The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
‘… 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-Qalq 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-Qalq 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 river beds, 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