Christopher Bellaigue - In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

There’s no reason to suppose that Khomeini rejected the regional stereo-type of Kurds as murderous and untrustworthy. A fear of separatism, as much as his hostility to left-wingers and liberals, had persuaded him, shortly after the Revolution, to set up the Revolutionary Guard. When the Kurdish violence broke, Bazargan and some of his allies favoured conciliation; Khomeini and the clerical hardliners wanted to send in the Revolutionary Guard. Hossein Kharrazi, along with some fifty friends and acquaintances, got ready to fight.

Kharrazi was the third son of a junior civil servant in Isfahan, and his father couldn’t pay for him to take up the university place he’d won before the Revolution. As a conscript in the Shah’s army, he’d spent part of his military service in the tiny sultanate of Oman, across the Strait of Hormuz from the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. Iran had kept a military presence there since the mid-1970s, when the Shah’s troops had helped the Sultan suppress a guerilla uprising. Kharrazi went AWOL when, the day after the Shah’s flight, Khomeini called for a mass desertion from the imperial army. Compared to many of his friends, whose military experience amounted to lobbing Molotov cocktails at the former regime’s police stations, he was a seasoned soldier.

To Kharrazi and his friends, putting down the Kurdish rebels was a religious duty. He and most of the other lads had joined the Revolutionary Guard. (In time, the Guard would grow, allowing Khomeini to reduce his dependence on the regular army; he suspected it of remembering the Shah with fondness.) By a process of informal election, Kharrazi and another local boy, Rahim Safavi, became leaders of the group.

At twenty-two, Kharrazi was older than most of the others; being bright and fervent, he was able to articulate their ideals. America, the mortal enemy of the new Islamic Republic, was trying to turn Kurdistan into another Israel. Saddam Hussein, who feared the new Islamic Republic, was helping. As Shi’as and Iranians, it was their duty to fight. If they were killed – as long as they had not actively sought death, but rather the glory of Islam – they would be martyrs and go to heaven. (The Qoran and the sayings of the Prophet made that clear.) If they stayed alive, and won, they would recreate the Imam Ali’s perfect caliphate.

To the boys in Isfahan, and across the country, that seemed like a terrific deal. The new warriors were mostly poor boys; similar boys in other countries, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, would have been drawn to extremist politics. Many were illiterate. The Shah’s rule had disoriented them; the elite had been devoted to money, while much of the rest of society continued to profess its old attachment to spiritual rewards. These lads had a penury of both. Now, wealth was being measured in ways that favoured them. You were rich if you enjoyed the favour of God and the Imam, if you were going off to Kurdistan for a grand adventure – a love affair with the Revolution. You were worth a million if your mother shed tears of dread and pride on your shoulder: ‘God speed your return!’

There was a jackpot up for grabs: martyrdom.

A minority of the boys – the more thoughtful ones – conceived of heaven abstractly. It was a state of grace, God’s mingling with the soul. (By contrast, hell was regret, a longing for divine favour that throbbed into eternity.) Most of the lads, however, thought of heaven as a mild spring day, where the heavenly facilities could be smelt or touched.

Kharrazi, Safavi and the lads took a bus to Kermanshah, more than one hundred kilometres south of the war zone. They commandeered a helicopter and went to Sanandaj, the capital of the province of Kurdistan. As they touched down, the airport was being mortared. According to Muhammad – Reza Abu Shahab, who went on to become one of Kharrazi’s aides, ‘We had no knowledge of military operations, or military theory. God was helpful and gave us false confidence; we thought we’d beat them easily.’

The Kurds made insulting, overweening demands. (They were showing that they didn’t understand the Revolution, and put their own petty nationalism above the rule of God.) They boycotted the referendum on the new constitution. Meanwhile, some misguided or treasonous elements inside the government continued to promote a peaceful settlement. They came to the region for peace talks, bartering with the Islamic Republic, when they should have been killing and dying for it.

Kharrazi and the others hated the army and mocked its daintiness. (The army was known to balk at orders to bombard Kurdish villages.) But the army was essential to the struggle to put down the Kurds; the Revolutionary Guard were too few, inexperienced and ill disciplined to win on their own. [*]

Kharrazi’s men carried cumbersome old automatic rifles. These had been supplied – with great reluctance – by the regular army. If they wanted heavier weapons, they were told, they would have to steal them from the enemy. Gradually, as they killed more Kurds, they picked up their Kalashnikovs and Uzis.

There were cakes, presented to the Revolutionary Guard by local girls, which exploded once the girl was out of view. There was the beheading of a convalescing Revolutionary Guardsman in a hospital ward. There was the rape and disembowelling of boys whose fathers supported the government. There were government sentries found with their genitals stuffed in their mouths. There was the fear of fighting in tall valleys far from home, of depending on Kurdish guides who might be leading you into a trap. No one said the Kurds fought like gentlemen.

I don’t know whether Kharrazi’s group perpetrated what I, or you, might deem an atrocity. A bullet in the head for a Kurdish Sunni – punishment for refusing an invitation to join the Shi’a faith? A bastinado for a shepherd who failed to disclose the whereabouts of an enemy patrol? A shelling for a village whose inhabitants had given the rebels bread? Abu Shahab and others deny that such things happened. But the government’s campaign was famous for its savagery. Kharrazi and his lads were fighting the enemies of God, and nowhere in Islam does God prescribe for them a gentle rehabilitation.

That was perfectly understood by Khalkhali, scourge of Hoveida and destroyer of the Pahlavi tomb. For a while, he was in the rearguard of the advancing government forces, dispensing justice. His trials would last ten minutes or so. Verdicts depended on his whim. There was no appeal.

A magnificent society was being created. The unit was its microcosm. Men addressed each other as ‘brother’. Kharrazi and his aides were obeyed because their authority, everyone assumed, came from God. When there was a shortage of food, Kharrazi would pretend he wasn’t hungry and give his share to the younger lads. He took guard duty like everyone else, and went on dangerous reconnaissance missions. ‘No one missed the cities,’ one of his men told me, ‘because they were still full of sin; here, in the fields, we were fighting alongside God.’

Kharrazi taught them:

No drop of liquid is more popular with God than the drop of blood that is shed for him.

The best deed of the faithful is fighting for God.

Participate in holy war, so you will be happy and need nothing.

One hour of holy war is better than sixty years of worship.

The wives of those who have gone to war must be respected and treated as inviolable.

An ideologically pure army is better than a victorious army.

They didn’t realize it at the time, but it was all a preparation, a rehearsal for a grander struggle.

Even before the Revolution brought Iran’s Shi’a clerics to power, Iraq’s Baathist state had been suppressing its own discontented Shi’as. Although they constitute a majority of Iraqis, Shi’as had been underrepresented in the dictatorship that Saddam helped set up in 1968. They had been alienated by its espousal, variously, of secularism and Sunni nationalism. Saddam, who had been vice-president since 1968, but overshadowed the president in influence, regarded the new Iranian regime as a challenge – one that he might be able to turn to his advantage.