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

Fao had a special meaning for me. It was at Fao that I first saw the Iran – Iraq war with my own eyes. It lay on a spit of land at the bottom of the Shatt al-Arab river, from which the Iraqi army had shelled Abadan. In those days, the Iraqis planned to take the eastern bank of the river and secure it for all time for Iraq. They had not only failed to capture the eastern bank; now they had lost part of the western bank – they had lost the port of Fao itself to the Iranians. The next target for the Iranians would be the great port of Basra with its Shia Muslim population and its straight roads north-west to the holy Shia cities of Kerbala and Najaf. I would be reporting if not from Basra itself, at least from the city in which I started off in this war.

But I wasn’t happy. There were frequent allusions in Tehran to ‘setbacks’ in the Fao battle. Rafsanjani made a disturbing reference to Iran’s need to hold on to Fao, while announcing that there were no plans to advance on Basra – which was odd because, if this was true, why bother to capture Fao in the first place? The Tehran newspapers described how the Iranian forces in Fao were ‘consolidating’ their positions – always a sign that an army is in difficulties. Then when we arrived in Ahwaz and were taken to the nearest airbase for a helicopter ride to the front line, the two American-trained pilots packed the machine with journalists and mullahs – and then aborted the flight. There was too much wind on the river, one of them claimed. There was a bad weather forecast for the afternoon. A cleric arrived to order the men to fly. Gerry ‘G. G.’ Labelle of the Associated Press, with whom I had spent years in Beirut during the war, was sitting beside me on the floor of the chopper and we looked at each other with growing concern as the helicopter lifted off the apron, hovered 2 metres above the ground, turned to face due west – and then gently settled back onto the tarmac. Like so many journalists in time of war, we had been desperate to get to the front line – and even more desperate to find a reason to avoid going. *

Part of me – and part of Gerry – was of the ‘let’s-get-it-over-with’ persuasion. Hadn’t I sped around the Dezful war front on an identical Bell helicopter scarcely a year before? Didn’t John Kifner and I admit that we had enjoyed those heart-stopping, shirt-tearing, speed-gashing rides up the wadis and over those hundreds of burned-out tanks? Wasn’t that what being a foreign correspondent in war was all about? Going into battle and getting the story and arriving home safe and sound and knowing you wouldn’t have to go back next day? We climbed off the helicopter and I could see the relief on the pilots’ faces. If they hadn’t wanted to go, then there was something very, very wrong with this journey to Fao.

In the grotty hotel in Ahwaz that night, I didn’t sleep. Mosquitoes came whining around my face and I ran out of bottled water, and the chicken I’d had for supper made me feel sick. ‘See you in the morning, Fisky,’ Labelle had said with a dark smile. Labelle was a New Yorker brought up in Arizona, a fast, tough agency man with a vocabulary of expletives for editorial fools, especially if they pestered him on the wire with childish queries about his reports. ‘How the fuck do I know if Saddam’s fucking son is fighting in this fucking war when I’m on the Iranian front line getting shelled by the fucking Iraqis?’ he was to ask me one day. ‘Sometimes I ask myself why I’m fucking working for this fucking news agency.’ But Labelle loved the AP and its deadlines and the way in which the wire bell would go ding-ding-ding-ding for a ‘bulletin’ story. ‘I imagine you know, Fisky, that old AK has bitten the dust at last,’ he told me over the phone in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini died. ‘I guess that means no more war.’

But on that hot and blasted morning in Ahwaz, after the mosquitoes and the sleepless night, I probably needed some of Labelle’s saturating humour. As the ministry minders called us to return to the airbase, he gave me one of his mirthless Steve McQueen smiles. ‘Well, Fisky, I’m told it’s a briefing at the usual bunker then a little mosey over the Shatt and a tourist visit to Fao. Lots of gunfire and corpses – should be right up your street.’ A few days earlier, a German correspondent had suffered a fatal heart attack during an Iraqi air raid on Fao. He and his colleagues had jumped for cover when the planes came in, but when they climbed back on to the truck on which they were travelling, the German had just stayed lying on the ground. The Iranians would later call him a ‘martyr’ of the ‘Imposed War’.

Labelle was right about the bunker. At the airbase, two Bell choppers with Iranian insignia on their fuselages were bouncing on the apron, their rotors snapping at the hot air, and into one of them we bundled, Labelle and I and maybe four other journalists and the usual crop of divines and, nose down, pitching in the wind, we swept over a date-palm plantation and flew, at high speed but only a few metres from the tree tops, towards that front line which all of us – save, I suppose, for our clerical brethren – had by now imagined as a triptych of hell. It was like a switchback, the way we cornered granaries and rose over broken electrical pylons and then fell into troughs of wind and sand and dust and turned like a buzzard over long military convoys that were moving down to the river. Labelle and I gazed down in a kind of wonderment. The sensation was so powerful, the act of flying in such circumstances such madness, that we were slipping into the same syndrome I had experienced at Dezful: To hell with the danger – just look at the war.

I saw the waters of the Shatt to our right – its paleness in the dawn light was breathtaking – and then, below us, coming up fast as if we were in a dive-bomber, a vast Iranian encampment of guns and mortars, earthworks and embrasures and tanks and armoured vehicles in the soggy desert, all swept by sand and smoke. The co-pilot, dressed in the beetle-like headset that the Americans supplied with their Bell helicopters, was scribbling something on a piece of paper as we made our final approach, the machine turning to settle next to a concrete bunker. The crewman was holding onto the machine with his right hand and scribbling with his left and I thought he must be writing an urgent message to the pilot until he turned to us and held up the paper with a grin. ‘We will kill Saddam,’ it said in English. Labelle and I looked at each other and Labelle put his mouth next to my ear. ‘Well, at least he knows what he fucking wants,’ he bellowed.

In the hot, noise-crushed air, I could see through the desert fog and rain that each dugout was decorated with a green banner bearing an Islamic exhortation. A middle-aged, slightly plump soldier ran to me smiling. ‘Death to England,’ he shouted and clasped my hand. ‘How are you? Do you want tea?’ Ali Mazinan’s bunker carried an instruction by the door, prohibiting the wearing of shoes. I walked in my socks across the woollen-blanketed floor as a 122-mm gun banged a shell casually towards Basra. A muezzin’s voice called for prayer. It was like one of my taped CBC reports. ‘Allah – BANG- akh -BANG- bar , ’ the voice sang amid the contentious gunfire. My map showed I was in what used to be a village called Nahr-e-Had.

Ali Mazinan clutched a wooden ruler in his right hand and pointed it lazily at the lower left-hand corner of a large laminated map, sealed to his dugout wall with minute pieces of Scotch tape. Mazinan wore a pair of thick spectacles with heavy black frames – they were at the time de rigueur for all self-respecting mullahs, Hizballah leaders, Revolutionary Guard officers and ministerial clerks – and was himself a Guard commander, one of the very men who captured Fao. ‘We won because we followed God’s orders,’ he said. I would be meeting Mazinan again; he was to become a symbol to me of rash and dangerous journalistic missions.