The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
has to be burned off. If it’s not, the journalist may well die. We were young. I was fresh from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, already immersed in covering the Lebanese civil war and the effects of Israel’s first 1978 invasion. I had covered the Iranian revolution, the very crucible of this Iraq – Iran conflict. This was my war. Or so I felt as we set off each morning for the Iraqi front lines. And thus it was one burning morning along the Shatt al-Arab, this time with Gavin and his crew, that I almost died again. Once more, I was carrying CBC’s recording equipment and so – before writing these paragraphs – I have listened once more to that day’s tape; and I can hear myself, heart thumping, when I first began to understand how frightening war is.
Most of the ships on the far side of the river were now on fire, a pageant of destruction that lent itself to every camera. But again, we had to approach the river through the Iraqi lines and the Iranians now had men tied by ropes to the cranes along the opposite river bank who were holding rocket-propelled grenades as well as rifles. Here is the text of the audio-track that I was ad-libbing for CBC:
FISK: We’re walking through this deserted village now, there really doesn’t seem to be anybody here, just a few Iraqi soldiers on rooftops and we can’t see them. But there’s a lot of small-arms fire very near. Sound of gunfire, growing in intensity. Yes, the car’s just over there, Gavin.
HEWITT: Down here.
FISK: Yes, there they are. Sound of shooting, much closer this time. I’m beginning to wonder why I got into journalism. My heartbeats are breaking up my commentary. Going through the courtyard of what was obviously a school – there are school benches laid out here.
The sound of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade followed by a thunderous explosion that obliterates the commentary and breaks the audio control on the recorder.
FISK: Back over here, I think, round this way. Dozens of shots and the sound of Gavin, the BBC crew and Fisk running for their lives, gasping for breath. Just trying to get back to the car to get to safety. Ouch, that’s too near. I think they can see us wandering around. Let’s go! Let’s go! There’s …
HEWITT (to crew): Yah, c’mon, c’mon, we’re getting out of here. Can we go? Damn!
And then, listening to this tape, I hear us urging our Iraqi driver to leave, shouting at him to leave. ‘Go, just go!’ one of us screams at him in fury and, once we are moving away, I talk into the microphone, giving a message to George Lewinski and Sue Hickey in the CBC office in London:
George and Sue, I hope you’ve now listened to all that. Please, please, use as much as you can ’cos you can tell how dangerous it was. And please would you keep this cassette whatever happens – it’s a memory I want to remember for the rest of my life, sitting in my Irish cottage. Whatever you do, don’t throw it away!
The tape never made it. I gave it to our Iraqi taxi-driver in Basra to take across the border to send from Kuwait airport, but he was turned round at the frontier and arrived back four hours later outside our hotel, smiling ingratiatingly and holding my tape out of the driver’s window like a dead fish. I later transmitted it down a crackling phone line. Heaven knows what the Canadians made of it – although I was later told that a truck-driver in White Horse, Yukon, pulled over to a phone booth, dialled CBC in Toronto and asked: ‘Was that for real?’
In one sense, it was. The recording was the actual sound of four comparatively young men risking their lives for … Nothing? I’m not sure that would be true. By putting our lives on the line, we did, I suspect, give an authenticity to our work that also gave us a credibility when we came to challenge what governments – or other journalists – claimed to be true. This experience had proved to me beyond all doubt that Iraq was not going to ‘win’ this huge war. An Iranian artillery counter-attack was being sustained and, as I wrote that October – accurately but six years prematurely – ‘if this is carried to its logical conclusion, then it will not be Khorramshahr that is under shellfire from Iraqi guns but Basra that will be hit by shellfire from the Iranians.’
Across the Bailey bridge in Basra came now a steady stream of military ambulances. I ventured out to the border post at Shalamcheh again and there now were the Iraqi wounded, lying in the sand while an artillery battery beside them lobbed 155-mm shells across the border. An ambulance came bumping out of the desert and bounced to a halt in a sandy basin half surrounded by palm trees. They brought an infantryman out of it on a stretcher, pulled the blood-soaked bandages off his shoulder and laid him on a makeshift bed in the shade of the old police station. The man, shot by an Iranian sniper, was still in pain but he made no sound as three army medical orderlies fussed with drip-feed bags above him, the guns firing off a round every minute, a slamming explosion that shook the walls of the building and had the doctors wincing.
A second Iraqi casualty was brought out of the sands, a private from a tank crew who had been blasted from his vehicle, a severely shell-shocked soldier whose head lolled from side to side and whose knees buckled when his comrades carried him into the courtyard of the police station. The soldier with the shoulder wound moaned a little, and every time the big guns fired and the shells soared off towards Khorramshahr, the shell-shock victim rolled his eyes around, his arms flopping from side to side like a dummy with the stuffing knocked out of it.
The forward dressing station of the Iraqi army’s southern front was a grim little place and the long smears of dried blood on the floor were witness to the sacrifice the Iraqi army was having to make for ‘the whirlwind war’. The senior medical orderly was quite matter-of-fact about it. ‘This is an old building and the Iranians have it on all their maps,’ he said. ‘They will fire at it and there will be more casualties.’ He gave me a mirthless grin. Three minutes later, the Iranian shells began coming in, sending the Iraqi gunners jumping into their pits.
The driver of an army jeep on the Khorramshahr-Shalamcheh highway – supposedly safe and long secure in Iraqi hands – was burned to death when Iranian shells rained down on his convoy. Not one major Iranian city had fallen to Baghdad and, with the exception of Qasr-e Shirin to the north, all that the Iraqis had so far captured was 3,000 square kilometres of brown, waterless desert, a shabby landscape of rock and sand from which the Iranians very sensibly withdrew to fight on from the hills.
When Gavin Hewitt and I asked to visit the military hospital in Basra, we were given permission within two minutes and nobody tried to prevent us talking to the wounded soldiers inside. All the casualties told the same stories, of surprise attacks by Iranian helicopter gunships – the Cobras sold to the Shah by the Americans – and Phantom jets suddenly swooping from the east. A badly burned tank crewman described how he heard the sound of jet engines only a second before a rocket hit his tank, covering a quarter of his body in blazing petrol. A private in the Iraqi army’s transport command was blown from his jeep south of Ahwaz by a rocket fired from an Iranian helicopter; as he lay in the road, a Phantom appeared from the sun and bombed his colleagues who were staggering from the wrecked vehicle.
By 5 October, the Iraqis entered Khorramshahr at last, and we went with them. We found a burning, smashed city and just one old Arab Iranian – sole representative of the millions of Arabs of ‘Arabistan’ whom Saddam was seeking to ‘save’ – squatting on the stone floor of his mud home, a man with deep lines on his face and a white beard, brewing tea for an Iraqi soldier and ignoring the questions of strangers. He had been ‘liberated’. This, after all, was the city where the representative of the Iranian embassy siege gunmen in London came from, the city he called al-Mohammorah. This was to be Saddam’s Danzig, the desert beyond was his Sudetenland. The Iraqis were going to rescue the Arabs of Iran, but we could only walk down one main street of the city, a battered thoroughfare of broken telegraph poles and blackened, single-storey shops where tired Iraqi troops, their faces stained with mud, sat on doorsteps and talked under the cover of sheets of corrugated iron.
General Adnan Khairallah, the Iraqi defence minister and Saddam’s first cousin, had offered a ceasefire to the Iranians – to show Iraq’s ‘peaceful intentions’ in front of the world rather than any Iraqi desire to withdraw from Iranian territory – but six and a half hours after the unilateral truce came into effect, the Iranians opened fire on occupied Khorramshahr. We had been