by two Arab gunmen. A French police inspector was killed and another policeman wounded; the three Iraqi agents claimed diplomatic immunity and were allowed to fly to Baghdad on 2 August 1978, just two days after the killing. U.S. export credits and chemicals and helicopters, French jets and German gas and British military hardware poured into Iraq for fifteen years. Iraq was already using gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers when Donald Rumsfeld made his notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad to shake Saddam’s hand and ask him for permission to reopen the U.S. embassy. The first—and last—time I called on the consulate there, not long after Rumsfeld’s visit, one of its young CIA spooks brightly assured me that he wasn’t worried about car bombs because “we have complete faith in Iraqi security.”

  Iraq’s vast literacy, public health, construction and communications projects were held up as proof that the Baathist government was essentially benign, or at least worthy of some respect. Again, my files contain many Western press articles that concentrate almost exclusively on Iraq’s social projects. In 1980, for example, a long report in the Middle East business magazine 8 Days, written with surely unconscious irony, begins: “Iraqis who fail to attend reading classes can be fined or sent to prison where literary classes are also compulsory. Such measures may seem harsh, but as Iraq enters
its second year of a government drive to eliminate illiteracy, its results have won United Nations acclaim.”

  In 1977, the now defunct Dublin Sunday Press ran an interview with former Irish minister for finance Charles Haughey in which the country’s human rights abuses simply went unrecorded. It was not difficult to see why. “An enormous potential market for Irish produce,” it began, “including lamb, beef, dairy products and construction industry requirements was open in Iraq . . . Charles Haughey told me on his return from a week-long visit to that country.” Haughey and his wife Maureen, it transpired, had been “the guest of the 9-year-old socialist Iraqi government” so that he could inform himself “of the political and economic situation there and to help to promote better contact and better relations between Ireland and Iraq at political level.” Haughey, who had met “the Director General of the Ministry of Planning, Saddam Hussein,” added that “the principal political aspect of modern Iraq is the total determination of its leaders to use the wealth derived from their oil resources for the benefit of their people . . .” The Baath party, the article helpfully informed its readers, “came to power in July 1968 without the shedding of one drop of blood.”

  The British understood the Iraqi regime all too well. In 1980, gunmen from the “Political Organisation of the Arab People in Arabistan”—the small south-western corner of Iran with a predominantly Arab population, which is called Khuzestan— had taken over the Iranian embassy in London; the siege ended when Special Air Service men entered the building, capturing one of the men but killing another four and executing a fifth in cold blood before fire consumed the building.45 Less than three months later, however, on 19 July 1980, I was astonished to be telephoned at my Baghdad hotel and invited by the Iraqi authorities to attend a press conference held by the very same Arab group which had invaded the embassy. Nasser Ahmed Nasser, a thirty-one-year-old economics graduate from Tehran University, accused the British of “conspiring” with Iran against the country’s Arabs and demanded the return to Iraq of the bodies of the five dead gunmen.