The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for Ottoman troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all of them in delicate handwritten Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq’s written history. But for Iraq, this was Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Archaeological Museum and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library of the ministry 500 metres away, the cultural identity of Iraq was being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose was this heritage being destroyed?

  When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning—there were flames 30 metres high bursting from the windows—I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the U.S. Marines’ Civil Affairs bureau, to report what I had seen. An officer shouted to a colleague that “This guy says some biblical library is on fire.” I gave the map location, the precise name—in Arabic and English—of the building, I said that the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene—and the flames were now shooting 60 metres into the air.

  There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burned libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the caliphate, but even the dark years of the country’s modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, with personal photographs and military diaries, an entire library of Western newspapers—bound volumes of the Financial Times were lying on the pavement opposite the old Defence Ministry—and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s. The microfiche machines were burned too.

  Palestinian newspapers from the early years of the PLO—even the journals of the “Kashmir Liberation Cell”—were lying on the floor. But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library opposite the Ministry of Defence, where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was of such strength that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the concrete stairs which I climbed through the acres of smouldering documents had been cracked by the furnace. The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. And again, standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: Why?

  So, as an all too painful reflection on what this means, let me quote from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind, written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople or to the Court of the Sherif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and who signed themselves “your slave.” There was a request to protect a camel convoy of tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a request for perfume and a warning from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of the Sherif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. “This is just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded,” al-Ayashi says. “If you don’t take our advice, then we have warned you.” A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.

  Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and artillery for the Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz—soon to be Saudi Arabia—while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his interrogators “with a knife and tried to stab them but was restrained and later bought off.” There is a nineteenth-century letter of recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, “a man of the highest morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government.”

  This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history—all that was left of it, which I picked off the road205—as the mass of documents of centuries still crackled in the immense heat of the ruins of the National Archives. Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca—whose court personnel are the authors of many of the letters I saved—was later deposed by the Saudis. It was his son Feisal who became king of Iraq and Feisal’s brother Abdullah who became the first king of Jordan, the grandfather of King Hussein and the great-grandfather of the present Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah the Second.

  For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan’s grandson burned the city in the thirteenth century and, so it was said, the Tigris ran black with the ink of books. Now the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why? Who sent the looters? Who sent the arsonists? Were they paid? Who wanted to destroy the identity of this country?

  America’s project in Iraq was going wrong faster than anyone could have imagined. “The army of ‘liberation’ has already turned into the army of occupation,” I wrote in my paper on 17 April:

  . . . Even the individual U.S. Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them. “Go away! Get out of my face!” an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man’s face suffuse with rage. “God is Great! God is Great!” the Iraqi retorted. “Fuck you!”

  It is much worse than that. The Americans have now issued a “Message to the Citizens of Baghdad,” a document that is as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone. “Please avoid leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before the call to morning prayers,” it tells the people of the city. “During this time, terrorist forces associated with the former regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as various criminal elements, are known to move through the area . . . please do not leave your homes during this time. During all hours, please approach Coalition military positions with extreme caution . . .” So now—with neither electricity nor running water—the millions of Iraqis here are ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown. It’s a form of imprisonment. In their own country.

  Written by the commanding officer of the 1st U.S. Marine Division, it’s a curfew in all but name. “If I was an Iraqi and I read that,” an Arab woman shouted at me yesterday, “I would become a suicide bomber.” And all across Baghdad, you hear the same thing, from Shia Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come only for oil, and that soon—very soon—a guerrilla resistance must start. No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are “remnants” of Saddam’s regime or “criminal elements.” But that will not be the case.

  Marine officers in Baghdad were yesterday holding desperate talks with a Shia militant cleric from Najaf to avert an outbreak of fighting around the holy city—I met the prelate just before the negotiations began. He told me that “history is being repeated.” He was talking about the British invasion of Iraq in 1917, which ended in disaster for the British. To gain entrance to the desert town of al-Anbar, U.S. intelligence officers yesterday had to negotiate with tribal leaders in the best restaurant in Baghdad.

  Everywhere are the signs of collapse. And everywhere the signs that America’s promises of “freedom” and “democracy” are not to be honoured . . . Here’s what Baghdadis are noticing—and what Iraqis are noticing in all the major cities of the country. Take the vast security apparatus with which Saddam surrounded himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy which was its foundation. President Bush promised that America was campaigning for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, the war criminals, would be tracked down and brought to trial. Now the 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad are empty; even the three-square-mile compound headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. I have been to many of them. But not a single British or American officer has visited the sites to sift through the wealth of documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners who are themselves visiting their for
mer places of torment. Is this through idleness. Or is this wilful?

  Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside the Tigris River. It’s a pleasant villa—once owned by an Iranian-born Iraqi who was deported to Iran in the 1980s—and there’s a little lawn outside and a shrubbery and at first you don’t notice the three big hooks in the ceiling of each room nor the fact that big sheets of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted over the windows to conceal the rooms from outsiders. But across the floors, in the garden, on the roof, are the files of this place of suffering. They show, for example, that the head of the torture centre was Hashem al-Tikrit, that his deputy was called Rashid al-Nakib. Ex-prisoner Mohamed Aish Jassem showed me how he was suspended from the ceiling by his torturer, Captain Amar al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of the religious Dawa party.

  “They put my hands behind my back like this and tied them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists,” he told me. “They used a little generator to lift me up, right up to the ceiling, then they’d release the rope in the hope of breaking my shoulder when I fell.” The hooks in the ceiling are just in front of Captain al-Isawi’s desk. I understood what this meant. There wasn’t a separate torture chamber and elsewhere an office for documentation. The torture chamber was the office. While the man or woman shrieked in agony above him, Captain al-Isawi would sign papers, take telephone calls and—given the contents of his rubbish bin—smoke many cigarettes while he waited for the information he sought from his prisoners.

  Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Are they sought by the Americans? No. Are they now working for the Americans? Yes, quite possibly— indeed some of them may well be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the U.S. Marines’ Civil Affairs unit. The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad—pedestrians were forbidden to walk down the road outside lest they heard the screams—are all named on the documents lying on the floor. They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman Abbas and Mohamed Fayad. But the Americans haven’t bothered to find this out. So Messrs. Alawai, Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply for work from the Americans.

  There are prisoner identification papers on the desks and in the cupboards. What happened to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud? We shall not know. A lady in a black chador approached the old torture centre. Four of her brothers had been taken there and, later, when she went to ask what happened, she was told all four had been executed. She was ordered to leave the building. She never saw or buried their bodies . . . One man told me his brother had been brought to this awful place 22 years ago—and never seen again.

  And the men who suffered under Saddam? What did they have to say? “We committed no sin,” one of them said to me, a 40-year-old whose prison duties had included the cleaning of the hangman’s trap of blood and faeces after each execution. “We are not guilty of anything. Why did they do this to us? America, yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil belongs to us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay Iraq. The Americans must go.”

  If the Americans and the British want to understand the nature of the religious opposition here, they have only to consult the files of Saddam’s secret service archives. I found one, Report No 7481, dated 24th February this year—for the Iraqi “mukhabarat” security men were still working hard on their Shia enemies less than a month before the American invasion—on the conflict between Sheikh Mohamed al-Yacoubi and Mukhtada Sadr, the 22-year-old grandson of Mohamed Sadr, who was executed on Saddam’s orders more than two decades ago, a dispute which showed both the passion and the determination with which the Shia religious leaders fight even each other. But of course, no-one has bothered to read this material or even look for it.

  At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking British and American intelligence officers moved into the defeated Reich to hoover up every document in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaus across western Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone. In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence that lies everywhere to be read. For there’s an even more terrible place for the Americans to visit in Baghdad, the headquarters of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive grey-painted block that was bombed by the Americans and a series of villas and office buildings which are stashed with files, papers and card indexes.

  It was here that Saddam’s special political prisoners were brought for vicious interrogation—electricity being an essential part of this—and it was here that Farzad Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for questioning before his dispatch to the hangman. It’s also graced with delicately shaded laneways, a children’s creche—for the families of the torturers—and a school in which one pupil had written an essay in English on (suitably perhaps) Beckett’s Waiting for Godot . There’s also a miniature hospital and a road named “Freedom Street” and flower beds and bougainvillea. It’s the creepiest place in all of Iraq. I met—extraordinarily —an Iraqi nuclear scientist walking in fear around the compound, a colleague of the former head of Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr. Shahristani. “This is the last place I ever wanted to see and I will never return to it,” he said to me. “This was the place of greatest evil in all the world.”

  But the Americans should pay a visit. The top security men in Saddam’s regime were busy in the last hours of their rule, shredding millions of documents. I found a great pile of black plastic rubbish bags at the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of thousands of papers. Shouldn’t they be taken to Washington or London and re-constituted to learn their secrets? That’s what the Iranians did with the shredded U.S. embassy files in Tehran in 1980.

  But again, the Americans have not bothered—or do not want—to search through these papers. If they did, they would also find the names of dozens of senior Iraqi intelligence men, many of them identified by the files of congratulatory letters which Saddam’s secret policemen insisted on sending each other every time they were promoted. Where now, for example, is Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi, Captain Saad Ahmed al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohamed, Captain Majid Ahmed and scores of others? We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to know.

  . . . Then there’s the fires that have consumed every one of the city’s ministries—save, of course, for the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Oil—along with UN offices, embassies and shopping malls. I have counted a total of 35 ministries now gutted by fire and the number goes on rising. Take the scene played out on Wednesday. I was driving through Baghdad when I saw a vast column of black smoke staining the horizon. So I headed to see which ministry was left to burn. I found myself at the Ministry of Oil, assiduously guarded by U.S. troops, some of whom were holding clothes over their mouths because of the clouds of smoke swirling down on them from the neighbouring Ministry of Agricultural Irrigation. Hard to believe, isn’t it, that they were unaware that someone was setting fire to the next building?

  Then I spotted another fire, just lit, three kilometres away. I drove to the scene to find flames curling out of all the windows of the Ministry of Higher Education’s Department of Computer Science. And right next to it, perched on a wall, was a U.S. Marine, who said he was guarding a neighbouring hospital and didn’t know who had lit the next door fire because “you can’t look everywhere at once.” Now I’m sure the marine was not being facetious or dishonest—should the Americans not believe this story, he was Corporal Ted Nyholm of the 3rd Regiment, 4th Marines and, yes, I called his fiancée Jessica in the States for him to pass on his love—but something is terribly wrong when American soldiers are ordered to simply watch vast government ministries being burned by mobs and do nothing about it.

  Because there is also something very dangerous—and deeply disturbing—about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives. For they are not the looters. The looters come first. The arsonis
ts turn up afterwards, often in blue and white single-decker buses. I actually followed one of them after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town. Now the official American line on all this is that the looting is revenge—an explanation that is growing very thin—and that the fires are started by “remnants of Saddam’s regime,” the same “criminal elements,” no doubt, who feature in the Marines’ curfew orders to the people of Baghdad.

  But people in Baghdad don’t believe Saddam’s former supporters are starting these fires. And neither do I. True, Saddam might have liked Baghdad to end in Götterdämmerung—and might have been tempted to turn it into a city of fire before the Americans entered. But afterwards? The looters make money from their rampages. But the arsonists don’t make money by burning. They have to be paid. The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to their targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn’t have started the fires. The moment Saddam disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the whole project, not wasted their time earning their cash post-payment.

  So who are they, this army of arsonists? Again, we don’t know. I recognised one the other day, a middle-aged, unshaven man in a red T-shirt— you can’t change clothes too often when you have no water to wash in—and the second time he saw me he pointed a Kalashnikov rifle at me. Looters don’t carry guns. So what was he frightened of? Who was he working for? In whose interest is it—now, after the American occupation of Baghdad—to destroy the entire physical infrastructure of the state, along with its cultural heritage? Why didn’t the Americans stop this?