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

Basra had come to define this last and savage stage of the war. For the Iranians, it remained the gateway to southern Iraq, the very roads to the shrines of Kerbala and Najaf and Kufa beckoning to the Iranian soldiers and Pasdaran who were still boxed into the powdered ruins of Fao. Iraq was still able to maintain an army of 650,000 men spread through seven brigades from Suleimaniya down to the front line outside Fao. Presidential guards and special forces made up 30,000 of these troops and the ‘popular army’ of conscripts and ‘volunteers’ at least 400,000. An ‘Arab army’ of 200,000, many of them Egyptians, constituted the rest of Iraq’s strength. But by early 1987 the Iranians had massed a force of 600,000 just opposite Basra. It seemed inevitable that Field Marshal Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, Prime Minister, Secretary General of the Regional Command of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and friend of America, would have to make another of his famous retreats.

And when the Iranians did break through in January 1987 and made their dash for Basra, they wanted to show us. At night, we were taken up behind the Iranian lines, our bus crunching through wadis as the skyline was lit by artillery fire, hour after hour of grinding through the dark amid thousands of troops moving up to the line, the same old approaching fear of death and wounds settling over us. Several years earlier, a ministry minder had led a Reuters reporter into a minefield. Both were blown to pieces. The Iranians proclaimed the Reuters man a ‘martyr’ and were only just prevented from sending his widow a glossy book of coloured photographs depicting other martyrs in various stages of dismemberment and putrefaction.

I spent the night on the sand floor of a deep, white-washed underground bunker. We were given juice and dooq – cold drinking yoghurt – and nan bread and cheese and tea, and I lay, as usual, sleepless beneath my blanket. Before six next morning, the Revolutionary Guards arrived to take us all to visit ‘the front’ and I climbed wearily up the steep steps towards the sun and heat and the roar of gunfire and the heavy crumping sound of incoming shells. Dezful was cinemascope. Fao was devastating. But this was an epic with a cast of thousands. Tanks and trucks and heavy guns were pouring westwards with hundreds of Iranian troops sitting on armour and lorries or marching alongside them. To my horror, I noticed that our escort would be none other than Ali Mazinan, the crazed and bespectacled Revolutionary Guards officer with an obsession about Iraqi date exports who had sent me off on the lunatic helicopter flight to Fao. He advanced towards me now with the warmest of smiles, embraced me in a grizzly-bear hug and kissed me on both cheeks. Never was Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ more necessary to a correspondent. Poetic faith was about the best there was to cling on to in the next few hours.

The Fish Lake was a stretch of desert north of the Karun river but west of Shalamcheh – the border post where I had been partially deafened by the Iraqi gun batteries shelling Khorramshahr more than six years earlier – but now Shalamcheh was back in Iranian hands and its vast army was moving towards the Shatt al-Arab river and the city of Basra. Once more, I was in ‘Iranian-occupied Iraq’, but in a desert that the Iraqis had flooded as they retreated. The Iranians were now advancing on a series of dykes above the waterlogged desert, under intense and constant shellfire from Iraqi artillery whose gunners quickly worked out their trajectories to hit the dykes.

The Iranians provided another army truck for the press, a Japanese open-top lorry with a pile of old steel helmets in one corner that we could wear when we reached the battlefield. Between earthworks and dugouts and lines of trenches we drove, the marching soldiery of the Islamic Republic walking beside us, grinning and making victory signs and holding up their rifles like conquering heroes. I suppose that’s what they were, the victims at last overcoming their aggressors, the winners – or so they thought – after so many years of pain and loss. Over to my left, as we climbed onto a plateau of rock and sand, I suddenly saw the shining white warheads and fuselages of a battery of Hawk missiles, gifts from Oliver North, along with the spare parts which had now turned them into a new and formidable air defence for the victorious Iranian army.

And then we were on the causeway, a long, narrow, crumbling embankment of sand surrounded by lagoons of water filled with still-burning Iraqi tanks, overturned missile launchers, half-submerged Iraqi personnel carriers and dozens of bodies, some with only their feet protruding above the mire. Far more fearful, however, were the whine and crash of incoming shells as the Iraqis directed their artillery onto the dykes. I squeezed the old Russian helmet the Iranians had given me onto my head. In front of us, an Iranian truck burst into pink fire, its occupants hurling themselves – some with flames curling round their bodies – into the water. The convoy backed up and our lorry came to a halt. We would hear the splosh in the water beside us as the next shell hit the lagoon, sending a plume of water into the sky, cascading us with mud and wet sand.

Ian Black of the Guardian , one of the sanest reporters with whom one could go to war, was sitting opposite me on the truck, looking at me meaningfully through his big spectacles. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is bloody dangerous.’ I agreed. Around us, on little hillocks amid the great green-blue lakes of water, Iranian gunners fired off 155-mm shells towards Basra, shouting their excitement, throwing their arms around each other. The young Iranian boys did not even bother to keep their helmets on amid the shellfire. They lounged around the earthworks of the captured Iraqi front lines, smoking cigarettes, hanging out their washing, waving good-naturedly at us as the Iraqi artillery rounds hissed overhead. The explosions even made them laugh. Was it contempt for death or merely their reaction to our fear?

Another big splosh and Black and I hunched our shoulders, and sure enough there was an eruption of water and earth behind me and a downpour of muck and brackish liquid descended on us. The shells came five at a time, zipping over the breakwaters. On a similar trip a few hours earlier, the British correspondent of US News and World Report had summed up his feelings under fire along the dykes with eloquent understatement. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that I could take more than a day of this.’ The road surface was only a few feet above the water but the causeway seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, a dwindling taper of sand that reached a horizon of fire and smoke. The strap of my helmet suddenly snapped and it slid off my head and bounced onto the floor of the truck. I picked it up and stuck it back on my head, holding it on with my left hand. But what was the point? If I was hit on the head, my fingers would be chopped off. Black was frowning. We were all concentrating. The idea of instant death was indeed a concentrating experience. And all the while, the army of boys and elderly volunteers and Revolutionary Guard commanders tramped past us in the sun as we ground slowly towards the battle front.

‘War till victory,’ they kept screaming at us from the mud. Would I never hear the end of this? And when we had driven for perhaps 3 kilometres along those earthworks and reached and passed Shalamcheh, the ghastly Mazinan suddenly appeared beside our truck, pointing in a demented way towards the north-west. ‘Basra,’ he kept shouting. ‘BASRA! BASRA! BASRA!’ Black and I peered through the smoke and flames and the waterspouts that were now rising eerily around us, volcanic eruptions that would carry the dark brown mud high into the sky, where it would hover for a second before collapsing on us. Black was looking at me again. A bit like The Cruel Sea , I said stupidly. ‘Much worse,’ he replied.