The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
– were afflicted with nausea, vomiting, burning of the eyes, blurred vision, itching, suffocation and coughing. Taken to a medical centre, they were found to have blisters all over their skin. Between 21 and 28 October, three Kurdish villages sympathetic to Iran came under chemical attack; an Iranian medical report stated that ‘many villagers of this Kurdish district, including women and children, were severely injured’. Between 28 December 1980 and 20 March 1984, the Iranian official history of the war lists sixty-three separate gas attacks by the Iraqis.
Yet the world did not react. Not since the gas attacks of the 1914–18 war had chemical weapons been used on such a scale, yet so great was the fear and loathing of Iran, so total the loyalty of the Arabs to Saddam Hussein, so absolute their support for him in preventing the spread of Khomeini’s revolution, that they were silent. The first reports of Saddam’s use of gas were never printed in the Arab press. In Europe and America, they were regarded as little more than Iranian propaganda, and America’s response was minimal. Only in March 1984 did Washington condemn Iraq for using poison gas – but even that criticism was mild. It was 1985 before the New York Times reported that ‘United States intelligence analysts have concluded that Iraq used chemical weapons in repelling Iran’s latest offensive in the Gulf War.’ True to that paper’s gutless style, even this report had to be attributed to those favourite sources of all American reporters – ’Administration officials’.
Preliminary evidence suggested that the Iraqis had been using bis(2-chloroethyl)sulphide, a blistering agent that damages all human tissues. The New York Times report continued in the same cowardly fashion: ‘Iran flew purported [sic] victims of the attacks to Austria and West Germany, where some doctors were quoted as saying [sic] the wounded showed signs of having been under attack by mustard gas …’ Four days earlier, US Secretary of State George Shultz had met the Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in Washington, but uttered no criticism of the chemical weapons attack. Despite the mass of evidence now available, my own paper, The Times of London, was still able to carry a photograph in March 1985 of an Iranian soldier in a London hospital covered in terrible skin blisters, with a caption saying only that he was suffering from ‘burns which Iran says [sic] were caused by chemical weapons’.
Mohamed Salam was again one of the few correspondents to obtain first-hand, almost lethal evidence of this latest poison gas attack. Again, he should tell his own awesome story:
I was invited with Zoran Dogramadjev of the Yugoslav Tanjug news agency to go down to Basra where there had been a major offensive by the Iranians. The 3rd Army Corps under Major General Maher Abdul Rashed was faced by this huge attack, totally overwhelming, so the only way of handling it was by mass killing. Rashed had crushed the Iranian offensive. There had been no flooding, no fire, no electricity. Zoran and I wandered around the desert where all this had happened and we came across hundreds and hundreds of dead Iranians, literally thousands of them, all dead. They were still holding their rifles – just think, thousands of them dead in their trenches, all still holding their Kalashnikovs. They had their little sacks of food supplies still on their backs – all the Iranians carried these little sacks of food. There were no bullet holes, no wounds – they were just dead.
We started counting – we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting. We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again. All the dead Iranians had blood on their mouths and beards, and their pants below the waist were all wet. They had all urinated in their pants. The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination of nerve gas and mustard gas. The nerve gas would paralyse their bodies so they would all piss in their pants and the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That’s why they spat blood.
We described all this in our reports, but we didn’t know what it was. We asked the Iraqi soldiers. They had been eating – tomatoes and cucumbers – but when they weren’t eating, they would wear gas masks. From that visit, I developed an infection in my sinus and went to see a friend of mine in Baghdad who was a doctor. He said: ‘This is what we call “front line infection” – I would advise you to leave Iraq immediately.’ I went to see Eileen and Gerry [Eileen Powell and Gerry Labelle, a husband-and-wife AP team in Nicosia] and they put me into the Cyprus Clinic. They gave me antibiotic injections.
But what I saw was a killing machine. Zoran and I, in the end, we thought we had seen about 4,700 Iranian bodies. You know, the things that happened in that war, you would need centuries to write about it.
Every evening at 6 p.m., the Iraqis would broadcast their official war communiqué for the day. I remember word for word what it said in early 1985: The waves of insects are attacking the eastern gates of the Arab Nation. But we have the pesticides to wipe them out.
So where did the ‘pesticides’ come from? Partly from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994 the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs of the US Senate produced a report, United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War. The ‘Persian Gulf War’ referred to the 1991 war and liberation of Kuwait, but its investigations went all the way back to the Iran – Iraq war – which was itself originally called the ‘Gulf War’ by the West until we participated in a Gulf war of our own and purloined the name. The committee’s report informed the US Congress about government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis – which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli (E. coli). The same report stated that ‘the United States provided the Government of Iraq with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile-system programs, including … chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans), chemical warfare filling equipment …’
In the summer of 1985, the Iraqi information ministry took Salam close to the Syrian border, where there was a quarry with the name Al-Qaem-ukashat. The government ‘minders’ told Salam it produced fertilisers. ‘There was an American engineer there from Texas,’ he was to recall.
I interviewed him and he said they were making fertilisers there. Actually, they were producing the mustard and nerve gas there. Many people in Iraq knew about this. There was a kind of artificial town next to it with a restaurant and chalets. The place was bombed by the Americans in the 1991 war. The regime people stayed there for a while immediately after the American invasion in 2003. But at the time they wanted us to write about this wonderful fertiliser plant. They laid on this big banquet with lots of wine and whiskey.
Hamid Kurdi Alipoor lies on his hospital bed in a semi-stupor, wheezing through cracked lips, his burned forehead artificially creased by his frown of pain. The nurse beside him – a girl in dark-framed spectacles wearing an equally black chador – pours water gently into his mouth from a plastic mug. The girl smiles at the young man as if she does not notice the dark skin hanging from his face or the livid pink burns around his throat. Something terrible has happened to him, but the Iranian doctors insist that I ask him to tell me his own story.
It is the same as that of many of the other 199 Iranian soldiers and Revolutionary Guards lying in torment in their beds in the Labbafinejad Medical Centre in Tehran. It is now February 1986. ‘I was in a shelter on the Iranian side of the Arvand [Shatt al-Arab] river,’ Alipoor says. ‘When the shell landed, I did not realise the Iraqis were firing gas. I could not see the chemical so I did not put my gas mask on. Then it was too late.’ He relaxes for a few moments, breathing heavily, the nurse holding out the cup to him again. How old is he? I ask. He looks at the girl when he replies. ‘Nineteen,’ he says.
Some of the other patients watch him from their beds, others are lying with their eyes congealed shut, a bowl of damp, pink swabs beside their pillows. They do not talk. All you can hear is the sound of harsh, laboured breathing. ‘The lungs are the real problem – we send them