The Great War for Civilisation (59 page)

Gholamreza's car was hissing on the melting tar of the desert road when the man from Islamic Guidance tapped me on the shoulder. “Look over to your right,” he shouted. Gholamreza slowed the car, the blowtorch heat swarming through the open windows. There was a railway track beside the road, but beyond it was the detritus of an army in defeat: burned-out Iraqi tanks and armoured personnel carriers, barrels cracked open, machine guns rusting on tank turrets, Saddam's monsters still decomposing in the desert. We walked across the railway and past a quicksand—the man from Islamic Guidance walked into it, up to his knees—and found ourselves among the wreckage of a great battle. Many of these vehicles had been driven into the sand and bogged down by their terrified drivers, their steel tracks snapping on rocks and concrete emplacements, their interiors turned into cauldrons by rocket-propelled grenades.

I climbed onto a T-62 tank, eased open the turret and lowered myself inside. The gun's breech had been blown apart, the driver's seat melted. A million tiny flies moved around this scorched, claustrophobic gunner's compartment. Perched on top of the tank, I began taking photographs, but realised that I could find no colour through my camera lens. I put the camera down and still saw no colour. The sun, the sheer whiteness of the desert, had sucked colour out of my vision, turning Saddam's armour into a dull monochrome. The man from Islamic Guidance was talking, more to himself than to me, but in English so that I would understand. “Think that he came here, Saddam, to our land, think of his arrogance, to think he would get away with this . . . How can you not understand why we had to fight him?”

On the other side of the main road, I recognised the skeletal outline of a Russian-made truck and walked across to it. Only the front of the driver's cab remained, pin-pricked by a thousand shrapnel holes and rusted grey. Behind it, punched into the desert floor, was a massive crater littered with ammunition tins that had been torn apart by some long-ago explosion and, half buried in the sand, thousands of heavy machine-gun bullets, congealed and twisted into grotesque shapes—a direct hit on an ammunition lorry. On the lip of the crater was some flaky white powder, perhaps human bone. The man from Islamic Guidance was sitting on the sand nearby, exhausted.

We walked off into the desert. We found an Iranian helmet with a bullet hole through it, dozens of army boots, one of them torn off at the heel with something dark inside. There were shell holes filled with dirt, and barbed wire, and a line of dugouts behind a trench, the floors lined with the lids of wooden ammunition boxes, the sandbags burst open. Somewhere near here, the Iranian poet Ali Babchohi had written a strangely moving poem about a dream in which an old man from Nachlestan—a date-growing region in the south of Iran—appeared before him in the desert:

Hey, look over there!
I can see him with my own blind eyes.
Do you see him?
It's old Shir Mohamed from the coast at Nachlestan
With the glint of the sun on his musket.
. . . I saw him with my own blind eyes.
And old Shir Mohamed said to me:
“I came to plant my rifle
Instead of wheat and barley
Across my land of dates.”

A few days earlier, in Tehran, I had talked to university students about the war. They were attending a philosophy seminar, fourteen young men and three women. Half of the men had fought during the eight-year war, one of the women had been a military nurse. Ex-
Basiji
volunteers, soldiers and Revolutionary Guards, they had been trying to analyse an impenetrable essay by an American sociologist. Then they tried to explain what the war had meant to them and why I did not understand it.

Shojae Ahmmadvande was bearded and looked to be in his thirties, though he must have been younger; he was just eighteen when he was sent to the front at Mehran on the Iraqi border, 170 kilometres east of Baghdad, in 1984. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with infinite care. “My involvement in the war was a reflection of the nature of our Islamic revolution. It was based on a new interpretation of religion—getting involved in the war was a sacred duty. We were led by a prophet-like statesman so this is how we perceived the war. This was the reason for our overwhelming commitment. The war could not be separated from our religion. I saw many incidents that cannot be described. I ask myself: ‘Was it real or not?' There were extraordinary scenes that touched me.”

And here Ahmmadvande looked at the floor, speaking to the ground rather than to me.

There was one day at the beginning of our “
Val Fajr 5
” operation in 1984. We were in the Mehran area and I was sitting with several other soldiers on top of a small hill. There was a man sitting with us, about thirty or thirtyfive years old. And suddenly we all noticed that his head had fallen forward, just a little. We didn't know what had happened. Then we saw blood running from his arm and then from his head. A bullet had hit him in the head. And at this moment, he turned slightly, knowing he was hit, and he put his hand in his pocket and took out a Koran and started looking at it, and the blood was all the while flowing down his arm. Three of us just stood there in amazement—we couldn't do anything—this man was almost gone, he was in the seconds before his death, and he had taken out his Koran and was looking at it. It was a scene I will never forget all my life, the power of his commitment.

There was a long silence, and then one of the women, at the end of the room, dressed in a black chador, spoke. “In general, we were very proud of what we did in the war. Our nation of Iran proved its sovereignty. We know how people have returned home after other big wars. I've read about it in Hemingway. But this did not happen in Iran during the war. You have to understand the importance of morality in our war—morality was better than food. You think the number of deaths and casualties are important—you work these statistics out on your computers—but my impression is that here people died regardless of the material worth of their lives. It was their Islamic faith that mattered.”

Exactly how many men died in the war may never be known—the Iraqis have not given precise figures—but the man who was in charge of the Revolutionary Guards during the 1980–88 conflict insisted to me that the Iranians lost well under 500,000 men. Mohsen Rafiqdoost, who by 1995 was running a multi-million-dollar foundation for the war wounded and the families of dead soldiers, claimed to me that 220,000 Iranians were killed and 400,000 wounded. “We think the Iraqis lost five hundred thousand dead. We don't know how many of their men were wounded. In addition to our Iranian war dead, we lost seventy thousand dead in the Islamic revolution the year before the war began.”

Even today, the figures must be constantly revised upwards. The bodies of at least 27,000 Iranian soldiers were found on the borders of Iraq after the end of the war in 1988. In July 1997—nine years after the ceasefire—Iran was holding mass funerals for another 2,000 soldiers whose remains had only recently been discovered near the frontier. Four hundred of them were given a state funeral in Tehran attended by President Mohamed Khatami, while the bodies of the other 1,600 were buried in ceremonies in twenty-two towns around the country. Many of the casualties died in the first months of the war when the Iraqi army entered Khorramshahr and attacked Abadan.

Among the soldiers trying to fight off the Iraqi invaders was Mujtaba Safavi. He told me his story as he sat in the back of a Tehran taxi, locked into one of the capital's fume-clogged, traffic-jammed streets.

I was captured about twenty miles outside Abadan. We were surrounded at night. We had no chance. They took us to a big prison camp in Iraq, in Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein. Our first years there were very hard. They killed some of us, tortured others. It was a year before the Red Cross visited us, took our names and brought us books. The younger ones among us were stronger than the older ones. I think it was because the younger ones felt their life was still in front of them. But two of our men in the prison killed themselves; they couldn't stand it any more. You know, if you are a prisoner, you have got to be very, very strong. I learnt a lot about myself in the prison, about how strong I could be. When the Red Cross brought me letters from home, they were already a year old. I wrote letters back and my mother still has them, but I do not want to read them now. They will remind me of terrible days.

When I asked Mujtaba the date of his release, he said it was the year after the war ended, 1989. He had been in prison camps for ten years—longer than any British Second World War POWs. When we met in 1995, Iran still maintained that 15,000 of its soldiers were being held in Iraq, some of them fifteen years after their capture.

When Gholamreza reached Khorramshahr, he shook his head at the ruins still strewn across the city. Fought over for two years and bombarded by the Iraqis for another six years, its brick-built apartments and factories were turned to dust by repeated Iraqi counter-offensives. It was Iran's—not Iraq's—Stalingrad. In the centre of the city, by a waterway littered with overturned, burned-out cargo ships, next to a mosque whose blue tiles were still being repaired, was a small museum of photographs marking the thirteenth anniversary of the city's liberation. “The photographer who took these pictures was martyred later in the war,” the guide said. His right hand gestured to a corpse on the floor.

The soldier's body was so graphically re-created in wax, the dark blood seeping through his back, his face buried in sand, his helmet covering most of his hair, that for a moment I believed the Iranians had preserved a real soldier's remains. Next to the sand pit with its “martyr” stood a large portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini beneath the legend: “Martyrdom Is the Highest Point in Human Life.” The photographs were of splintered trees and smashed railway yards, of ruined mosques and pulverised homes and bodies in side streets.

Another poet who fought in the war caught the sense of fury when he wrote about Khorramshahr under Iraqi occupation. Parvis Habib Abadi used traditional Iranian symbols of love—the butterfly hovering round a candle—and the anger of Abu Zaher, loyal friend of the Prophet Mohamed, to illustrate his rage:

My friend, how lonely we are,
Away from this city that was ours,
The candle's guttered out, the butterfly consumed by fire
Everywhere, in every alley, I see just ashes, rubble, blood,
A head here, over there some long, blood-matted hair,
No hands left to comb it with.
So until the time that head is recomposed upon the corpse,
I wear my clothes as a shroud, screaming like Abu Zaher
To put fear in all my enemies.

But one man who liberated Khorramshahr had not wanted to die. He sat with me in a restaurant in Abadan, munching on his fish and potatoes, his mouth open, making too much noise. “I was in the naval service of the army and we came in at the liberation. I didn't see many bodies. You know, most of the Iraqis surrendered, 20,000 of them—can you imagine it? All with their hands up, like this.” And there in the restaurant, to the surprise of fellow diners, he stuck his hands on his head, palms down. “But we should have ended the war then, in 1982. Saddam had offered a ceasefire, the Saudis offered Iran $70 million to rebuild. If we'd have stopped then, Saddam would have been overthrown by his own people. But another group of people had the Imam's ear and Khomeini decided to continue the war until Saddam was destroyed, to fight for Najaf and Kerbala and capture Basra. It was a big mistake. I decided to keep clear of the war then and got a job in Tehran. It went on for another six years. And we didn't even win. We only got all our lost territory back when Saddam was facing you after his invasion of Kuwait.”

This was a rare voice of dissent. During the war, I remember, the dead would talk to the living, a permanent rebuke to those who might find fault with the military conduct of the conflict. The Revolutionary Guards had a house magazine,
The
Guardian of Islam
, which carried memorial tributes to their newly dead comrades under an unimpeachable text: “Count not as dead those killed in the cause of God—but alive and living with their Lord.” Shortly before he fell on the Shatt al-Arab, Hossein Chair-Zarrin would write in ungrammatical Persian that “I am being dispatched for the first time to the front—I had heard about the attack so I wanted to take part in it . . .” But to his mother, he wrote as if already in the afterlife: “Dear Mother, your son has broken loose from the chains of [worldly] captivity, of slavery and self-betrayal . . . Yes, dear Mother, your child has become a captive of Islam and has reached obedience, devotion and sincerity—of course if God accepts.”

I was to grow used to reading these testaments with their convictions and—for want of a better word—their self-righteousness. Abulhassan As-Haq was almost blithe in his will. “Martyrdom is not a rank that everyone deserves,” he wrote just before his death. “I am writing this will even though I think the possibility of being martyred is remote—but anyway, there's no shame in a young man having that ambition. I'm not frightened of the day of resurrection . . . when the first drop of martyr's blood is spilt, all his sins are cleansed . . . Yes, my dear ones, death will eventually take us all—no one lives for ever in this world—so why give away this golden opportunity?”

Now Khorramshahr was being rebuilt. There were new schools, two new hospitals, new factories and apartment blocks under construction. But the port was still in ruins, its wrecked ships blocking the river. At the harbourside, I stood next to one hulk—the
Race Fisher
, registered in Barrow-in-Furness—taking photographs, until two cops in black shirts turned up. The man from Islamic Guidance sprang out of Gholamreza's taxi to rescue me. “They are suspicious of foreigners with cameras,” he said meekly. “People were hurt very badly in this city.”