The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
reality rather too rational when it came to religious war – towards another vast embankment of mud. We struggled towards the top of it. And down the other side. It was the third Iraqi line and we were now in front of it. Bullets buzzed around us. I remember thinking how much they sounded like wasps, high-speed wasps, and I could hear them ‘put-putting’ into the mud behind me. Mazinan clutched my right arm and pointed towards the pillars of black smoke that hung like funeral curtains in front of us. ‘Do you see that building?’ he asked. And through the darkness I could just make out the outline of a low, rectangular block. ‘That,’ Mazinan cried, ‘is the Basra Sheraton Hotel!’
The Iranians were using their artillery at three times the Iraqi rate of fire, the muzzle flashes streaking out across the water. Still the boys and the bearded old men lounged along the causeway, sometimes playing taped religious music from loudspeakers. Back on the truck, Black and I looked at each other. Brent Sadler and a crew from ITN had been taken to view a pile of Iraqi bodies in a swamp churned up by shells. ‘Very dangerous but I’ve got no option,’ Sadler told me with just a twinkle of death in his eye. ‘It’s television – you know, we’ve got to have pictures.’ Sadler would survive, he always did. But Black wasn’t so sure. Nor was I. ‘We would like to go now,’ I hollered at Mazinan. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Go,’ Black shouted at him. ‘We want to go, go, go.’ Mazinan looked at us both with something worse than contempt. ‘Why?’ he roared. Because we are cowards. Go on, say it, Fisk. Because I am shaking with fear and want to survive and live and write my story and fly back to Tehran and go back to Beirut and invite a young woman to drink fine red wine on my balcony.
Mazinan nodded at the driver. Then he raised his right hand level with his face and closed and opened his fingers, the kind of wave one gives to a small child. Bye-bye, bye-bye, he said softly. He was mimicking the mother taking leave of her babies. And so our truck turned left off the dyke and chuntered down a long causeway towards the ruins of Khorramshahr.
In a factory warehouse, a thousand Iraqi prisoners were paraded before us, including Brigadier General Jamal al-Bayoudi of the Iraqi 506th Corps, who described how the Pasdaran and the Basiji clawed their way through swaths of barbed wire 60 metres deep to reach their third line of defence.* The Iraqis half-heartedly chanted curses against the very Iraqi leader for whom they had been fighting only a few days before. Several smiled at us when the guards were not looking. One of them muttered his name to me. ‘Please tell my family I am safe,’ he said softly. ‘Please tell them I did not die in the battle.’ A week later, I gave his name to the International Red Cross, who promised to relay his message to his parents.*
I returned from the battle of Fish Lake with a sense of despair. That small boy holding the Koran to his chest believed – believed in a way that few Westerners, and I include myself, could any longer understand. He knew, with the conviction of his own life, that heaven awaited him. He would go straight there – the fast train, direct, no limbo, no delays – if he was lucky enough to be killed by the Iraqis. I began to think that life was not the only thing that could die in Iran. For there was, in some indefinable way, a death process within the state itself. In a nation that looked backwards rather than forwards, in which women were to be dressed in perpetual mourning, in which death was an achievement, in which children could reach their most heroic attainment only in self-sacrifice, it was as if the country was neutering itself, moving into a black experience that found its spiritual parallel in the mass slaughter of Cambodia rather than on the ancient battlefield of Kerbala.
I would spend days, perhaps weeks, of my life visiting the cemeteries of Iran’s war dead. Less than a year after the capture of Fao – the offensive that was supposed to lead Iran into Basra and then to Kerbala and Najaf – I was standing in the little cemetery of Imam Zadeh Ali Akbar on the cold slopes of the Alborz mountains at Chasar, where they had been preparing for the next Iranian offensive. The bulldozers had dug deep into the icy graveyard and there was now fresh ground – two football pitches in length – for the next crop of martyrs.
The thin, dark-faced cemetery keeper was quite blunt about it. ‘Every time there is a new Kerbala offensive, the martyrs arrive within days,’ he said. ‘We have three hundred already over there and twelve more last week. The graves of ordinary people we destroy after thirty years – there is nothing left – but our martyrs are different. They will lie here for a thousand years and more.’ His statistics told a far more apocalyptic story than might have appeared; for Chasar – distinguished only by an ancient, crumbling shrine – merely contained the war dead of one small suburb of north Tehran. Spread across the country, those 312 bodies become half a million, perhaps three-quarters of a million, perhaps far more. In the Behesht-i-Zahra cemetery outside the city, they lie in their tens of thousands.
They are nearly all young and they are honoured, publicly at least, with that mixture of grief and spiritual satisfaction so peculiar to Shia Islam. Take Ali Nasser Riarat. He was only twenty-one when he was killed at the battle of the Majnoon Marshes west of Howeiza in 1986; his photograph, pinned inside a glass-fronted steel box above his remains, shows him to have been a slim, good-looking youth with a brush moustache. His gravestone contains a message to his father Yussef, and to his mother:
Don’t cry mother, because I am happy. I am not dead. I remember all that you have done for me. You gave me milk and you wanted me to sacrifice my life for religion. Dear father, don’t cry and don’t beat yourself because you will be proud when you realise I am a martyr …
Several other inscriptions express similar sentiments. Even the flowers laid on the grave of a young soldier called Zaman near the cemetery-keeper’s hut carry such a declaration. ‘We congratulate you upon your martyrdom,’ it says, signed by ‘students and staff of the Tehran University of Science’. Could there really be such joy amid the graves of Chasar? Those cruel steel boxes above the dead contain fresh flowers and plastic doves and real steel-tipped bullets, but the snapshots show the young men who die in every war, laughing in gardens, standing with parents outside front doors, perched on mountain tops, holding field binoculars. Lutyens would have understood the waste of 25-year-old Sergeant Akbazadeh, who died in 1982 in Khorramshahr; of Mehdi Balouoch – a hand grenade carved on his gravestone – who was twenty-three when he was killed in Zakdan; of Mehrdrodi Nassiri, aged twenty-five, who was shot at Mehran in July of 1986. A 24-year-old who died outside Basra a few days before – perhaps in the same Battle of Fish Lake which I had witnessed – was pictured with his two little girls, one with her hair in a bow, curled up in his arms before he went to the front.
Was there no sense of waste? A man in his forties, bearded, unsmiling, shook his head. What of Owen’s question about doomed youth? What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ‘I only met one man who spoke like that,’ the Iranian said. ‘He was an old man in hospital. He had his legs and one arm blown off by a bomb near Ahwaz. He had lost an eye. The bomb had killed his wife and children, his sisters and his brothers. He said he thought Saddam and Khomeini were both out for what they could get and did not care about their people. But he was the only man I ever heard who said those things.’
Outside the chilly, intimate cemetery, there stood a shop selling books about martyrdom. Inside was a young Revolutionary Guard who had that day returned from the southern front. His name was Ali Khani. What did his parents feel when he was away? ‘I have three brothers as well as me at the front,’ he replied. ‘My mother and father know that if I am martyred, I will be still alive.’ But did his parents not wish him luck – not tell him to ‘take care’ when he left for the war? ‘No,’ he said, a slight smile emerging at such Western sentiment. ‘They believe it is God’s wish if I die.’ But would his parents not cry if he died? Ali Khani thought about this for a long time. ‘Yes, they would,’ he said at last. ‘And so did the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him, when his baby son Ibrahim died. But this is not a sign of weakness or lack of faith. It is a human thing.’