The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
would not violate Iraqi national territory – had given way to a new pragmatism. If by entering Iraq the war could be ended, then Iranian troops would do what Iraq had done in September 1980 and cross the international frontier. Khomeini spoke repeatedly of the suffering of Iraqi Shiites, releasing their century-old political frustrations. Would he any longer be satisfied with just the head of Saddam? He would surely want an Iraqi regime that was loyal to him, a vassal state of Iran, or so the Arabs began to fear.
It was not hard to fathom what this might involve. The largest community in Lebanon – though not a majority – was Shia. Syria was effectively ruled by the Alawites, a Shia sect in all but name. If Iraq was to fall to its own majority Shiites, there could be a Shia state from the Mediterranean to the borders of Afghanistan, with both oil and the waters of the two great rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates. With both Iranian and Iraqi oil, Khomeini could undercut OPEC and control world prices, let alone dominate the waters of the Gulf and the Arab peninsula. That, at least, was the nightmare of the Arabs and the Americans, one that Saddam was happy to promote. Now he was portraying himself as the defender of the Arab lands, his war with Iran the new Qadisiya, the battle in ad 636 in which the Arab leader Saad bin Ali Waqqas vanquished the far larger Persian army of Rustum. In Baghdad’s official discourse, the Iranians were now the ‘pagan Zoroastrians’.
In Basra, the Iraqis had displayed their seventeen Iranian POWs to us. Now the Iranians took us to meet their Iraqi POWs – all 15,000 of them. At Parandak prisoner-of-war camp in northern Iran, they sat cross-legged on a windy parade ground in lines a quarter of a mile deep, many of them with well-trimmed beards, all of them wearing around their necks a coloured portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. Their eyes moved in a way that only captivity can control, studying each other nervously and then staring at their prison guards, awed by the enormity of their surrender. When Iran’s army chief of staff, grey-haired and bespectacled, told them of Iraq’s iniquities, the Iraqis roared back: ‘Down with Saddam Hussein.’
This was not brainwashing in the normally accepted use of the word. It was scarcely indoctrination. But there could be no doubt what the Iranians were trying to do at Parandak: to make Saddam’s own soldiers more dangerous to his Baathist regime than the Iranian army that was fighting its way towards the Iraqi frontier. When Khomeini’s name was mentioned, it echoed over the massive parade ground, repeated by thousands of Iraqi soldiers who then knelt in prayer and homage to the Islamic faith that overthrew the Shah.
True, there were some dissidents among the Iraqi troops, men who still retained their political as well as their Islamic identity. At the far back of one line of older prisoners – captives now for more than a year – an Iraqi soldier shouted ‘Saddam is a very good man’, and a few of his comrades nodded in agreement. ‘The man did not say “Saddam” – he was greeting you with the word “Salaam”,’ explained an Iranian official with the confidence of mendacity. Several hundred prisoners refused to pray. ‘They had probably not washed before prayers,’ said the same official. ‘They had not been purified.’
From his residence in north Tehran, Khomeini had given specific instructions that Iraqi prisoners-of-war were to be well treated and given all the rights of captive soldiers. The POWs were visited by the International Red Cross, but they were also being lectured in Arabic each day by Iranian officers who explained to them that the United States, France, Britain and other Western nations had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1980 attack on Iran. There were, naturally, no contradictions from their vast audience. When the Iraqi prisoners knelt to pray, they took Khomeini’s portrait from around their necks, placed it upon the ground in front of them and rested their heads upon it. In the barracks, these men – including Iraqi paratroopers who arrived from the war front on the very day of our visit, still wearing their blue berets – were to be given weekly lessons by mullahs on the meaning of Islam. They were already receiving the daily Tehran newspaper Kayhan, specially printed in Arabic for their convenience.
When these prisoners eventually returned to Iraq, some of them, perhaps a goodly proportion, must have carried these lessons with them, an incubus for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – or an inspiration to oppose any other army that dared to take control of their country in the years to come. We were not told how many of these young Iraqi soldiers were Shiites and what percentage were Sunni.
The Iranians would not permit us to speak to the prisoners, although they produced more than a hundred captives – or ‘guests’ as they cloyingly called them – from Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Nigeria and Somalia, who had been taken among the Iraqi prisoners. A bearded Lebanese librarian from Zahle – a Christian town – claimed to have been forced to enlist while working in Baghdad. A Somali, Fawzi Hijazi, frightened but smiling, pleaded with me to tell his embassy of his presence. He had been a scholarship student at Baghdad University, he said, when he had been press-ganged into the Iraqi army. He had not been visited by the Red Cross. But at this point, an Iranian guard ordered him to stop speaking.
Now on our chaperoned visits to the Iranian front, we could see the country’s newly established self-confidence made manifest. The Revolutionary Guard Corps had become the spine of Iran’s military power, drawing on a huge pool of rural volunteers, the Basiji, the schoolboys and the elderly, the unemployed, even the sick. An official history of the Guard Corps was published in booklet form in Tehran during the war, claiming that it was ‘similar in many respects to the combatants of early Islam, in the days of the Holy Prophet … Among the important and prevalent common points of the two is … life according to an Islamic brotherhood; the story of the travellers and the followers. The travellers … migrated to the war fronts, and the followers … support their families in the cities during the war.’ An ‘important and popular activity’ of the Guards, the pamphlet said, was ‘the military, political, and ideological training of the Baseej [sic], in which the limitless ocean of our people are organised.’*
Both the ‘Guards’ and the ‘travellers’ were now in convoy towards the borders of Iraq, singing and chanting their desire to ‘liberate’ the Iraqi Shia holy cities. One trail of trucks, jeeps and tanks 5 kilometres long, which I overtook near the Iranian city of Susangerd, was loaded down with thousands of Basiji, almost all of them waving black and green banners with ‘Najaf’ and ‘Kufa’ written across them. Jang ta pirouzi, they shouted at me when I took their pictures. ‘War until victory.’ Another convoy was led by a tank with a placard tied above its gun muzzle, announcing that it was the ‘Kerbala Caravan’. These men, most of them, were going to their deaths in Iraq but they were doing so with an insouciance, a light-heartedness – a kind of brazen stubbornness – that was breathtaking.
I suppose the soldiers of the 1914 war had something of the same gaiety about them, the British who thought the war would be over by Christmas, the French who painted ‘Berlin’ on the side of their troop trains, the Germans who painted ‘Paris’ on theirs. In Frederic Manning’s semi-autobiographical Her Privates We, a unit of British soldiers marching through a French village at night during the First World War awakes the inhabitants:
… doors suddenly opened and light fell through the doorways, and voices asked them where they were going.
‘Somme! Somme!’ they shouted, as though it were a challenge.
‘Ah, no bon!’ came the kindly, pitying voices in reply … And that was an enemy to them, that little touch of gentleness and kindliness; it struck them with a hand harsher that death’s, and they sang louder, seeing only the white road before them …
No wonder that boy soldier on the Dusallok Heights had lectured me about spirituality and materialism. There comes a point, I suspect, in a soldier’s life when the inevitability of death becomes more pressing than the possibility of life.
Now the Arab leaders who had expressed such confidence in Saddam were fearful that he might lose the war they had so cheerfully supported. King Hussein of Jordan arrived hurriedly in Baghdad for talks with Saddam, speaking boldly of standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Iraqis but privately expressing his fears that their army would soon fall back even further, allowing the Iranians