The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
front door and this is true; but the midday heat was so harsh that it sucked all colour from the landscape. The heat smothered us in the shade and ambushed us in fiery gusts from unsuspecting alleyways until all I could see was a monochrome of streets and shuttered houses, the fragile negative of a city dedicated to the linked identities of worship and death. Ayatollah Khomeini must have loved it here.
But the city was changing. The roads had been resurfaced, a construction project had erased one of Khomeini’s old ‘safe’ houses from the face of the earth, and Iraq’s government was doing its best to ensure that the Shia now lacked nothing in this most holy of cities; new factories were being built to the north, more than a hundred new schools – complete with Baath party teachers – had been completed, together with a network of health centres, hotels and apartment blocks. The city’s beaming governor drove me through the drained and sweltering streets in his white Mercedes, pointing his pudgy finger towards the bazaar.
‘I know everyone here,’ Misban Khadi said. ‘I love these people and they always express their true feelings to me.’ Behind us, a trail of police escort cars purred through the heat. Khadi, though a Shiite, did not come from Najaf but from the neighouring province of Diyala. He came to the Imam Ali mosque every day, he claimed, and gestured towards a banner erected over the mosaics of the shrine. It was from a recent speech by Saddam. ‘We are doubly happy at the presence here of our great father Ali,’ it said. ‘Because he is one of the Muslim leaders, because he is the son-in-law of the Prophet – and because he is an Arab.’
Baathist officials made this point repeatedly. All the Iraqis of Iranian origin had already been expelled from Najaf – ‘if only you had telephoned me yesterday,’ Khadi said irritatingly, ‘I could have given you the figures’ – and the message that Shia Islam is a product of the Arab rather than the Persian world constantly reiterated. Had not Saddam personally donated a set of gold-encrusted gates to the Najaf shrine, each costing no less than $100,000? The governor stalked into the bazaar across the road. Because it was Ramadan, the shutters were down, so hot they burned your skin if you touched them. But a perfume stall was still open and Khadi placed his mighty frame on a vulnerable bench while the talkative salesman poured his over-scented warm oils into glass vials.
‘Ask him if he enjoys living in Najaf,’ the governor barked, but when I asked the salesman instead if he remembered Khomeini, his eyes flickered across the faces of the nearest officials. ‘We all remember Khomeini,’ he said carefully. ‘He was here for fourteen years. Every day, he went to pray at the mosque and all the people of Najaf crowded round him, thousands of them, to protect him – we thought the Shah would send his Savak police to kill him so we stood round Khomeini at the shrine.’ There was a moment’s silence as the perfume seller’s critical faculties – or lack of them – were assessed by his little audience.
‘But here’s a little boy who would like to tell you his view of Khomeini,’ said the governor, and an urchin in a grubby yellow abaya shrieked ‘Khomeini is a traitor’ with a vacant smile. All the officials acclaimed this statement as the true feelings of the people of Najaf. Khadi had never met Khomeini but confidently asserted that the Imam had been a CIA agent, that even Grand Ayatollah Abolqassem al-Khoi of Najaf had sent a telegram to Qom, blaming Khomeini for killing the Muslim Kurds of northern Iran. Al-Khoi may have done that – his fellow teacher, Ayatollah Sahib al-Hakim, had been executed by the regime – but this did not spare his family. In 1994, just two years after al-Khoi’s death, his courageous 36-year-old son Taghi was killed when his car mysteriously crashed into an unlit articulated lorry on the highway outside Kerbala. He had been a constant critic of Saddam’s persecution of the Shia and told friends in London the previous year that he was likely to die at Saddam’s hands. At the demand of the authorities, his burial – and that of his six-year-old nephew who died with him – went without the usual rituals.
Four years later, Ayatollah Sheikh Murtada al-Burujirdi, one of Najaf’s most prominent scholars and jurists, a student of the elder al-Khoi and another Iranian-born cleric, was assassinated as he walked home after evening prayers at the shrine of Ali. He had been beaten up the previous year and had escaped another murder attempt when a hand grenade was thrown at him. Al-Burujirdi had refused government demands that he no longer lead prayers at the shrine. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the principal marja al-taqlid – in literal Arabic, ‘source of emulation’ – was still under house arrest and the Baathists were promoting the more pliable Sayed Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, cousin of the executed Sadiq. But Sadiq al-Sadr himself was assassinated by gunmen in Najaf nine months later after he had issued a fatwa calling on Shiites to attend their Friday prayers despite the government’s objection to large crowds. Al-Khoi’s son Youssef – Taghi’s brother – blamed the Baathists, and rioting broke out in the Shia slums of Saddam City in Baghdad. But the history of Shia resistance did not end with the fall of Saddam. It was Sadiq al-Sadr’s son Muqtada who would lead an insurrection against America’s occupation of Iraq five years later, in 2004, bringing US tanks onto the same Najaf streets through which Saddam’s armour had once moved and provoking gun battles across Sadr City, the former Saddam City whose population had renamed it after the executed Bakr Sadr.
These were just the most prominent of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who would be murdered during Saddam’s twenty-four-year rule. Kurds and communists and Shia Muslims would feel the harshest of the regime’s punishments. My Iraqi files from the late Seventies and early Eighties are filled with ill-printed circulars from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, from Iraqi trade unions and tiny opposition groups, naming thousands of executed men and women. As I thumb through them now, I come across the PUK’s magazine The Spark, an issue dated October 1977, complaining that its partisans have been jointly surrounded by forces of Baathist Iraq and the Shah’s Iran in the northern Iraqi village of Halabja, detailing the vast numbers of villages from which the Kurdish inhabitants had been deported, and the execution, assassination or torturing to death of 400 PUK members. Another PUK leaflet, dated 10 December 1977, reports the deportation of 300,000 Kurds to the south of Iraq. Yet another dreadful list, from a communist group, contains the names of 37 Iraqi workers executed or ‘disappeared’ in 1982 and 1983. Omer Kadir, worker in the tobacco factory at Suleimaniya – ‘tortured to death’; Ali Hussein, oil worker from Kirkuk -‘executed’; Majeed Sherhan, peasant from Hilla – ‘executed’; Saddam Muher, civil servant from Basra – ‘executed’… The dead include blacksmiths, builders, printers, post office workers, electricians and factory hands. No one was safe.
This permanent state of mass killing across Iraq was no secret in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the West was either silent or half-hearted in its condemnation. Saddam’s visit to France in 1975 and his public welcome by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, who bestowed upon the Iraqi leader ‘my esteem, my consideration, and my affection’, was merely the most flagrant example of our shameful relationship with the Iraqi regime. Within three years, agents at the Iraqi embassy in Paris would be fighting a gun battle with French police after their diplomats had been taken hostage by two Arab gunmen. A French police inspector was killed and another policeman wounded; the three Iraqi agents claimed diplomatic immunity and were allowed to fly to Baghdad on 2 August 1978, just two days after the killing. US export credits and chemicals and helicopters, French jets and German gas and British military hardware poured into Iraq for fifteen years. Iraq was already using gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers when Donald Rumsfeld made his notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad to shake Saddam’s hand and ask him for permission to reopen the US embassy. The first – and last – time I called on the consulate there, not long after Rumsfeld’s visit, one of its young CIA spooks brightly assured me that he wasn’t worried about car bombs because ‘we have complete faith in Iraqi security’.
Iraq’s vast literacy, public health, construction and communications projects were held up as proof that the Baathist government was essentially benign, or at least worthy of some respect. Again, my files contain many Western press articles that concentrate almost exclusively on Iraq’s social projects. In 1980, for example, a long report in the Middle East business magazine 8 Days, written with surely unconscious irony, begins: ‘Iraqis who fail to attend reading classes can be fined or sent to prison where literary classes are also compulsory. Such measures may seem harsh, but as Iraq enters its