by Robert Fisk
Saddam probably began to drain the marshlands in 1989, just a year before his invasion of Kuwait, and the officially stated explanation—“security reasons”— could not fail to hide its potential effect. For years, the Marsh Arabs were turning up in Kuwait and Iran with stories of dried-up riverbeds, of starvation and disease. The man who rebuilt Babylon in his own image was destroying Sumeria. Of course, it was his war with Iran that first drew Saddam’s attention to the vulnerability of the marshland; it was here that the Iranian boy soldiers made their biggest penetration of Iraq and Saddam, as we have seen, swamped the marshes with gasoline, fire and death by electricity. Within a year of the end of that war, the first work began, massive walls and dams of pre-stressed concrete, initially in secret and then—once the first satellite pictures revealed what Saddam was doing—in public. After 1991, American journalists were taken to see the northern ramparts of what was described as an “irrigation” project. They were banned from the crusted lake-beds further south, for it was here that Saddam was still being assaulted, by army deserters who emerged from the wetlands at night to assault army convoys and police posts, even three years after the 1991 war.
As usual in the Arab world, everyone knew what was happening and no one said a thing. The American and British pilots flying the pointless southern “no-fly” zone could see the receding waters of the Marshes, the evaporating reedbeds and lagoons. But we did nothing. And the Arab regimes remained silent. Neither Mubarak nor Arafat nor Assad nor Fahd—none of the supposed titans of the Arab world—uttered the mildest word of criticism, any more than they did when the Kurds were gassed. The Iraqi exiled writer Kanan Makiya drew attention to an incendiary article in the Baath party’s Al-Thawra newspaper in April 1991 while Saddam’s army was still trying to crush the southern rebellion. The author attacked the Marsh Arabs for their poverty, backwardness and immorality, referring to them as vicious, slatternly and dirty. “One often hears stories of perversion that would make your mouth drop,” the paper said. So the Marsh Arabs—whose brides were once carried to their weddings on convoys of reed-boats—were bestialised before their culture was destroyed. Saddam had dried up another corner of Iraq, put the people and the birds to flight, and made sure that there were no more little islands unto themselves.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Land of Graves
My home is dark, the heart of my garden and the desert is dark, . . . every corner of this ruined city is black. The sky is tired; the sun has given up. Like a prison cell, the travelling moon is dark.
—Quhar Ausi, Darkness (Tareeq), 1990
ON THE HEIGHTS OF THE MUTLA RIDGE, a tattered, cheap bouquet of artificial roses, bleached white by the sun, thrashes in the wind, still fixed to a rusting metal pipe that stands upright in the sand. It is 2 August 1991, a year to the day after Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait. The plastic rose is the only memorial to the slaughter that took place here, a lone act of gentleness by an American soldier— for it was the Americans I saw here five months ago, heaping the mangled corpses into the pit, scarves over their mouths, an army bulldozer widening the mass grave. The sand, shawling over the desert—cutting into your face and hands if you stand facing the wind—has now covered the two mounds of dirt that the bulldozer created. Only those twin piles—and those pathetic fake roses—mark the last resting place of Saddam’s legions.
How many died here? Who were those Iraqis whose stiffened, shabby remains we found lying around their burned-out tanks and trucks and looted buses, guns and armoured carriers after the American and British jets had trapped them at night in their flight from Kuwait? When it comes to this particular cull, you can forget the Geneva Convention and that clause about the exchange of lists showing “the particulars of the dead interred therein.” On the highway below their graves, the rusting armour and the stolen cars are still there, covered now in the graffiti of the victors, cheerful jokes for Mom and Pa, American unit slogans and interminable, grotesquely obscene remarks—not so much about Iraq and Saddam but about women, humiliating and disturbing, as if the conquerors needed to associate sex with violent death.
Just as the sand has subtly changed the landscape at each end of the mass grave, time changes our perception of such events. At the time of their death, we had just witnessed the evidence of Iraqi savagery in the newly liberated city of Kuwait. We had visited the Iraqi torture chambers, seen the mutilated bodies of Kuwaiti men and women, the destruction of Kuwait’s palaces and oil wells. In among the doomed convoys at Mutla, we had found plunder on a medieval scale. I had seen hundreds of dead here; there must have been thousands. The Kuwaitis talk about 100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed in the desert. Some say 200,000. Shouldn’t we have been referring back then, not to the “Highway of Death”—the popular headline around the world—but to the Massacre at Mutla Ridge?
The plunder has long since been re-looted. But there are still ghosts in the desert. Beside the wreckage of an Iraqi truck—battalion insignia, a blue square beside a white triangle, for armies are about bureaucracy as well as death—I tug at the spines of shredded files and exercise books, three-quarters buried in the sand, detritus of the defeated Iraqi army’s administration, faithfully loaded in the hours before its destruction on 28 February 1991. At first, the sand will not yield these papers so I trowel with my fingers in the muck and dig and pull at these archives with my nails. In my hands, I hold a company inventory that lists the soldiers of this battalion by name, Muslim Arabs, Kurds, Christians, even Armenians. “Abdul Rida Rahim Ahmed, motorcycle dispatch rider, born 1954, primary school education, Arab Muslim, home: Basra. Mandil Ahmed Qadis Mustafa al-Koli, motorcycle dispatch rider, born 1952, Kurdish Muslim, home: Al-Ta’amim. Gunner Ali Hussein Hamza, artillery, born 1949, primary school education, Arab Muslim, home: Qadisiya . . .”
Are these the men lying now on the Mutla heights? Not only names, I find nightmares beneath the desert. I see the edge of a larger book, almost buried, and get down on my knees and seize the edge of it and tug from side to side, feeling my knees sinking into the sand until the volume suddenly slips out into my hands. I open the pages and specks of sand begin to heap up in the spine; these are the handwritten notes of an anonymous Iraqi Baath party functionary attached to an unknown military unit, recording the minutes of a meeting between Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi minister of industry on 28 February 1990, a year to the day before his army was destroyed in this very desert. I am squatting on my haunches, but when I see Saddam’s name, I sit back on the sand and nurse the book in my lap. It actually quotes Saddam, hubristic but already feeling the financial constraints that led him to invade Kuwait just over five months later. “We will give the people 20 dinars each for every bomb that is manufactured inside Iraq,” the tattered notebook records Saddam as saying. “Make our factories produce 5,000 bombs every day. Let our local industries compete with each other so that they can compete with the international arms industry. We have to save millions of dollars in military spending . . . so let’s spend a little bit more on our local manufacturing so that we can reach the point where we will be completely independent of the international market . . .”
Militarily independent. Saddam’s New World Order. From beneath the sands of the Kuwaiti desert these words came to me, and with what irony. For it was not Iraq’s toiling masses but the Western world that created Saddam’s military power, that furnished his republic of terror with credits and food and with the very means of his own destruction. It was Britain that was still sending nuclear substances to Baghdad, even as Saddam was planning his monumental output of domesticallyproduced weapons. It was America that provided funds and the Soviets who gave Saddam the tanks and armour that were now decaying on the Mutla Ridge. No wonder Saddam still lied to the United Nations about what was left of his armoury. The more powerful he could remain, the longer he could survive President Bush’s version of the New World Order, an international system in which aggression would in theory no longer pay dividends and where arms were no longer suppo
sed to be supplied with such promiscuity to the nations of the Middle East. Perhaps— and this would be the darkest of all nightmares—Saddam might still succeed.
Who, after all, now remembered George Bush’s assurance to the people of Iraq that it was not them but their leader with whom he was in conflict? “We have no argument with the people of Iraq,” he insisted on 15 February 1991. “Our differences are with that brutal dictator in Baghdad.” Yet while the people of Iraq were now dying of sickness and starvation caused by the war, Saddam’s brutal regime had survived. Indeed, when the Iraqi people tried to destroy Saddam, the Americans and their allies permitted him to destroy his people and to emerge with his ultimate proclamation on this very week of the anniversary of his invasion, that Iraq had won a “great historical duel”—since victory should not be regarded “as a fight between one army and several others.” This was not a view that would commend itself to the ghosts of Mutla Ridge.
Nor to the Saudi and Kuwaiti ruling families who also survived the conflict intact. Yet they had cause for satisfaction. Forgotten now were the hopes of the educated Saudi middle classes that America’s military presence in the Gulf would liberalise their nation and make their royal family more amenable to collective leadership. In the aftermath of Saddam’s humiliation, Saudi Arabia had become more, not less, conservative, its mutawin morality police more powerful, its military establishment stronger despite all the talk of disarmament. For the Pentagon now said that it planned to sell the Saudis laser-guided components, 2,100 cluster bombs and 770 Sparrow air-to-air missiles at a cost of $365 million. The White House had already told Congress of its plans to sell an additional $473 million of jeeps and military support services to Saudi Arabia. Since the liberation of Kuwait, Washington had disclosed plans to send a total of $4.2 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Oman and Turkey—the latter receiving eighty F-16 fighter-bombers. So much for the disarming of the Middle East. The Saudis and their allies were now receiving the sort of largesse that Saddam obtained just over a year earlier.
We had come a long way since George Bush proposed to the post-Kuwait liberation world, on 29 May 1991, that there should be a Middle East arms control initiative that would “slow and then reverse the build-up of unnecessary and destabilising weapons” in the region. Less than three months earlier, he had vouchsafed the thought that “it would be tragic if the nations of the Middle East and Persian Gulf were now, in the wake of war, to embark on a new arms race.” Yet just over two years later, Kuwait was buying 236 U.S. M1A2 Abrams tanks at a cost of $2 billion. Saudi Arabia was buying $7.5 billion worth of British Tornadoes and spending a further $3.9 billion on French frigates after the previous year’s announcement of an awesome $9 billion purchase of American F-15XP fighter jets. To understand these figures, one had to remember the total Saudi financial support for the Palestinian–Israeli Gaza–Jericho accord: a mere $100 million. The United Arab Emirates, which in 1993 was buying $3.5 billion of French Leclerc tanks, had pledged just $25 million to the Palestinians. The U.S. sold well over $28 billion of arms in the two years following the 1991 Gulf War, of which the Saudis accounted for $17 billion. Sales of weapons to the Middle East in 1993 were running at $46 million a day.
Yet the treatment of the Iraqi dead lay heavily upon those whose duty it is to ensure that the “rules of war” are obeyed by the victors. Already, stories were coming out of Washington that 10,000 Iraqi soldiers had been buried alive near the Saudi frontier when the American army first stormed over the border into Kuwait. Faced with the alternative of fighting their way into the network of trenches and bunkers which the Iraqi forces had dug into the desert, or of bulldozing the sand over them—literally smothering them as they stood ready to fight—the United States understandably decided on the latter option. Was entombment alive any worse for the Iraqis than being annihilated by shellfire—especially when U.S. casualties would be higher in open fighting?
A semantic game was played by the Americans. Most of the Iraqi dead, claimed those inevitably anonymous “military sources”—in this case, to the Reuters news agency—would have died during the five weeks of air attacks that preceded the four-day ground conflict. They would have been buried by their comrades. The total number of Iraqi occupation troops, originally put at half a million, might have been exaggerated. Iraqi divisions, normally up to 12,000 strong, might have been 50 per cent depleted before they arrived in Kuwait. At least 62,000 Iraqis, hungry and fearful, surrendered to the Allies. All officers would say was that “large numbers” of Iraqis were killed in the war. Which meant—and was no doubt intended to mean—nothing.
For no U.S. officer saw fit to mark the vast graves into which the Americans and British had committed the Iraqi dead, or to pass on the information to the International Committee of the Red Cross as the Allies were bound to do under international law. In late May 1991, Dr. Jeannik Dami, a Swiss doctor for the ICRC in Kuwait, was called to examine the bodies of nine unburied Iraqi soldiers lying in the desert near the headquarters of the Kuwaiti army’s 6th Brigade not far from the Iraqi border. She found that the remains of the dead Iraqis were badly decomposed but that a further thirteen Iraqi corpses had been buried a few yards away beneath a wooden stake, upon which was written in English the single word “Unknown.”
It was highly misleading. All but one of these buried bodies were dressed in the remains of Iraqi army uniforms. And on eight of them, Dr. Dami found identification papers or “dog-tags” with their names. They were not “unknown” at all. Most of the corpses had been interred in U.S. military body bags and one of them—a twenty-seven-year-old Iraqi conscript named Jabr Elwan Qidar—had his legs tied together with rope. The only body not in uniform was that of a woman.
What was even more remarkable about Dr. Dami’s discovery was that this was the first time the Red Cross had been able to inspect the graves of dead Iraqi soldiers. Three months had passed since the end of “Operation Desert Storm”—and the American estimates of Iraqi dead had already reached 100,000—yet the Red Cross had obtained access to the graves of only twenty-one Iraqis. In total violation of Article 17 of the Geneva Conventions, Allied and Arab coalition forces failed to provide even the vaguest statistics of the Iraqi death toll. The American military authorities gave neither the names of their tens of thousands of dead enemies nor the location of mass graves in which they were buried to the International Red Cross. What this true figure was—and why the Allies failed to disclose it— was to remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the 1991 Gulf War.
Saddam Hussein, of course, was in no position to complain about breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Allied prisoners-of-war were tortured by the Iraqis; and Saddam’s Baathist regime, as everyone knew, routinely tortured and executed its political opponents. Saddam’s use of poison gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers and then Kurdish civilians and his butchering of Shiite rebels during the postwar rising in March 1991 marked one of the vilest human rights records in the world.
Yet the Geneva Conventions state that “parties to [a] conflict shall ensure that burial or cremation of the dead, carried out individually as far as circumstances permit, is preceded by a careful examination . . . of the bodies, with a view to confirming death, establishing identity and enabling a report to be made . . . They shall further ensure that the dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, that their graves are respected . . . properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found.” Under the convention, armies are required to organise a graves registration service that will exchange “lists showing the exact location and markings of the graves together with particulars of the dead interred therein.”
The 1991 Gulf War Allies ignored every one of these basic rules. After the liberation of Kuwait, General Schwarzkopf brusquely dismissed questions about Iraqi fatalities with the rejoinder that he was “not in the business of body counts.” Yet under the Geneva Conventions, generals—even American gener
als—had to ensure that bodies were indeed counted. True, Iraqi troops had committed what might well classify as war crimes during their occupation of Kuwait, but even Hitler’s SS soldiers who were killed fighting the Americans around Bastogne in 1944 were identified and buried in marked graves.
As usual, we had to turn to humanitarian workers—speaking anonymously lest they lose what little moral power they had with the victorious armies—to find out what the Red Cross felt. “They are bloody angry and I don’t blame them,” a British doctor told me. “What’s really puzzling is that the Americans know where a lot of mass graves are and must have files on how many Iraqis they buried in each grave. They are hiding the figures. The Red Cross knows this, but they can’t get the allied powers to come up with a single figure. Why not? Well, either the Americans killed far fewer than they claim—maybe only ten or twenty thousand; in which case people are going to ask if their victory was as big as they claimed. Low casualty figures would explain why Saddam had enough soldiers left to crush two big uprisings in Iraq the moment the allied advance stopped. Or maybe the Americans killed too many, say more than two hundred thousand—and they’re worried the Arabs would be disgusted at, say, the slaughter of a quarter of a million fellow Arabs.”
Christophe Girod, the senior ICRC delegate in Kuwait, confirmed to me on 4 August 1991 that the Red Cross had twice asked the U.S. embassy for details of the Iraqi dead without receiving any information. The Red Cross was told to seek details directly from the Pentagon. But the Pentagon proved equally unhelpful. “We are still waiting for a reply from the allies about the location of mass graves, the numbers of dead and, hopefully, names and details,” Girod said. “It is their obligation to give us this information under Article 17 of the Geneva Conventions and we hope they will provide it.” Some hope. The Americans never supplied any of these locations, statistics or names.153 It was to become a habit. In 2003, the United States and Britain showed equally little interest in recording details of enemy dead—or, for that matter, the civilians killed in their invasion—although they were rigorous, as they were in the 1991 Gulf War, in listing the American, British and other Western, or “coalition,” soldiers killed in action.
