Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

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, ‘and all our camps at Ramadi are the same. The prisoners here are in such good conditions that they don’t feel the need to escape.’

A sharp eye detected an element of hyperbole. Ramadi One, for example, was surrounded by so much glistening barbed wire, 9 metres deep and 5 metres high, that there was scarcely room for the prisoners to lean out of their hut windows, let alone play basketball. Ramadi Three appeared to have none of those friendly tuck shops and prison libraries. Perhaps, too, the inmates of the other camps did not speak in quite such scathing tones of Ayatollah Khomeini. For the boy soldiers in Major Ali’s Ramadi Two condemned Khomeini’s regime with an enthusiasm that had the Baath party officials nodding sagely and the military police guards grinning with satisfaction.

Mohamed Ismaili, a twenty-year-old from Kerman, for example, admitted he had broadcast over Iraq’s Farsi-language radio, telling his parents on the air that ‘this war is not a holy war’. Ahmed Taki, who was only seventeen, was even more specific. A thin, shy youth with his head totally shaved, he was a Basij volunteer sent to the battle front a year ago. ‘I was in school when a mullah came to our class and told us we should fight in the battle against Iraq,’ he said. ‘I heard Khomeini say that all young people should go to the front. But now I know it is not a holy war.’ The stories were all similar, of schoolboys told that God would reward them if they died in battle, a spiritual inspiration that underwent a swift transition once they entered Ramadi Two.

For after uttering such statements, few of these Iranian prisoners could return home under the Khomeini regime, even if the war suddenly ended. Some of them admitted as much. The Iranians, of course, had persuaded hundreds of Iraqi POWs to speak with an identically heretical tongue about Saddam. Perhaps that is what both sides wanted: prisoners who could not go home.

Major Ali seemed unperturbed. ‘There are maybe sixty or seventy prisoners who still support Khomeini,’ he said. ‘That’s not many – a very small percentage. Sometimes they mention him at their prayers – we never interfere with their religion.’ But the major did interfere with their news. The POWs could listen only to the Farsi service of Iraqi radio and television – hardly an unbiased source of information on the war – and the only outside information they were permitted to receive were the letters sent to them by their families through the International Red Cross. ‘Come and see the barracks,’ the major insisted. We walked into a hut containing a hundred teenagers, all in that same pallid, greyish-yellow uniform. They stood barefoot on the army blankets that doubled as their beds and the moment an Iraqi army photographer raised his camera, half of them bowed their heads. Their identity concealed, perhaps they could one day go home.

Each military setback for Iraq provided an excuse to break the rules of war once more. Faced with human-wave attacks, there was gas. Faced with further losses, there was a sea war to be commenced against unarmed merchantmen. A new and amoral precedent was set in early 1986 – just after the Iranian capture of the Fao peninsula – when Iraq shot down an Iranian Fokker Friendship aircraft carrying forty-six civilians, including many members of the Majlis and the editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan , Sayad Hassan Shah-Cherghi.

The Iranians wanted to take journalists to Fao, but I for one refused to take the usual night-time C-130 Iranian military transport plane to the front. If the Iraqis were prepared to attack civilian aircraft, they would certainly shed no tears if they destroyed the international press as it travelled to witness Iraq’s latest humiliation. So we took the train again, back down to Ahwaz and the war I had been covering for five and a half years.