centre. Iranian cannon fire had punctured the fourth floor, wounding four patients, and the doctor claimed that this, too, was a deliberate attack, since the hospital had flown white flags with the red crescent on them. But the flags were only six foot square and the dark crescent painted upon the flat roof by the doctors merged with the colour of the concrete. Al-Tikriti pointed to the splashes of blood on the ceiling. ‘Arabs would never do this,’ he said. ‘They would never attack civilians.’ But as he was leaving the building, a battered, open-top truck drew up. There were two corpses in the back, half-covered by a dirty blanket, four bare brown feet poking from the bottom. The driver asked what he should do with the bodies but Dr al-Tikriti saw no journalists nearby. ‘Take them round the back,’ he told the driver.
The first commandos of the Iraqi army broke through to the west bank of the Karun river on the Shatt al-Arab at 12.23 Iraq time on the afternoon of 2 October, four small figures running along the Khorramshahr quayside past lines of burned-out and derailed trucks, bowling hand grenades down the dockside. I was able to watch them through Iraqi army binoculars from just 400 metres away, peering above sandbags in a crumbling mud hut while an Iraqi sniper beside me blasted away at the Iranian lines on the other side of the Karun river.
Pierre Bayle of Agence France-Presse was beside me, a tough, pragmatic man with a refusal to panic that must have come from his days as a French foreign legionnaire. ‘Not bad, not bad,’ he would mutter to me every time an Iraqi moved forward down the quayside. ‘These guys aren’t bad.’ It was an extraordinary sight, an infantry attack that might have come from one of those romanticised oil paintings of the Crimean war, one soldier running after another through the docks, throwing themselves behind sandbags when rockets exploded round them and then hurling grenades at the last Iranian position on the river bank. The Iranians fought back with machine guns and rockets. For over an hour, their bullets hissed and whizzed through the small island plantation on which we had taken refuge, smacking into the palm trees above us and clanging off the metal pontoon bridge that connected the island to the Iraqi mainland. Only hours earlier, the Iraqis had succeeded in crossing the Karun 4 kilometres upstream from the Shatt al-Arab, sending a tank section across the river and beginning – at last – the encirclement of the Iranians in Abadan. Iran’s own radio admitted that ‘enemy troops’ had ‘infiltrated’ north of the city.
The Karun river runs into the Shatt al-Arab at right angles and it was almost opposite this confluence – from the flat, plantation island of Um al-Rassas in the middle of the Shatt itself – that we finally watched the Iraqis take the riverfront. Behind them, Iraqi shells smashed into a group of abandoned Chieftain tanks, deserted by their Iranian crews when their retreat was cut off by the Karun. All morning and afternoon, the Iraqis fired shells into Abadan, an eerie, jet-like noise that howled right over our heads on the little island.
Shells travel too fast for the naked eye, but after some time I realised that their shadows moved over the river, flitting across the water and the little paddyfields, then dropping towards Abadan where terrific explosions marked their point of impact. I could not take my eyes off this weird phenomenon. As the projectiles reached their maximum altitude before dropping back to earth, the little shadows – small, ominous points of darkness that lay upon the river – would hover near us, as if a miniature cloud had settled on the water. Then the shadow would grow smaller and begin to move with frightening velocity towards the far shore and be lost in the sunlight.
On the other bank of the river, one of these shells set a big ship ablaze; a sheet of flame over 100 metres in height ran along its deck from bow to stern. Its centre was a circle of white intensity, so bright that I could feel my face burning and my eyes hurting as I stared at it. At times, the din of Iraqi artillery fire and the explosion of Iranian shells around our little mud hut was so intense that the Iraqi troops crouched behind the windows and alleyways of the abandoned village on the island could not make themselves heard. An army captain – the small gold medallion on his battledress proof of his Baath party membership – was fearful that his riflemen might shoot into their own troops on the far side of the river, and repeatedly gave orders that they should turn their fire further downstream. One Iraqi sniper, a tall man with a broad chest, big, beefy arms and a scar on his left cheek, walked into our shabby mud hut holding a long Soviet Dragunov rifle with telescopic sights. He grinned at us like a schoolboy, scratched his face, placed his weapon at the broken window and fired off two rounds at the Iranians. Whenever a shell landed near us, the palm trees outside shook and pieces of mud fell from the ceiling.
At last, it seemed, the Iraqis might be marrying up reality with their propaganda. If they could take Khorramshahr and Abadan and so control both banks of the Shatt al-Arab, they would have placed their physical control over the entire waterway – one of the ostensible reasons for the war. There were reports that the Iraqis were now making headway towards Dezful, 80 kilometres inside Iran, as well as Ahwaz, although claims that they had already captured the Ahwaz radio station were hard to believe. They had originally captured it twelve days earlier, but journalists later watched it blown to pieces by Iranian shells. And there was no denying the ferocity of Iran’s defence of Abadan. Even in Khorramshahr, they were still fighting, their snipers firing from the top of the quayside cranes.
The Iraqi soldiers in our hut had warned us of them as we were about to leave Um al-Rassas. Although they could not see us near the hut, the Iranians had a clear view over the top of the palm plantation once we arrived at the lonely iron bridge that linked the island to the western shore of the Shatt al-Arab. Pierre Bayle and I walked quickly between the trees, hearing the occasional snap of bullets but unworried until we reached the river’s edge. There again, I could see the shadow of the shells moving mysteriously across the water. ‘Robert, we are going to have to run,’ Bayle said, but I disagreed. Perhaps it was the bright sunlight, the heavenly green of the palms that made me believe – or wish to believe – that no one would disturb our retreat across the bridge.
I was wrong, of course. As soon as we set off across the narrow iron bridge, the bullets started to crack around us, many of them so close that I could feel the air displacement of their trajectory. I saw a line of spray travelling across the river towards us – I was running now, but I still had the dangerous, childish ability to reflect that this was just how it looked in Hollywood films, the little puffs of water stitching their way at speed towards the bridge. And then they were pinging into the ironwork, spitting around us, ricochets and aimed shots. I actually saw a square of metal flattened by a round a few inches from my face. I ran faster but was gripped by a kind of stasis, a feeling – most perilous of all – that this cannot be happening and that if it is, then perhaps I should accept whatever harm is to come to me. Within seconds, Bayle was beside me, taking the cassette recorder from me, screaming ‘Run, run’ in my left ear, physically pushing me from behind and then, when we neared the end of the bridge, grabbing me by the arm and jumping with me into the water of the Shatt al-Arab, the bullets still skitting around us. We waded the last metres to shore, scrambled up the bank and plunged into the palm grove as a cluster of mortar shells burst around the bridge, the shrapnel clanging off the iron.
Amid the trees, an Iraqi platoon was banging off mortars towards Khorramshahr. The sergeant beckoned to Pierre and myself, and there, amid his soldiers, we lay down exhausted in the dirt. One of his men brought us tea and I looked at Bayle and he just nodded at me. I thought at first that he was telling me how bad things had been, how closely we had escaped with our lives. Then I realised he was thinking what I was thinking: that Saddam had bitten off more than he could chew, that this might not be a whirlwind war at all but a long, gruelling war of aggression. When we returned to the Hamdan Hotel that afternoon, I typed up my story on the old telex machine, sent the tape laboriously through to London, went to my room and slept for fifteen hours. The smell of adventure was beginning to rub off.
So why did we go back for more? Why did I tell the Times foreign desk that although I was short of money, I would stay on in Basra? To be sure, I wanted to see a little bit more of this history I was so dangerously witnessing. If it was true that Saddam had grotesquely underestimated the effect of his aggression – and the Iranians were fighting back with great courage – then eventually the Iraqi army might heed Khomeini’s appeal and revolt. This could mean the end of Saddam’s regime or – the American and Arab nightmare – an Iranian occupation of Iraq and another Shiite Islamic Republic.