The Great War for Civilisation (41 page)

Snow packaged his film and gave it to me to take to Kuwait, where a private jet had been hired by America's NBC to take both their own and ITN's news film to Amman for satelliting to New York and London. As the Learjet soared into the air, the purser offered me smoked salmon sandwiches and a glass of champagne. From Amman I filed the story of the
Al-Tanin
to
The Times
. Then I sank into the deepest bed of the Intercontinental Hotel and woke to find a telex with a nudge-in-the-ribs question from the foreign desk in London: “Why
you
no swam shark-infested Shatt al-Arab river?”

But here the sweet stories must end. By the end of October, the Iraqis— realising that they were bogged down in the deserts of Iran with no more chance of a swift victory—were firing ground-to-ground missiles at Iranian cities. Early in the month, 180 civilians were killed in Dezful when the Iraqis fired a rocket into the marketplace. On 26 October, at least another hundred civilians were killed when the Iraqis fired seven Russian Frog-7 missiles at Dezful. The War of the Cities had begun, a calculated attempt to depopulate Iran's largest towns and cities through terror.

The outbreak of war in Iran had been greeted even by some of the theocratic regime's opponents with expressions of outrage and patriotism. Thousands of middle-class women donated millions of dollars' worth of their jewellery to Iran's “war chest.” Captive in the Iranian foreign ministry, U.S. chargé d'affaires Bruce Laingen “knew something was happening when I heard a loudspeaker outside the foreign ministry playing American marching tunes—which the Iranians used on military occasions. I heard later that the Iraqis used them too. That night, there were anti-aircraft guns being used and the sky was full of tracer. They never seemed to hit anything. In fact, when we heard the air-raid sirens, we used to relax because we knew that the Iraqi planes had already been, bombed and flown away.”

The Iranians, like Saddam, had to fight internal as well as external enemies during the war, knowing that groups like the Mujahedin-e-Khalq had the active support of the Iraqi regime. The strange death of the Iranian defence minister Mustafa Chamran on the battle front has never been fully explained. But there could be no doubt what happened when, just before 9 p.m. on 28 June 1981, a 60-pound bomb exploded at a meeting of the ruling Islamic Republican Party in Tehran, tearing apart seventy-one party leaders as they were listening to a speech by Ayatollah Mohamed Beheshti, chief justice of the supreme court, secretary of the Revolutionary Council, head of the IRP and a potential successor to Khomeini. When the bomb destroyed the iron beams of the building and 40-centimetre-thick columns were pulverised by the blast, the roof thundered down onto the victims. Among them were four cabinet ministers, six deputy ministers and twenty-seven members of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis.

Beheshti, who died with them, was an intriguing personality, his thin face, pointed grey beard and thick German accent—a remnant of his days as a resident Shiite priest in Germany—giving him the appearance of a clever eighteenth-century conspirator. When I met him in 1980, I noted that he employed “a unique mixture of intellectual authority and gentle wistfulness which makes him sound— and look—like a combination of Cardinal Richelieu and Sir Alec Guinness.” He had for months been intriguing against President Bani-Sadr, although the date of the latter's formal removal gave Beheshti little time for satisfaction: he was murdered a week later.

He was a man with enemies, unmoved by Iran's growing plague of executions. “Don't you see,” he explained to me with some irritation, “that there have been very few people sentenced to death because of their failures in the [Shah's] ministries. Those people who have been sentenced to death are in a different category—they are opium or heroin dealers.” This was palpably untrue. Most of the executions were for political reasons. “When you study the history of revolutions,” Beheshti said, “you will find that there are always problems. This is normal. When people here say they are unhappy, it is because they have not experienced a revolution before. There are problems—but they will be solved.” Beheshti's loss was the most serious the revolution suffered—until the death of Khomeini in 1989— because he had designed the IRP along the lines of the Soviet Communist party, capable of binding various revolutionary movements under a single leader.

By coincidence, the bloodbath on 28 June cost the same number of lives— seventy-two—as were lost at the battle of Kerbala in 680 by Imam Hossein, his family and supporters, a fact that Khomeini was quick to point out. Saddam and America, he concluded, had struck again through the Mujahedin-e-Khalq. “Suppose you were an inveterate enemy to the martyred Beheshti,” Khomeini asked sarcastically, “. . . what enmity did you bear against the more than seventy innocent people, many of whom were among the best servants of society and among the most adamant enemies of the enemies of the nation?” But on 5 August, Hassan Ayat, another influential Majlis deputy, was killed. On 30 August a second bomb killed President Mohamed Rajai, who had just replaced Bani-Sadr, and the new Iranian prime minister, Mohamed Javad Bahonar. The prosecutor general, Ayatollah Ali Quddusi, was murdered on 5 September and Khomeini's personal representative in Tabriz, Ayatollah Asadollah Madani, six days later.

The regime hit back with ferocious repression. Schoolchildren and students figured prominently among the sixty executions a day. One estimate—that 10,000 suspects were hanged or shot—would equal the number of Iranians killed in the first six months of the war with Iraq. Just as Saddam was trying to destroy the Dawa party as a militant extension of Shia Islam, so Khomeini was trying to eliminate the Mujahedin-e-Khalq as a branch of the Iraqi Baath. This duality of enemies would force both sides in the war to take ever more ruthless steps to annihilate their antagonists on the battlefield as well as in their prisons and torture chambers.

When I visited Tehran in the spring of 1982 to make my own investigations into these mass executions, survivors of Evin prison spoke to me of 8,000 hangings and shootings, of fourteen-year-old Revolutionary Guards brutalised by their participation in the killings. Among the 15,000 prisoners who were spared and were now being released—partly, it seemed, because of Amnesty International's repeated condemnation of Islamic “justice” in Iran—several vouchsafed accounts of quite appalling savagery. At one point after the Beheshti, Rajai and Bahonar murders, inmates were told to demonstrate their repentance by hanging their friends. There were three stages in this purgation: they could actually strangle their fellow prisoners, they could cut them down from the gibbet—or they could merely load their corpses into coffins. Prisoners thus emerged from Evin with souls purified but blood on their hands. Islamic socialism was almost wiped out; only a few leftists escaped death, capable of shooting at Iran's deputy foreign minister in April 1982. But the Mujahedin-e-Khalq was broken.

Saddam eventually claimed victory over Khorramshahr and the Iranians admitted they had “lost touch” with their forces still in the city. Henceforth the Iranians would call it Khuninshahr—the “City of Blood.” The Iraqis never captured Abadan but Saddam invested tens of thousands of troops in Khorramshahr, and Iraq announced that it would become “another Stalingrad.” This was an early version of the “mother of all battles” that Saddam always threatened but never fought. Fifteen months after the war began, the Iraqi army found that its supply lines were stretched too far and made a strategic decision to retreat, building a massive defensive line along its border with Iran and leaving behind it a carpet of destruction. Howeiza, with an Arabic-speaking population of 35,000, had been captured by the Iraqis on 28 September 1980, but when Iranian forces re-entered the empty town in May 1982 they found that it had been levelled; only two of its 1,900 buildings were still standing: a damaged mosque used as an observation post and a house that had been a command post. Even the trees had been uprooted. This is what the Israelis had done to the Syrian city of Kuneitra after the 1967 Middle East war. All of “Arabistan”—Khuzestan—whose liberation had been another of Saddam's war aims, was simply abandoned. The Iranians were winning. And Western journalists would now be welcomed in Iran as warmly as they once were in Iraq during the fictional “whirlwind war.”

Dezful was the first major Iraqi defeat. In a blinding sandstorm, 120,000 Iranian troops, Revolutionary Guards and
Basiji
(mobilised) volunteers plunged through the desert towards the Iraqi lines in late March 1981, taking 15,000 Iraqi soldiers prisoner, capturing 300 tanks and armoured vehicles and recovering 4,000 square kilometres of Iranian territory. When I reached the scene of the Iranian victory, an almost total silence enveloped the battlefield. There were wild roses beside the roads south of Dezful and giant ants scuttled over the desert floor. Iranian artillerymen sat beneath their anti-aircraft gun canopies, glancing occasionally at the empty sky. The smashed tanks of the Iraqi army's 3rd Armoured Division, disembowelled by rocket fire, their armour peeled back as if by a can-opener, lay in the mid-afternoon heat, memorials already to what the dismissive Iranians insisted on calling “Operation Obvious Victory.”

The silence of the desert indicated both the extent of Iran's success and the extraordinary fact that with scarcely a shot fired in return, the Iranian army had halted its advance along a geometrically straight line about 65 kilometres in length. It stretched from a ridge of hills north-west of Dezful to the swamps of Sendel, where Iraqi tanks and armoured carriers lay axle-deep in mud, driven there in frustration and fear by Saddam's retreating forces. The Iranians—at one point scarcely 5 kilometres from the Iraqi border—had effectively declared a halt to offensive action in the Dezful sector, forbidden to advance, on Khomeini's orders, across the international frontier.

Colonel Beyrouz Suliemanjar of the Iranian 21st Infantry Division was quite specific when he spoke to us, baton in hand, in his dark underground command post beneath a ridge of low hills. “According to the Imam's guidance,” he stated with military confidence, “we are not allowed to cross the border.” He patted a blue, straggling river on his polythene-covered map. “Our troops could cross this last river but our Imam will not let them. Our strategic aim is to push the enemy troops back to their territory. But we will not cross the frontier.” Whenever the colonel spoke—with apparent modesty—about the surprise attack on 22 March, his junior officers along with a mullah, standing at the back of the dugout, chorused, “God is great—Down with America—Down with the Soviet Union.” No military briefing could ever have been quite like this.

Khomeini had already promised that his armies would not invade neighbouring countries. Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the Majlis speaker, had given his word that Iran “harbours no territorial ambition against Iraq.” All Iran wanted, according to Rafsanjani, was the satisfaction of four demands: the expulsion of Iraqi troops from all Iranian territory; “punishment of the aggressor”; compensation for war damage; and the return of war refugees to their homes. “Punishment of the aggressor,” the Iranians made clear, meant the overthrow of Saddam Hussein—something that neither the Arabs nor the Americans would permit. That the Iranians sought an end for Saddam every bit as bloody as that dealt out to the 4,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed at the battle of Dezful made this prospect even less likely.

The Iranians crammed John Kifner of
The New York Times
and myself into a Bell/Agusta helicopter gunship along with a bevy of mullahs—the pilots were trained in the United States, of course—and flew us across kilometre after kilometre of wreckage and corpses. A Cyclopean view of carnage, the whup-whup of the chopper blades, the sudden ground-hugging rush between hills and into wadis were so frightening that we placed superhuman faith in the pilot and thus became so confident that we almost enjoyed this flying madness. One pile of dead Iraqi soldiers had already been bulldozed into a mass grave—“Aggressor cemeteries,” the signs said above these muddy crypts—but others still lay out in the sun in their hundreds. Many lay where they fell, in dried-up riverbeds, their decomposition clearly visible from our helicopter. Several times, the pilot hovered over a pile of corpses as the odour of their putrefaction wafted into the machine, overpowering and sickening, the mullahs screeching “God is Great” while Kifner and I held our breath. The dead were distended in the heat, bodies bloating through their shabby uniforms. We could see the Revolutionary Guards next to them, digging more mass graves for Saddam's soldiers.

When we landed behind what had been the Iraqi front line—they ran like ant-hills, catacombed with dugouts and ammunition boxes—there was almost no sign of incoming shellfire, none of the traditional “softening up” by heavy artillery that conventional armies employ. The Iraqi positions lay untouched, as if the occupants had been taken sleeping from their mattresses at night, leaving their trenches and revetments on display for the ghoulish visitors—us—who follow every war. The Iranians even invited us to enter the dugouts of their enemies. It was easy to see why. They were equipped with air conditioners, television sets, videos and cassette films and magazine photographs of young women. One officer maintained a fridge of beer, another had laid a Persian carpet on the concrete floor. This was Khomeini's “saturnalia” writ large. Saddam didn't want his soldiers to revolt—as Khomeini had now repeatedly urged them to—so he gave them every comfort. But how could such a pampered army fight when the Iranians stormed towards them in their tens of thousands?

The Iranians had learned that opposing massed Iraqi armour with poorly maintained Chieftain tanks was suicidal—the wreckage of dozens of Chieftains destroyed in the initial battles outside Dezful more than a year earlier still littered the desert. At Ein Khoosh, I padded round the broken Iraqi tanks for more than an hour. I noticed one whose severed turret had been blown clean off the base of the vehicle, landing with its gun barrel intact beside a small field. Around the turret and the decapitated tank stood a cluster of Iranian troops and peasants, all holding handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses.