The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  “Our” dead—the heroes, the Westerners who died for “freedom,” “democracy” or whatever other benefit we planned to impose on the losers—were sacrosanct. In 1991, the Americans lost 125 soldiers, their allies around 70. Their names would live for evermore, just like those on the Lutyens memorials along the old Western Front in France in Bill Fisk’s war. There would be religious services to honour them, interviews with wives and children, parents and fiancées. There would be— in both wars—controversy about the accidental killing of British troops by trigger-happy Americans. But we would know who they were. Our dead would have identities, families, public mourning. They were individuals, even in death. The Iraqi dead were an amorphous mass, as nondescript as the graves into which they were shovelled. They were the occupiers of Kuwait—or, later, the “remnants” or “terrorists” who insisted on fighting the invaders of their country in 2003—and they did not deserve a memorial. In this, the Americans were ably assisted by Saddam’s regime. For the Baath party in Baghdad had no desire to reveal to the world the extent of the country’s military defeat and would give no indication of the scale of their own casualties. As the Americans had pointed out, many hundreds of Iraqi soldiers died under allied air bombardment before the land offensive. Saddam was happy for their names and numbers to remain unknown, just as he was indifferent to the rest of his “martyrs” in the Kuwait war. The Americans and the Iraqis thus shared a happy coincidence of intention. Both sides wanted to keep the Iraqi dead a secret.

  Towards the end of the first week of August 1991, Christophe Girod drove me up to the Mutla Ridge so that I could identify for him the mass grave I had come across the previous February. The artificial rose was there and Girod immediately noted the ramparts of sand thrown up by the bulldozer when it covered over the bodies. Dozens of corpses were subsequently exhumed there and returned to Iraq. But it was the only grave I could still find. At other locations I had jotted into my notebook back in February, the wind had changed the landscape. Flat terrain beside the highway to Iraq had been turned into sand dunes, the hump of individual graves in the soil had been smoothed into the desert floor by the spring gales.

  But American and British units had participated in thousands of hasty burials in this desert in February 1991. I saw at least seven of them myself, young soldiers staggering under the weight of soggy, corpse-filled blankets, digging into the sand and dumping their burden in the holes they had made. All over the land north of Kuwait City, this ritual took place. Kuwaiti Red Crescent workers, some of whom helped to clear the dead from the Mutla Ridge and the other largely unexplored “highway of death” to the east of it, were involved in the same process. The Kuwaitis later told Western aid workers that dozens of victims of these allied air attacks were innocent Kuwaiti civilians being taken to Iraq as hostages by the retreating Iraqi army.

  As for the Red Cross, they repatriated the twenty-one dead Iraqi soldiers to Baghdad. Dr. Dami found that the corpses had not been buried—as they should have been according to their religious rites—facing Mecca. They had been interred two at a time with identity papers between the body bags. In several of their uniforms, she found personal papers and diaries which, under the Geneva Conventions, should have been returned to their next-of-kin. On one page of a diary belonging to Burhan Ahmed Faraj was the name Burhan Hamad Faraj—the nephew of the buried soldier—through whom the Iraqis were able to inform the dead man’s closest relatives. Other names found on the bodies and handed to the Iraqis by the Red Cross included Mussair Jabr Hamdi, Musalam Ismail Ibrahim, Ahmed Fahd Malalla and Hassan Daoud Salman. One of the bodies had a bottle of perfume in a pocket, probably looted in Kuwait. Why Jabr Elwan Qidar’s legs were tied together was never explained.

  Had the Red Cross not exhumed their remains, these soldiers would have been, as British world war headstones used to record, “known unto God.” Yet they did not even have known graves. As for the dead woman, her body was taken to Kuwait City, where the authorities said they could identify her from her fingerprints. She was a former resident of Kuwait. When I asked a Kuwaiti aid official for her identity, his voice filled with contempt. “They said she was an Iraqi whore,” he replied.

  The only serious attempt to estimate overall casualties was made by Beth Osborne Daponte, the U.S. Census Bureau demographer assigned to gather statistics on the number of Iraqis killed during the war. Her figures suggested that 86,000 men, 40,000 women and 32,000 children died at the hands of American-led coalition forces, during the American-inspired insurgencies that followed and from immediate postwar deprivation. Daponte was fired. The bureau then rescinded her dismissal but rewrote her report, lowering the death toll and deleting the fatalities of women and children. A subsequent Pentagon official history omitted a chapter on casualties and made no mention of Iraqi deaths.

  Needless to say, the massive bloodletting that these military operations involved was never allowed to spoil the “big picture,” the war aims that Western leaders and editorial writers could point to as proof that this had been a “good” war with God on their side—though which God was invoked was a moot point. Kuwait’s royal family was restored to power, just as President Bush had promised it would be. And no one who entered the Kuwaiti capital on the day of its liberation— as I and my colleagues did—could doubt that its freedom was devoutly to be wished. Had Saddam succeeded in holding on to his “nineteenth province,” it would have been a disaster for the region and for the international system of nation-states.

  Yet in Kuwait, as in Saudi Arabia—and in Iraq, for that matter—the aftermath of the ground fighting was not participation in a New World Order but a restoration of the status quo. The Arab rulers were back within their respective, British-drawn borders. Those Kuwaitis who refused to leave during the occupation and who had endured horrifying personal risk for their country found that those who had fled Kuwait, including the royal family, were brought back to rule them. The emir and his entourage, who suffered exile in the most luxurious hotel in Taif, had returned to tell the Kuwaitis who stayed—and who sometimes resisted with great courage—that they could not have democracy just yet.

  Most scandalous of all in Kuwaiti domestic politics was to be the expulsion of 360,000 Palestinians over the next two years, an act of “ethnic cleansing” unparalleled in the Middle East since the massacres that accompanied the Palestinian flight from Israeli forces in 1948. The UN Security Council did not even bother to discuss this outrage, nor to question the Kuwaitis about their miserable excuse for such treatment of their fellow Arabs: that some Palestinians had collaborated with Iraq during the occupation. Up the long road towards Basra each day, I would watch the overloaded trucks and pick-ups carrying the Palestinians into yet another exile—through Iraq to Jordan—without even the luxury of selling the homes and property which they had owned for decades in Kuwait. “They will throw me out before you return,” Sulieman Khalidi, a Palestinian friend in Kuwait, told me in 1992. “Give me a call if you like, but I don’t think I’ll be here to answer the phone.” In January 1993, I called Khalidi as I had promised. And as he had promised, he was not there. “Yes, he was living in this house but he left for Jordan,” a woman answered irritably. “No, he is not coming back. Yes, I am Kuwaiti.”

  Less epic in scale but almost equally scandalous was the plight of the Kuwaiti Bedouin troops who refused to run away on 2 August 1990, who chose to fight the Iraqi invaders and who were taken prisoners-of-war by Saddam’s army. These thousands of young men did not hold Kuwaiti citizenship, yet they fought for the emirate. But now, while most of the Kuwaiti officers who fled were reinstalled in their posts, Kuwait refused to allow these loyal Bedouin soldiers to return from their Iraqi imprisonment. Hundreds more were held in an internment camp at Abdali on the Kuwaiti–Iraqi border, having been freed from their Iraqi jails during the Shiite uprising but rejected by the nation for which they fought, Kuwaiti patriots now held prisoner by the Kuwaiti soldiers who took to their heels in their country’s hour of need.


  One broiling morning, I drove up to Abdali. It was a disgrace. It wasn’t the latrines, whose stench pervaded the place. Nor the sandstorms that howled across its wastes, turning its occupants into white and grey shadows. Nor even the shacks of cloth and corrugated iron and old tin sheets whose constant demented rattle turned a conversation into a shouting match. It was the fact that the inhabitants of this awful place—all 1,173 of them—appeared to be decent and honest Kuwaitis who had been left to rot here because they were never given citizenship and happened to be on the wrong side of the Gulf War front line when President Bush announced his ceasefire the previous February.

  Many of them were Kuwaiti policemen with years of service to the emir, who were arrested during the occupation and taken hostage to Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Others were the wives and children of Kuwaiti policemen who were searching for missing relatives in Iraq when the Americans arrived at the border town of Abdali five months earlier and who were then refused permission to return to their homes in Kuwait—even though their families were waiting for them there. A few were Kuwaitis without citizenship who made the mistake of trying to buy food with Iraqi currency after the liberation—and who were shipped up to this desolate place by the emir’s security police.

  The prisoners’ fate was to belong to the bidoon—the “withouts”—the quarter of a million Kuwaitis whose failure to register as citizens, or whose parents’ failure to register, after the emirate’s independence in 1920 left them loyal but stateless citizens of a country that would not give them a passport. Now that Kuwait was liberated and now that the Sabah family wanted to reduce the number of non-Kuwaiti citizens, the bidoon—along with Kuwaiti-born Palestinians, and large numbers of other Arabs who made their homes in the emirate decades ago—were being accused of collaboration with the Iraqi occupiers.

  And so, choking in the gales of sand in the south-eastern corner of Abdali camp, I found—behind a protective sheet of rusting iron—the bearded figure of Saba Abu Nasr al-Kaldi, clerk at the interior ministry and well-known Kuwaiti artist until 2 August 1990. “I never tried to go to my office when the Iraqis came, because I knew they were arresting government officials,” he told me. “But I did draw posters for the Kuwaiti resistance and someone informed on me and the Iraqis took me from my home. I was taken to the Salahiyeh police station where I was beaten but I refused to tell them anything. So they let me go home. But a month later, they took me again and put me on a convoy of buses with four hundred other bidoon to a military barracks at Amara, inside Iraq. We were held prisoner there for three months. When the Americans began to bomb, we were moved to Diwaniya. We had little food. We were filthy. I wondered if I would see my home again.”

  Al-Kaldi and his fellow “withouts” were freed during the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq, awoken to their imminent freedom when shoals of bullets smashed through the windows of their cells. From his prison, al-Kaldi said, he walked with forty other Kuwaitis for ten days over desert and scrubland, eating tomatoes and dates, sleeping at night in wrecked Iraqi mosques, empty dugouts or in the shadow of abandoned Iraqi tanks. His narrative—of rotting Iraqi corpses along the roadsides and the constant explosion of underground munitions as he made his way south—was as frightening as it was convincing. “One night, we slept on a hill called Tell el-Lahm and there were terrible explosions,” he said. “The ground moved beneath us all the time and shells went over us. God saved us. Can you know how we felt to reach Kuwait, to know that we would see our families again? But the Kuwaiti government were here and they stopped us. They said ‘You are bidoon.’ So we stayed here, and stayed and stayed.”

  The Kuwaiti authorities claimed that many bidoon joined the Iraqi “Popular Army” after the occupation. And when the Kuwaiti government announced in July 1991 that it would hang anyone who had joined Iraq’s “voluntary” units, more than 3,000 “withouts”—including women and children—abandoned the Abdali camp and walked back to Iraq. More than 1,000, however, stayed put, arguing that they had never helped the Iraqis, and that those who signed up with the occupiers did so through coercion and never turned up for work. “It was a lie by the Iraqis to call these people a ‘volunteer’ army,” one of the bidoon at Abdali said. “They were no more members of the Iraqi army than the foreign hostages in Iraq were ‘guests.’”

  The bidoon of Abdali all carried their official Kuwaiti papers—the policemen showed me laminated government cards with photographs in which they were dressed in smart blue police uniforms—and the Red Cross workers who ran the camp, mostly from America and Europe, did not doubt their authenticity. It was of little use. “All of us want to return to our homes where we were born, where we lived and worked before this terrible war,” al-Kaldi said. “What is our crime? What is the crime of the children here? Nobody cares about us.” In his captivity, al-Kaldi drew a series of sad and beautiful sketches of life during the war. The most moving showed a bidoon family burying their policeman son, murdered by the Iraqis during the occupation. A boy near the grave is waving goodbye towards the distant city of Kuwait, identifiable by its water towers. “You see what is happening?” al-Kaldi asked me. “The bidoon can die here, but they will not be allowed to live here.”

  But if the geographical restoration of Kuwait to its rulers was a measure of the war’s worth, its oil fires cast more than a physical shadow over the land. The destruction of the wells remained Saddam’s greatest crime in the emirate, their continued burning proof that the war had not yet ended. I had to fly over them to realise the enormity of what had happened. From the air, it was possible to see lakes of oil, hundreds of square kilometres of sludge, the white of the sands turned to blackness. In a hundred years, the evidence will still be there to see. The desert has changed colour for generations to come. Arriving in Kuwait on one of MEA’s elderly Boeing 707 airliners, I could physically feel the extent of the damage. Sitting on the plane’s flight deck, I watched the pilot twisting his aircraft around the oil clouds as if he were performing at an air display. But when we actually hit one of the black columns of smoke on final approach, the old airliner bucked in the sky, juddering and shaking as it smashed into the haze of sulphur.

  Standing next to the fires, the very ground vibrated beneath my feet, their roar awesome and elemental. The Kuwaitis were more than willing to take reporters to these scenes of Saddam’s environmental and economic crimes. We would drive in our own cars out of Kuwait City that dazzling, cooking August to be confronted by fires so bright they hurt our eyes, the heat so powerful that every few seconds we would instinctively turn round to cool the left or right side of our faces and arms. “The Iraqi who did this arrived about three months after the invasion,” Mahmoud Somali told us as we stood beside one of these thundering, squirting torches of oil, the smoke above us so thick that I could not have seen my own notebook but for the golden fires. “He was a very ordinary sort of guy, I’ve even forgotten his name. He was very friendly to us, not hostile at all. He chatted a lot, had coffee with us in the Ahmadi canteen each day. He said he was a good Muslim and every Friday he went to the mosque. But then he put the mines down the wells and he told us this was his duty, that he had to do his duty.”

  Was this the banality of evil, this man with the forgettable name—an official from the Iraqi oil company, most of the Kuwaitis at Ahmadi now believed—who dutifully, efficiently, committed what must qualify as a war crime as well as an environmental catastrophe? For let us not deny his professionalism. Of Kuwait’s 940 or so producing oil wells, he set off mines in 732, turning 640 of them into basins of fire. Stand beside the burning lagoons of the Burgan oil field even now— more than five months after the coffee-drinking Iraqi with his religious observances had left—and you could only wonder at the implications of his act.

  The clichés were long ago exhausted: the fires of hell, darkness at high noon. All had an element of truth about them. Across the black lakes, reflecting the fine, brown-gold light of the fires, the curtains of smoke that smothered the sun—a
button of pale yellow light immediately above us—were almost as frightening as the thunder of the burning wells. At Burgan, I scribbled these observations into my notebook until I realised that the pages were becoming spotty and then soaked in a slippery brown substance that was settling on our clothes, our shoes, faces and hair. We were breathing crude oil. We coughed for hours afterwards. It was then that it dawned on me: Saddam Hussein did use chemical warfare.

  What, after all, were a few mustard gas shells compared to the 2 million tons of carbon dioxide and 5,000 tons of soot spurting into the sky over Kuwait every day, drifting as gently as any sarin or tabun across the Gulf? Everyone was a witness. Mr. Somali’s daughter was asthmatic, and he had to move accommodation to protect her lungs every time the wind changed. Down at the al-Ahmadi headquarters, an Iranian drilling team had arrived to help the Kuwaitis put out their fires, serious, inevitably bearded, genuinely shocked men who had never seen anything on this scale, not even in the eight years of Iraqi destruction in their own country.

  “Of course it is an environmental disaster, and not just here,” Homayoun Motier, the drilling engineer from the National Iranian Oil Company, said to me. “I come from Ahwaz and this smoke has covered us there—there is pollution from these fires all across southern Iran. Do you realise that there is soot all over our Zagros mountains a thousand kilometres away? I have seen it there. It lies in layers beneath the snow, frozen in layer after layer.” Later, as the Iraqi invasion receded, the Americans and the British would paint Iran in the same dangerous colours as Iraq—partly to persuade the Arabs to buy more weapons—and Iran would be touted as the next aggressor, the next threat to the Arab Gulf states, just as it had been in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution. And the work of Homayoun Motier and his men would be forgotten.