The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  I was wrong, of course. As soon as we set off across the narrow iron bridge, the bullets started to crack around us, many of them so close that I could feel the air displacement of their trajectory. I saw a line of spray travelling across the river towards us—I was running now, but I still had the dangerous, childish ability to reflect that this was just how it looked in Hollywood films, the little puffs of water stitching their way at speed towards the bridge. And then they were pinging into the ironwork, spitting around us, ricochets and aimed shots. I actually saw a square of metal flattened by a round a few inches from my face. I ran faster but was gripped by a kind of stasis, a feeling—most perilous of all—that this cannot be happening and that if it is, then perhaps I should accept whatever harm is to come to me. Within seconds, Bayle was beside me, taking the cassette recorder from me, screaming “Run, run” in my left ear, physically pushing me from behind and then, when we neared the end of the bridge, grabbing me by the arm and jumping with me into the water of the Shatt al-Arab, the bullets still skitting around us. We waded the last metres to shore, scrambled up the bank and plunged into the palm grove as a cluster of mortar shells burst around the bridge, the shrapnel clanging off the iron.

  Amid the trees, an Iraqi platoon was banging off mortars towards Khorramshahr. The sergeant beckoned to Pierre and myself, and there, amid his soldiers, we lay down exhausted in the dirt. One of his men brought us tea and I looked at Bayle and he just nodded at me. I thought at first that he was telling me how bad things had been, how closely we had escaped with our lives. Then I realised he was thinking what I was thinking: that Saddam had bitten off more than he could chew, that this might not be a whirlwind war at all but a long, gruelling war of aggression. When we returned to the Hamdan Hotel that afternoon, I typed up my story on the old telex machine, sent the tape laboriously through to London, went to my room and slept for fifteen hours. The smell of adventure was beginning to rub off.

  So why did we go back for more? Why did I tell the Times foreign desk that although I was short of money, I would stay on in Basra? To be sure, I wanted to see a little bit more of this history I was so dangerously witnessing. If it was true that Saddam had grotesquely underestimated the effect of his aggression—and the Iranians were fighting back with great courage—then eventually the Iraqi army might heed Khomeini’s appeal and revolt. This could mean the end of Saddam’s regime or—the American and Arab nightmare—an Iranian occupation of Iraq and another Shiite Islamic republic.

  But war is also a vicarious, painful, attractive, unique experience for a journalist. Somehow that narcotic has to be burned off. If it’s not, the journalist may well die. We were young. I was fresh from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, already immersed in covering the Lebanese civil war and the effects of Israel’s first 1978 invasion. I had covered the Iranian revolution, the very crucible of this Iraq–Iran conflict. This was my war. Or so I felt as we set off each morning for the Iraqi front lines. And thus it was one burning morning along the Shatt al-Arab, this time with Gavin and his crew, that I almost died again. Once more, I was carrying CBC’s recording equipment and so—before writing these paragraphs—I have listened once more to that day’s tape; and I can hear myself, heart thumping, when I first began to understand how frightening war is.

  Most of the ships on the far side of the river were now on fire, a pageant of destruction that lent itself to every camera. But again, we had to approach the river through the Iraqi lines and the Iranians now had men tied by ropes to the cranes along the opposite riverbank who were holding rocket-propelled grenades as well as rifles. Here is the text of the audio-track that I was ad-libbing for CBC:

  FISK: We’re walking through this deserted village now, there really doesn’t seem to be anybody here, just a few Iraqi soldiers on rooftops and we can’t see them. But there’s a lot of small-arms fire very near. Sound of gunfire, growing in intensity. Yes, the car’s just over there, Gavin.

  HEWITT: Down here.

  FISK: Yes, there they are. Sound of shooting, much closer this time. I’m beginning to wonder why I got into journalism. My heartbeats are breakingup my commentary. Going through the courtyard of what was obviously a school—there are school benches laid out here.

  The sound of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade followed by a thunderousexplosion that obliterates the commentary and breaks the audio controlon the recorder.

  FISK: Back over here, I think, round this way. Dozens of shots and the sound of Gavin, the BBC crew and Fisk running for their lives, gasping for breath. Just trying to get back to the car to get to safety. Ouch, that’s too near. I think they can see us wandering around. Let’s go! Let’s go! There’s . . .

  HEWITT (to crew): Yah, c’mon, c’mon, we’re getting out of here. Can we go? Damn!

  And then, listening to this tape, I hear us urging our Iraqi driver to leave, shouting at him to leave. “Go, just go!” one of us screams at him in fury and, once we are moving away, I talk into the microphone, giving a message to George Lewinski and Sue Hickey in the CBC office in London:

  George and Sue, I hope you’ve now listened to all that. Please, please, use as much as you can ’cos you can tell how dangerous it was. And please would you keep this cassette whatever happens—it’s a memory I want to remember for the rest of my life, sitting in my Irish cottage. Whatever you do, don’t throw it away!

  The tape never made it. I gave it to our Iraqi taxi-driver in Basra to take across the border to send from Kuwait airport, but he was turned round at the frontier and arrived back four hours later outside our hotel, smiling ingratiatingly and holding my tape out of the driver’s window like a dead fish. I later transmitted it down a crackling phone line. Heaven knows what the Canadians made of it—although I was later told that a truck-driver in Whitehorse, Yukon, pulled over to a phone booth, dialled CBC in Toronto and asked: “Was that for real?”

  In one sense, it was. The recording was the actual sound of four comparatively young men risking their lives for . . . Nothing? I’m not sure that would be true. By putting our lives on the line, we did, I suspect, give an authenticity to our work that also gave us a credibility when we came to challenge what governments—or other journalists—claimed to be true. This experience had proved to me beyond all doubt that Iraq was not going to “win” this huge war. An Iranian artillery counter-attack was being sustained and, as I wrote that October—accurately but six years prematurely—“if this is carried to its logical conclusion, then it will not be Khorramshahr that is under shellfire from Iraqi guns but Basra that will be hit by shellfire from the Iranians.”

  Across the Bailey bridge in Basra came now a steady stream of military ambulances. I ventured out to the border post at Shalamcheh again and there now were the Iraqi wounded, lying in the sand while an artillery battery beside them lobbed 155-mm shells across the border. An ambulance came bumping out of the desert and bounced to a halt in a sandy basin half surrounded by palm trees. They brought an infantryman out of it on a stretcher, pulled the blood-soaked bandages off his shoulder and laid him on a makeshift bed in the shade of the old police station. The man, shot by an Iranian sniper, was still in pain but he made no sound as three army medical orderlies fussed with drip-feed bags above him, the guns firing off a round every minute, a slamming explosion that shook the walls of the building and had the doctors wincing.

  A second Iraqi casualty was brought out of the sands, a private from a tank crew who had been blasted from his vehicle, a severely shell-shocked soldier whose head lolled from side to side and whose knees buckled when his comrades carried him into the courtyard of the police station. The soldier with the shoulder wound moaned a little, and every time the big guns fired and the shells soared off towards Khorramshahr, the shell-shock victim rolled his eyes around, his arms flopping from side to side like a dummy with the stuffing knocked out of it.

  The forward dressing station of the Iraqi army’s southern front was a grim little place and the long smears of dried blood on the floor wer
e witness to the sacrifice the Iraqi army was having to make for “The Whirlwind War.” The senior medical orderly was quite matter-of-fact about it. “This is an old building and the Iranians have it on all their maps,” he said. “They will fire at it and there will be more casualties.” He gave me a mirthless grin. Three minutes later, the Iranian shells began coming in, sending the Iraqi gunners jumping into their pits.

  The driver of an army jeep on the Khorramshahr–Shalamcheh highway—supposedly safe and long secure in Iraqi hands—was burned to death when Iranian shells rained down on his convoy. Not one major Iranian city had fallen to Baghdad and, with the exception of Qasr-e Shirin to the north, all that the Iraqis had so far captured was 3,000 square kilometres of brown, waterless desert, a shabby landscape of rock and sand from which the Iranians very sensibly withdrew to fight on from the hills.

  When Gavin Hewitt and I asked to visit the military hospital in Basra, we were given permission within two minutes and nobody tried to prevent us talking to the wounded soldiers inside. All the casualties told the same stories, of surprise attacks by Iranian helicopter gunships—the Cobras sold to the Shah by the Americans—and Phantom jets suddenly swooping from the east. A badly burned tank crewman described how he heard the sound of jet engines only a second before a rocket hit his tank, covering a quarter of his body in blazing petrol. A private in the Iraqi army’s transport command was blown from his jeep south of Ahwaz by a rocket fired from an Iranian helicopter; as he lay in the road, a Phantom appeared from the sun and bombed his colleagues who were staggering from the wrecked vehicle.

  By 5 October, the Iraqis entered Khorramshahr at last, and we went with them. We found a burning, smashed city and just one old Arab Iranian—sole representative of the millions of Arabs of “Arabistan” whom Saddam was seeking to “save”—squatting on the stone floor of his mud home, a man with deep lines on his face and a white beard, brewing tea for an Iraqi soldier and ignoring the questions of strangers. He had been “liberated.” This, after all, was the city where the representative of the Iranian embassy siege gunmen in London came from, the city he called al-Mohammorah. This was to be Saddam’s Danzig, the desert beyond was his Sudetenland. The Iraqis were going to rescue the Arabs of Iran, but we could only walk down one main street of the city, a battered thoroughfare of broken telegraph poles and blackened, single-storey shops where tired Iraqi troops, their faces stained with mud, sat on doorsteps and talked under the cover of sheets of corrugated iron.

  General Adnan Khairallah, the Iraqi defence minister and Saddam’s first cousin, had offered a ceasefire to the Iranians—to show Iraq’s “peaceful intentions” in front of the world rather than any Iraqi desire to withdraw from Iranian territory—but six and a half hours after the unilateral truce came into effect, the Iranians opened fire on occupied Khorramshahr. We had been sitting in the courtyard of a broken villa near the Karun River, listening to a Colonel Ramseh of the Iraqi army—his eyes bloodshot, head hanging with fatigue—as he claimed that his troops had taken control of the city and its harbour, when shells showered down onto the houses and orchards around us.

  “Please go now because it is not safe,” a brigadier pleaded as explosions began to crash around the bridge at the end of the street. An Iraqi commando was led through the gate, blood dribbling down his right cheek from a shrapnel wound. The Iraqi Special Forces soldiers—no longer laughing and making their familiar victory signs at journalists—sat round the edge of an empty fish pond and stared at us glumly. Iranian Revolutionary Guards were still holding out in the heavily damaged buildings on the western side of the Karun and they drove six Chieftain tanks past the central post office, firing shells at the nearest Iraqi command post until one of them was hit by a rocket. Running from the villa, I had just enough time to see an Iraqi tank, its barrel traversing wildly and its tracks thrashing through the rubbish along the street as it drove towards the centre of the city.

  The Iraqis now had tanks positioned along the Khorramshahr waterfront. They must have entered the port very suddenly, for the docks were still strewn with empty goods wagons, half-empty crates and burning containers hanging from damaged cranes. From some of the containers, Iraqi soldiers were stealing the contents, making off with a bizarre combination of Suzuki motorcycles, footballs, Dutch cattle-feed and Chinese Ping-Pong bats.

  The ships along the quayside had been under fire for days. The chief officer of the Yugoslav freighter Krasica leant over the after-deck of his bullet-flecked ship and grinned broadly. “Both sides shelled us all the time—for fifteen days,” he shouted. “We sat down below, played cards and drank beer—what else could we do?” It must have been bad, because the man did not even look eastwards along the waterfront where smoke poured from a burning ship. The Italian freighter Capriella had had its bridge, funnel and superstructure gutted by fire. The crew of another Italian vessel had quenched the fires of a first bombardment but then fled to a Korean freighter whose crew refused to let them aboard; they were eventually given sanctuary on a Greek ship. The Chinese Yung Chun had rocket and bullet holes in its hull. Further east, there were larger vessels, all burning furiously.

  None of these ships would ever sail again. They would remain, charred wrecks along the harbour-side, for eight more years. But in Basra, the ninety big freighters moored along the quays, their crews still aboard and keeping steam up for a quick escape if a real ceasefire took hold, would still be rotting away at the harbour almost a quarter of a century later. It was a mournful development for a port city founded by the Caliph Omar Ibn Khattab in 638, a harbour occupied by the British in 1914 and 1941 and 2003. British mercantile interests had been here since 1643, and behind the city’s six stinking canals it was still possible to find the carved wooden façades and elaborate shutters of Ottoman houses. The Caliph Omar had decreed that no one should be permitted to cut down the city’s date palms, although thousands of them now stood, decapitated or blackened by fire in plantations ribbed by streams into which nineteenth-century steamships had long ago been secreted, rotting museums of industrial technology which were no doubt launched with appropriate triumph when they went down the slipways of Birkenhead and Belfast two generations earlier. In what the Basra tourist office, in a moment of unfortunate enthusiasm, dubbed “the Venice of the East,” it was still possible to come across the relics of empire. The Shatt al-Arab Hotel had been a staging post for the British Imperial Airways flying boats that would set down on the Shatt and deposit their passengers in a lounge still decorated with scale models of British-built ships.

  Every day now, the Iraqis were learning that victory would not be theirs—not at least for weeks, maybe months, even years. The Iraqi army around Khorramshahr moved forward only 8 kilometres in ten days. In the city, an Iraqi army colonel in a paratrooper’s red beret and carrying a swagger stick agreed with us that the Iranians were still fighting hard. Even as he spoke, a young soldier covered in blood was carried past us, the wounded man screaming that he was dying. “We thought the Iranians would not fight,” another officer said to me that day. “But now I believe they will fight on, whatever happens.”

  Officially, no one would suggest such a thing. “You must come—you must come,” a Ministry of Information minder shouted to us in the lobby of the Hamdan Hotel. “You must see the Iranian prisoners.” It was to be the first display of prisoners by both sides in the war, a theatrical presentation that would eventually involve thousands of captured soldiers, a press “opportunity” which was a gross breach of the Geneva Convention. But we went along that bright October morning to see what the Iranians looked like. “Animals in a cell” was Gavin’s apt comment.51

  They were sitting in the far corner of a concrete-walled barrack hut, a dishevelled group of dark-haired young men, some in bandages and all in the drab, uncreased khaki uniform of the Iranian army. Unshaved, the seventeen men gaped at the television cameras as they sat on the bare mattresses that had been their beds for the past three days. “You are not permitted to talk to th
em,” an Iraqi army major announced, and the Iranians looked again at the lenses and microphones that were thrust expectantly towards them. Asked by a journalist if any of the prisoners spoke English, a young bearded man below the latticed window said that he spoke German but the major shut him up. “They were taken prisoner at Ahwaz and Mohammorah,” the major said. “What more do you want to know?”

  But the prisoners talked with their hands and faces. About half had been injured, their heads and arms in bandages. A thin young man by the wall slyly made a victory sign with his fingers. Five prisoners had been told to hold copies of a Baghdad newspaper that pictured Saddam Hussein on the front page, but they had folded the paper in such a way that the portrait was no longer visible. The Iranian soldier who spoke German smiled and nodded at us as we were herded from the barracks hut. Then the Iraqi major announced that two prisoners would talk to us if we promised to take no pictures. Two sad, drawn young men, one with his chest bandaged in plaster, were eventually led into a messroom where a picture of Saddam, a Gainsborough reproduction and a bunch of pink plastic flowers vied for space along the wall.

  The two soldiers were seated on steel chairs in the centre of the room while government officials and the major stood round them in order to “translate.” The wounded prisoner clutched his hands nervously and began to shake. The major wagged his finger in front of the first soldier. “They are asking about your casualties,” he said. The man shrugged and proclaimed his ignorance. “I am an Iranian soldier,” he said quietly. Were the Iranian mullahs in charge of the Iranian army, journalists asked, and the major translated this question as: “Aren’t religious people influencing your officers?” It was true, the prisoner said sullenly. “The spirit of our soldiers is not what it used to be.”