The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
Iraqi raids often provoked little more than a fantasy display of antiaircraft fire from the guns around Tehran. The pilots could not identify any targets now that the Iranians had acquired new German SEL aircraft warning radar and switched off the electricity. On 2 June 1985, however, two bombs dropped by an Iraqi high-altitude Ilyushin 28 exploded on a large civilian housing complex in the Gishe suburb of the city, collapsing five entire blocks of apartments. From my hotel window – from where I had been watching the lights of the distant bomber – I saw two huge flashes of crimson light and heard a terrific roar of sound, the detonation of the bombs becoming one with the sound of crashing buildings. Hitherto, the Iraqis had fired rockets onto Tehran, so this was a new precedent in the War of the Cities. At least 50 civilians were killed and another 150 wounded in the raid. When I arrived there, it was the usual story: the cheaply-made bricks of the walls had crumbled to dust and a four-storey building – home to sixteen families – had been blown to pieces by one of the bombs. A little girl in the block had been celebrating her birthday during the evening and many children were staying the night with her family when the bombs destroyed the girl’s home. Angry Iranians gathered at the site next morning and the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guards were forced to fire into the air to clear the road.
In all of March and April of 1985, there were thirteen air raids on Tehran. Now there were thirteen a week, sometimes three a night. Only one Iraqi jet had been shot down – during a daylight raid in March – when an Iranian F-14 intercepted it over the capital. The Iraqi plane crashed into the mountains above Tehran, its pilot still aboard. Yet the Iranians could be forgiven for believing that the world was against them. In July, Iraq began to take delivery of forty-five twenty-seater Bell helicopters from the United States, all capable of carrying troops along the war front. The Reagan administration said, in all seriousness, that the sale of the Super Transports did not breach the US arms embargo on the belligerents because ‘the helicopters are civilian’ and because the American government would ‘monitor’ their use. The sale had been negotiated over two years, during which the United States had been fully aware of Iraq’s use of poison gas and its ‘cleansing’ of the Kurds. I would later see eight of these same Bell helicopters near Amara – all in camouflage paint and standing on the tarmac at a military air base.
Yet still the martyrology of war could be used to send fresh blood to the front; the child soldiers of Iran, it seemed, would be forever dispatched to the trenches of Kerman and Ahwaz and Khorramshahr, each operation named Val Fajr – ‘Dawn’ – which, for a Muslim, also represents the dawn prayer. We had Val Fajr 1, all the way up to Val Fajr 8. I would walk down to the Friday prayers at Tehran University during the war and I would often see these miniature soldiers – every bit as young and as carefree of life and death as those I had met in the trenches outside Dezful. The inscription on the red bands round the little boys’ heads was quite uncompromising. ‘Yes, Khomeini, we are ready,’ it said. And the would-be martyrs, identically dressed in yellow jogging suits, banged their small fists against their chests with all the other worshippers, in time to the chants. This cerebral drumbeat – at least ten thousand hands clapping bodies every four seconds – pulsed out across the nation, as it did every Friday over the airwaves of Iranian radio and television. The audience was familiar, even if the faces changed from week to week: mullahs, wheelchair veterans of the war, the poor of south Tehran, the volunteer children and the Iraqi POWs, green-uniformed and trucked to the prayer ground to curse their own president.
Friday prayers in Tehran were a unique combination of religious emotion and foreign policy declaration, a kind of Billy Graham crusade and a weekly State of the Nation address rolled into one. A stranger – especially a Westerner – could be perplexed at what he saw, even disturbed. But he could not fail to be impressed. It was not the prayer-leader who acted as the centrepiece of this great theatre. Often this was Rafsanjani. He could discourse to his ten thousand audience on the origins of the revolution, superpower frustration in Lebanon and further Iranian military successes outside Basra. But this was almost a rambling affair. His hair curling from beneath his amami turban and his hand resting on an automatic rifle, Rafsanjani did not stir his audience to any heights of passion.
The congregation that June provided their own sense of unity, their voices rising and falling in cadence with a long chant in Farsi that attempted to integrate Islamic history with the struggle against Iraq, the little boys – some as young as ten – still banging their fists on their heads. Much Farsi verse rhymes and – by rhyming the English translation – these calls to war come across with an archaic, almost Victorian naivety:
We are ready to give our lives, we are ready to go,
And fight as at Kerbala against our foe.
Imam Hossein said those around him were the best;
Now you see with Khomeini we attest
That Hossein and those around him are with us.
In our way lies the honour of Islam
As we follow the word of our Imam.
There were some, the more youthful Basiji, who had already been chosen for martyrdom, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds kitted out in tiny bright camouflage uniforms. They stood on each side of Rafsanjani’s dais holding trays of toffees, each sweet wrapped in crimson cellophane. At a signal, they stepped among the rows of mullahs and war-wounded, the Revolutionary Guards in parka jackets and the elderly, unshaven, dark-suited men from south Tehran, and presented their trays of toffees. Each man carefully took a sweet without looking at the child in front of him, aware of the significance; for this was no interlude between prayers. It was a communion with doomed youth.
Then the boys walked soulfully back to their places on each side of the dais, hair cut short, large dark eyes occasionally turning shyly towards the mass of people. They were, the worshippers were told, aware of their mission. And they stood there, fidgeting sometimes, headbands slightly askew, but feet together at attention as any child might play at soldiers in his home. Rafsanjani made no reference to them. His message was more temporal and the formula was an old one. Iraq was losing many men at the front. It was also losing much territory. To save the land, it had to lose more men. To save the men, it had to lose more land. So Iraq was losing the war. In just one week, Rafsanjani said, Iraq had lost six more brigades. The worshippers chanted their thanks to their army at the front.
Friday prayers were broadcast through loudspeakers along those very trench lines opposite Basra, piped through loudspeakers so that the Iranian soldiers could hear these ten thousand voices above the shellfire. They called for revenge against Iraq for its air raids on Iranian cities. Rafsanjani added a pragmatic note. ‘If you want to make yourselves useful,’ he told his nationwide audience, ‘you can dig air-raid shelters at home.’ The young boys stood listlessly on either side of him, perhaps aware that their homes were no longer their immediate concern.
Yet still Iraq hoovered up Iranian prisoners – by the thousand now, just as the Iranians had done before – and ostentatiously presented them to the world’s press. Iraq opened a huge prison camp complex for its new POWs in the desert west of Baghdad, around the hot, largely Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, where there would be no Shia community to offer comfort and help should any of them escape. This was every man’s Stalag, complete with a jolly commandant called Major Ali who wanted to introduce us to his model prisoners. The Iranian inmates crowded round us when we arrived, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, still in their drab, desert-yellow uniforms, happy prisoners according to the senior Iranian officer at Ramadi, Anish Tusi. How could they be otherwise, the camp’s doctor asked? Why, look, they had schools, a library, a tuck shop, table tennis, basketball.
A portrait of Saddam Hussein smiled down benevolently upon them. ‘If you obey the camp rules, it will be better for you and for everybody else,’ a poster advised the prisoners in Farsi. ‘Obey the rules of the camp and the commander of the camp, and you will be treated as friends.’ Major Ali, smiling in the midday sun, gestured magnanimously towards the canteen. ‘Just see how well our prisoners eat,’ he said. We pushed inside a small hut where four Iranian Basiji – captured in the Howeiza marshes a year earlier – gently stirred two cauldrons of fish and roast chicken. ‘This camp is Ramadi Two,’ the jolly major said,