The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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.”