The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  If they even so much as keyed a microphone, I would know who they were, what type of aircraft they were in, where they were, where they were going, and what they were going to do. During the first three or four days of the air campaign, lots of Iraqi pilots at least tried to make a show of defending their country. As soon as they made their first radio call, I would radio the AWACS and tell them number and type of aircraft, location, direction, and altitude, and the AWACS would immediately send coalition fighters after them. The reality of what was happening came through my earphones, as the Iraqi pilots became almost immediately disoriented, confused, terrified, and finally, silent. I truly felt sorry for them. They would all be talking over one another on the same frequency to the point that their ground controller couldn’t get through to them to warn them of approaching coalition fighters.139

  “THEY ARE BURNING OUR OILFIELDS,” the Kuwaiti official said down the phone. The evidence was incontrovertible. Only 100 kilometres north of Riyadh, we could see it along the horizon, the penumbra of a dark, forbidding cloud that stretched across the far edge of the bright desert. An hour later, 150 kilometres further north, and it towered over us, reaching out towards the sun, turning the sand into a white, pasty colour. The drivers on the highway north were all looking at it, as if from the immensity of darkness they expected some sign, unconscious of the fact that the cloud was the sign. The Iraqis were scorching the earth, just as they had promised to do. The Americans had helped, by dropping fuel-air explosives on oil wells in Kuwait as well as Iraq. Now the shadow of Kuwait’s destruction was spreading over the north-east of Saudi Arabia.

  It was an open secret that the Americans and the British would soon lunge deep into western Iraq—well over 250 kilometres—in the opening offensive to liberate the emirate. This preparedness was obvious on the highway now. It was almost empty. The tanks and howitzers and missile batteries were already over the skyline, beneath that great darkness. Only ammunition and fuel trucks now sped up the roads to the border. Camels grazed on the thickets between the dunes, bored policemen did not bother to check our papers.

  The “pool” reporters were now marooned with “their” military units—all of them waiting to move forward in the night, north and then east into Kuwait City or right on across the Iraqi frontier and up towards the Euphrates River. The straight road up the coast from Khafji—the quickest way to reach Kuwait in peacetime— was regarded as a death trap, mined and closely defended by Iraq’s best troops. American planners had decided that the Kuwaiti army itself—and their Saudi allies—would have the dubious honour of taking this highway and liberating the Kuwaiti capital. So with something close to trepidation, I hitched a ride with Sky Television and a unit of Kuwaiti commandos who could not wait to drive up that unpleasant, sinister road. There would be oil-filled trenches and berms set on fire to burn us alive, kilometres of interconnected minefields to blow us to bits, enfilading rifle fire from Iraqi emplacements, dug-in T-72 tanks to blast our vehicles off the highway. Or so we were told.

  In the pre-dawn darkness on the morning of 25 February, the Sky crew and I drank tea with all the enthusiasm my dad must have felt on the Somme in 1918. Then we swung in behind a Kuwaiti petrol tanker and ground through the rubble of the Saudi customs post and suddenly, as the sun struck through the wadis, we crossed the infamous berms. Half-filled with black sludge, the ditches and earthworks ran guiltily across the Kuwaiti desert, the sand dark and soggy with oil. We were supposed to have been incinerated. But there were no cremation trenches, no snipers, no activated minefields, just mile after mile of burned out Iraqi armour and ammunition trucks ripped apart by precision bombs. The Iraqis had already fled.

  I breathed in the dawn air. It was as if God had given us a second life. We wound through kilometre after kilometre of Saudi and Kuwaiti convoys—Arab troops with just a few U.S. Special Forces Humvees cutting through the desert alongside us, their radio aerials adorned with the red, green, white and black flags of Kuwait. “Kuwait City,” the road signs beckoned to us. By the time we stopped beneath lowering clouds of burning oil, the air pressure changing with the blast of artillery shells, the prize was only 70 kilometres away, the suburbs only 50 kilometres, half an hour’s drive. In the dreary town of Azour, where the Americans were firing at the few Iraqi infantrymen who failed to join the rout, stood Colonel Fouad Haddad of the Kuwaiti army’s 9th Battalion, his massive beard and shades almost obscuring his smile. “I feel I am dreaming,” he said.

  We felt like that, too. After so many months and so much planning—and, let us be frank, ruthlessness—the “Allied” armies had broken through the Iraqis in just a few hours and we had sped down the highway like kings. The Iraqis destroyed the telephone lines in Kuwait but my Saudi mobile still maintained a fractured signal west of Azour. I called the foreign desk of The Independent. Harvey Morris wasn’t surprised. Richard Dowden, our most daring foreign correspondent, had long ago found himself confronted by Iraqi soldiers who asked him to take them prisoner. Reports from the west spoke of Iraqis surrendering by the thousand. After promising the “Mother of All Battles,” Saddam had ordered his army to retreat out of Kuwait, like a child grown bored with a familiar game, tired of the bombing and rhetoric, anxious to start a new epic, create a new narrative of empty courage.

  How long, I wondered, before Baghdad told us of the unquenchable resolve of the Iraqis never to surrender to the United States, how Iraq alone had faced the world’s only superpower, how their occupation of Kuwait, however temporary, had been a historic Iraqi victory? About a week, in fact. And munching an unspeakable American military chocolate bar in the cover of a Special Forces Humvee, I remembered how Khorramshahr was going to be defended in 1984, a Stalingrad of fortitude against the Iranian hordes; until one day seven years ago Saddam had woken up and decided to withdraw his army from the city it had captured with so much blood in 1980. Kuwait was a repeat of Khorramshahr. For the second time, what was billed as one of the great battles of Iraqi history was simply erased from the history books. A new script would begin tomorrow.

  Beside the Kuwait City highway were piles of unexploded anti-personnel mines and broken Iraqi trucks whose contents of unused rocket-propelled grenades and boxes of machine-gun ammunition and brass cartridges sparkled in the sand. Electricity pylons had been torn down. There were expensive cars, turned over on their roofs, wheels ripped off. Crude piping lay everywhere across the desert, reeking of fuel oil; there were liquid-filled trenches, acres of black scum. Could they not have been set alight? Or were the Americans too quick for them? Or had Saddam just given up? What had the Iraqis done? It was like a dead land.

  And in Kuwait City, we asked a far more devastating question: What kind of people would do this? Day had been turned into night, so thick was the canopy of smoke, the nation’s oil wells burning gold and orange along the black-fringed horizon, and so we had—again I must use the example of that most sadistic of medieval cultural images—Hieronymus Bosch; courtesy, this time, of the Iraqi army. Five years later, the Chinese would complain of the pollution and black snow on Mount Everest caused by Kuwait’s oil fires.

  The Iraqis had even used the modern equivalent of a torture wheel. All day, Kuwaiti men, young and old, approached our car with their terrible stories. “They twisted my son on a pole and broke his legs with pieces of wood,” a stooped old man said. “They thought he was in the resistance. Now they have taken him away, with all the others, as a human shield.” Then there was Heather Rennison, an Englishwoman married to a Kuwaiti. “A cousin of my mother-in-law was arrested. She was only nineteen and they found two-way radios in her bedroom. Three days later they came to her home to ask her parents for clothes and blankets. So her parents thought she would be all right. Then the Iraqis hanged her and dumped her body outside her home. There were burns from electricity on her arms and legs. Of course, the Iraqis kept the clothes and blankets.”

  Perhaps one needed to walk the pavements of Kuwait City to understand the extent of what the Iraqis d
id, that it really did amount to a war crime. “I will show you the mosque where they shot eleven men on Friday,” a bearded man shouted to us from a car. The Abdullah Othman mosque stands in the Palestinian Hawali quarter. The bearded man pointed to a yellow wall. “The Iraqis said that all those at prayer would be taken away—kidnapped—and eleven men stayed in the mosque and refused to go. So they brought them here, blindfolded them, made them stand with their backs to the wall and shot them in the face.” The bullets that passed through the worshippers’ heads were now embedded in the yellow wall. “Don’t be surprised,” the man said. “I had two neighbours who the Iraqis thought were in the resistance. So they pushed them into drains, closed the grille, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. Their families buried them later—you can’t leave bodies in drains.”

  The figure of 5,000 Kuwaiti men abducted in the last hours before Iraq’s retreat seems fantastic until you find—as I did that day—that the first three families who offered me lifts to various locations in Kuwait City had all lost sons as hostages. The young men had simply been ordered into Iraqi army buses as they walked to work. Three thousand men and women were murdered here, the Kuwaitis also tell you. Who could do this?

  It is comforting, in trying to record a reign of terror, to search for some logical reason; long-standing hatred perhaps, or some aberrant unit of the Iraqi secret police. But this would be fanciful. What was one to think when one walked, as I did, through the smoking embers of the National Museum, fired by the Iraqis on Tuesday? Or the gutted interior of the parliament? Or the still burning library in the Sief Palace—its magnificent golden clock tower smashed by a tank shell— when I found, lying on a chair, the remains of a book published by the government of India, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi? What kind of people burn museums and libraries? Fast-forward. Would I not be writing these same words, 800 kilometres north of here, in Baghdad, in almost exactly twelve years from now?

  Outside the museum, Kuwait’s collection of antique wooden boats had been burned to cinders. The “Islamic house” lay in ruins. The walls of the emir of Kuwait’s Dasman Palace were torn down with explosions and bulldozers. The Iraqis used tanks to shoot at the parliament. The great hotels had been systematically fired. The Iraqis planted explosives in the bedrooms of the Meridien. It was like a medieval army that conquered, looted and then burned even on an individual level. Boat owners found their yachts stolen or sunk in the marinas. Shopkeepers found their stores burned if they could not be looted. At an abandoned anti-aircraft gun on the coast—where the Iraqis mined the beaches against a non-existent U.S. marine amphibious landing—I came across piles of brand-new women’s shoes, made in France, none of them matching, all wrapped inside Iraqi army blankets along with body-building magazines. Why did they do this, these soldiers? Why had they stolen an exhibition display of women’s eye shadow? There were cartridge cases across the forecourt of the museum, bullet-holes in the cracked walls of the building that once contained Kuwait’s finest—and long ago looted— national treasures. What was he thinking, this soldier, when he opened fire on a museum?

  The seafront restaurants had been torn down, the high, glass-covered landmark water towers machine-gunned. At Al-Ahmadi, the Iraqis set off explosives every hour at the two oil farms, each containing twenty tanks. The fine old British “White House” there was burned down along with the control room that operated the oil pipelines.

  I suppose one sensed in Kuwait that something very wicked and—here it comes—something at times very evil had visited this city. Not just an occupation army, not even the Iraqi Baath party apparatus, but something that intrinsically links dictatorship and corruption. “Down with the dirty Fahd, Sabah and Hosni,” said a blood-red graffiti on the wall of one of the burned palaces. “Long live Saddam Hussein.” In the little, looted museum of Kuwaiti peasant art, I found a poster of Saddam stapled to a wall. “Most victorious of all Arabs, the great leader Saddam Hussein—God bless him,” the caption said.

  Whoever uttered such prayers? Colonel Mustafa Awadi of the Kuwaiti resistance movement offered to show me. On a bleak housing estate in the suburb of Quwain, he took me to a school—the Iraqis used schools as interrogation centres—and in a classroom he introduced me to sixteen Iraqi soldiers. They sat on the floor, legs crossed, mustachioed, miserable, ordinary men with tired, dirty faces and grimy uniforms. “They were happy to surrender,” the colonel said. “See? We even give them food and tea. I promise they will be handed over unharmed to the Kuwaiti army.” Two of the men had been wounded in the face—their bandages were fresh—and they all smiled when I greeted them and when they heard me tell the colonel in Arabic that I would mention their presence to the Red Cross. One could not help but feel sorry for these defeated teenagers with their sad smiles. So what kind of men raped Kuwait?

  And what—here, at last, was my opportunity—was it like under our bombardment, under the laser-guided munitions and the GBUs and the “Daisy Cutters”? What was it like to be an Iraqi soldier attacked by the Americans? “The Americans and British both bombed us,” Mohamed said. “We knew all the planes—Tornado, Jaguar, B-52, F-16, F-15—and we knew what was going to happen.” Mohamed was a thirty-three-year-old Iraqi reservist, one of the oldest of the men, and his fellow prisoners nodded in agreement as he described their suffering. He moved his left hand in a fast, sweeping movement from left to right. “All over the explosions went, one big bomb and lots of smaller bombs, everywhere, like this.” Mohamed was describing the effect of a cluster bomb.

  After all the briefings and the bomb-aimer’s video films, here at last was what it was like on the Other Side, in the words of those who tried to survive in the “target-rich environment.” Schwarzkopf had described the Iraqis as poorly fed, living in fear of their own execution squads. On the evidence of Mohamed and his comrades, it was true. Not one of the Iraqi soldiers I spoke to had eaten anything but rice and bad bread for months. All talked with disgust of the kuwat al-khassa, the “special guards.”

  According to Ali, a twenty-two-year-old private from Diwaniya, it was the kuwat al-khassa that controlled the death squads. “They came to see us at the front at Wafra [in Kuwait] and told us what they would do to us. One of them said that if we ran away, we knew what would happen to us and he invited one of us to go and look at the bodies of fifty soldiers who had been executed. None of us would go to look at them. But later—a few days ago, at the end of the war—one of my friends, Salaam Hannoun, a soldier from Amara, ran away. They caught him and brought him back and made us watch his execution. He waited for his death and cursed Saddam Hussein. Then they shot him. He was twenty-three.”

  Mohamed’s description of the death squads was terrifying. “They were all members of the party. They change their names so they can never be identified. If a man is Mohamed, they call him Hussein. They have no emotion. They have no mercy.” The executions did not deter Ali. “Ten of us tried to run away at the end, under the bombing,” he said. “We were caught and our hands were tied and they put blindfolds on us. They said they would kill us. But then the order to withdraw came and they needed us to help drive the trucks out of Kuwait. So after a while, a captain came and said: ‘Release them.’ ”

  If the difference between life and death in the Iraqi lines was a matter of tactical convenience, the soldiers appreciated the dangers of the Allied bombing. “At night, during the bombing, we always hid in our shelters in the sand,” Mohamed said. “We hid there all the time, waiting for the bombing to end and for the ground attack. One of my friends, Abbas, from Baghdad, was thirsty one night when they were dropping cluster bombs on us. He kept complaining that he needed water. We said to him: ‘Don’t go out there—it’s too dangerous.’ The water was kept in another shelter only ten metres from us. Abbas left despite our warnings and immediately a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head and killed him. We had to leave him there. He was not buried.”

  Ghassan, a thirty-year-old Iraqi reservist from Nasiriyah, complained that there had
been little chance of surrendering to the Allies although, three days ago, he and his comrades had handed themselves over to the Kuwaiti resistance. “After we read the leaflets dropped on us, we wanted to run away. We kept the leaflets with us all the time and we made some white flags to wave at helicopters if they came. But there were too many mines in front of us to run—and at the start, we were forty kilometres from the border.” The Iraqis said they had received only water, rice and bread “mixed with small pieces of sawdust” since they were posted to Kuwait. In Iraq, they said, their military rations had been five kilos of flour a month and three pieces of bread a day.

  Several of the prisoners spoke with emotion of bereavement and suffering within their own families in Iraq. Adnan’s eight-month-old baby boy was suffering from acute diarrhoea and a high temperature when he last saw him; his family could not obtain medicines from the doctor, he said, because of the UN blockade, and he did not know if the child was still alive. Ghassan’s sister Nidal died two days after giving birth because two hospitals were unable to provide her with oxygen—again, he said, because of the blockade. This was the first evidence I found—even before the liberation of Kuwait—that the UN sanctions were lethal.