The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
photograph on the wall, unaware that she is already a widow and that her husband’s wedding ring, so bright with love for her on this glorious morning, embraces a dead finger.
The man from the ministry is full of false confidence. No need to worry about air raids: the Iranian air force has put up fighter cover above Fao to protect the visiting foreign correspondents. Labelle and I look at each other. This is a whopper. No Iranian pilot is going to waste his time protecting the khabanagoran – the ‘journalists’ – when his army is under such intense Iraqi fire to the north. A plane flies over at high altitude and the ministry man points up into the scalding heavens. ‘There you see, just like I said.’ Labelle and I know a Mig when we see one. It’s Iraqi.
Coughing and bouncing on the muck, there then arrived a captured Iraqi army truck, into which we climbed. The second helicopter had brought another group of reporters from Nahr-e-Had who came slogging over the mud. It was tourism time. I could hardly recognise the Fao I’d driven through – in almost equal fear – five and a half years earlier. I could just remember the Iraqi army barracks that now had a banner floating over its entrance, reading ‘Islam means victory’. The city was occupied by thousands of Revolutionary Guards. They waved at us, held up Korans and smiled and offered tea amid the ruins. The very name of Fao had acquired a kind of religious significance. ‘You will see there are no Iraqis left here,’ a young Pasdar officer told us, and he was as good as his word. The mud – ‘Somme-like mud’ as I was to write melodramatically in my dispatch that night – consumed Fao, its roads, its gun emplacements, the base of its burning oil tanks, the dull grey and pale brown uniforms of the Iranian fighters, gradually absorbing the Iraqi bodies spread-eagled across the town. One Iraqi soldier had been cut neatly in half by a shell, the two parts of his body falling one on top of the other beside a tank. He, too, had a wedding ring. The Iraqi defences – 3-metre-high sandbag emplacements – stood along the northern end of Fao, their undamaged machine guns still fixed in their embrasures. Was it Iraqi indolence that allowed the Iranians to sweep through the city with so little opposition, even capturing an entire missile battery on the coast? Some of the mud-walled houses still stood, but much of the city had been destroyed. The Iranians displayed several Iraqi 155-mm guns which they were now using to shell the Basra road.
An elderly, grey-bearded man emerged from a ruined house on cue. Jang ba piruzi, he shrieked. War till victory, the same old chorus. The rain poured out of the low clouds above Fao, sleeking the old man’s face. He wore a ragged red cloth round his forehead and waved a stick over his head. Members of Iran’s ‘War Propaganda Department’ had suddenly emerged from the bowels of a factory and turned to their foreign visitors in delight. ‘See – this is one of our volunteers. He wants to die for Islam in fighting Saddam.’ An old jeep pulled up alongside the man, a rusty loudspeaker on top. Jang ba piruzi, the machine crackled and the old man jumped up and down in the mud. Behind him, red flames rippled across the base of a burning oil storage depot where the Iraqis were shelling the Iranian lines.
Up the road there was now a curtain of fire and a wall of black smoke. From here came that drumbeat of sound, that seismic tremor which we had felt when we landed. The Iranians appeared to be nonchalant, almost childishly mischievous about their victory. On the back of our old Iraqi truck – we all noted the head-high bullet hole through the back of the driver’s cab – an Iranian officer stood with a megaphone and pointed across the torrid Khor Abdullah Strait towards the Kuwaiti island of Bubiyan. ‘Kuwait is on your left,’ he shouted. This was one of the reasons we had been brought to Fao. Here we were, inside Iraq with the Iranians, looking at the Arab country that was one of Iraq’s two principal arms suppliers.
Bubiyan is 130 square kilometres of swamp and mud-banks, but a small Kuwaiti guard force was stationed there and the symbolism was obvious. ‘We hope Kuwait remains responsible during this conflict,’ the officer shouted again. Many of the newly dug Iranian gun-pits along the road to Um Qasr – a port still in Iraqi hands – had been newly equipped with artillery pointed directly across the narrow strait towards Kuwait. In the ghost town of Fao, the bodies would soon have to be buried if the wind and sand did not reach them first. On a vacant lot, there lay the wreckage of an Iraqi Mig, half buried in the liquid sand, its pilot’s head poking from the smashed cockpit. A dead soldier was sitting next to the plane, as if preparing for our arrival.
We spent three hours waiting for our helicopter back to the east bank of the Shatt, Labelle and I sitting once more in our basin of sand with the dead soldier and his wedding ring a few metres away. We also discovered, as Labelle walked through the pieces of broken steel and body parts, puffing on his dozens of cigarettes – part of his charm was that he was a cigarette-smoking asthmatic – that there was a large unexploded bomb lying in the mud near us. ‘It has been defused,’ the ministry man lied. Labelle looked at it scornfully and lit another cigarette. ‘Fisky, it ain’t going to explode,’ he muttered and began to laugh. Only one chopper came back for us. There was a shameful race through the mud by reporters and mullahs to find a place aboard and, as Labelle heaved me above the skids and behind the co-pilot, I saw some desperate soul’s boot placed on the shoulder of a mullah, shoving at the scrabbling cleric until he fell backwards into the mud. Then we took off, back across the rippling waters of the Shatt, right over the army base at Nahr-e-Had and on to Ahwaz and the grotty hotel and the Ahwaz post office where there were no phone lines to London. So I called Tony Alloway in Tehran and dictated my report to him and he told me that The Times foreign desk had a message for me: the paper was full tonight – would my story hold till tomorrow?
The Iranians had occupied about 300 square kilometres of Iraqi territory south of Basra – their own claim of 800 square kilometres included territorial waters – and they would hold this land for almost two more years until Major-General Maher Abdul Rashed – whose 3rd Army Corps had gassed the Iranians in their thousands outside Basra in early 1985 – battered his way back into the city in April 1988. But how did the Iranians capture Fao in the first place? They said it was a mystery known unto God, but years after the war I met the young Iranian war hero – a helicopter pilot – who had swum the Shatt al-Arab at night to reconnoitre the city when it was still under Iraqi control. He had devised an extraordinary plan: to place giant oil pipes beneath the river until they formed an underwater ‘bridge’ upon which the Iranian trucks and fighters and artillery could cross with only their feet and the wheels of their vehicles under water. Thus the Iraqi defenders had seen, in the darkness, an Iranian ghost army walking and driving on the very surface of the water, crying ‘God is Great’ as they stormed ashore. And how did Major-General Rashed retake Fao? ‘The Iraqis are strangely reluctant to explain how they staged last Sunday’s attack,’ the Observer’s correspondent wrote on 24 April 1988. The Iraqis used their usual prosaic means; they drenched Fao in poison gas – as US Lieutenant Rick Francona would note indifferently when he toured the battlefield with the Iraqis afterwards. The writer of the Observer report, who had been invited by the Iraqis to enter ‘liberated’ Fao, was Farzad Bazoft. He had just two more years of his life to enjoy. Then Saddam hanged him.
Our train back to Tehran contained the usual carriages of suffering, half troop train, half hospital train, although mercifully without the victims of poison gas. The soldiers were all young – many were only fifteen or sixteen – and they sat in the second-class compartments, their hair shaved, eating folded squares of nan bread or sleeping on each other’s shoulders, still in the faded yellow fatigues in which Iran’s peasant soldiery were dressed. The wounded clumped on sticks down the swaying corridors, back and forth through the carriages, as if their exertion would relieve their pain.
One boy with cropped hair moved with an agonised face, grunting each time he put his weight on his crutches, staring accusingly at the compartments as if his comrades had personally brought about his ordeal. A youth in khaki trousers with an arm and hand wrapped in bandages sat disconsolately on a box by the carriage door, his back to the open window, hurling bottle caps over his shoulder into the desert north of Ahwaz, giggling to himself in a disturbing, fitful way.
It was a slow train that laboured for seventeen hours up from the Shatt al-Arab battle front, through the great mountains to the plains of Qom, a tired train carrying tired men home from a tired war. When darkness came, some of them left their crammed compartments and slept in the filthy corridors, so that