bloodshot, head hanging with fatigue – as he claimed that his troops had taken control of the city and its harbour, when shells showered down onto the houses and orchards around us.
‘Please go now because it is not safe,’ a brigadier pleaded as explosions began to crash around the bridge at the end of the street. An Iraqi commando was led through the gate, blood dribbling down his right cheek from a shrapnel wound. The Iraqi Special Forces soldiers – no longer laughing and making their familiar victory signs at journalists – sat round the edge of an empty fish pond and stared at us glumly. Iranian Revolutionary Guards were still holding out in the heavily damaged buildings on the western side of the Karun and they drove six Chieftain tanks past the central post office, firing shells at the nearest Iraqi command post until one of them was hit by a rocket. Running from the villa, I had just enough time to see an Iraqi tank, its barrel traversing wildly and its tracks thrashing through the rubbish along the street as it drove towards the centre of the city.
The Iraqis now had tanks positioned along the Khorramshahr waterfront. They must have entered the port very suddenly, for the docks were still strewn with empty goods wagons, half-empty crates and burning containers hanging from damaged cranes. From some of the containers, Iraqi soldiers were stealing the contents, making off with a bizarre combination of Suzuki motorcycles, footballs, Dutch cattle-feed and Chinese ping-pong bats.
The ships along the quayside had been under fire for days. The chief officer of the Yugoslav freighter Krasica leant over the after-deck of his bullet-flecked ship and grinned broadly. ‘Both sides shelled us all the time – for fifteen days,’ he shouted. ‘We sat down below, played cards and drank beer – what else could we do?’ It must have been bad, because the man did not even look eastwards along the waterfront where smoke poured from a burning ship. The Italian freighter Capriella had had its bridge, funnel and superstructure gutted by fire. The crew of another Italian vessel had quenched the fires of a first bombardment but then fled to a Korean freighter whose crew refused to let them aboard; they were eventually given sanctuary on a Greek ship. The Chinese Yung Chun had rocket and bullet holes in its hull. Further east, there were larger vessels, all burning furiously.
None of these ships would ever sail again. They would remain, charred wrecks along the harbour-side, for eight more years. But in Basra, the ninety big freighters moored along the quays, their crews still aboard and keeping steam up for a quick escape if a real ceasefire took hold, would still be rotting away at the harbour almost a quarter of a century later. It was a mournful development for a port city founded by the Caliph Omar Ibn Khattab in 638, a harbour occupied by the British in 1914 and 1941 and 2003. British mercantile interests had been here since 1643, and behind the city’s six stinking canals it was still possible to find the carved wooden façades and elaborate shutters of Ottoman houses. The Caliph Omar had decreed that no one should be permitted to cut down the city’s date palms, although thousands of them now stood, decapitated or blackened by fire in plantations ribbed by streams into which nineteenth-century steamships had long ago been secreted, rotting museums of industrial technology which were no doubt launched with appropriate triumph when they went down the slipways of Birkenhead and Belfast two generations earlier. In what the Basra tourist office, in a moment of unfortunate enthusiasm, dubbed ‘the Venice of the East’, it was still possible to come across the relics of empire. The Shatt al-Arab Hotel had been a staging post for the British Imperial Airways flying boats that would set down on the Shatt and deposit their passengers in a lounge still decorated with scale models of British-built ships.
Every day now, the Iraqis were learning that victory would not be theirs – not at least for weeks, maybe months, even years. The Iraqi army around Khorramshahr moved forward only 8 kilometres in ten days. In the city, an Iraqi army colonel in a paratrooper’s red beret and carrying a swagger stick agreed with us that the Iranians were still fighting hard. Even as he spoke, a young soldier covered in blood was carried past us, the wounded man screaming that he was dying. ‘We thought the Iranians would not fight,’ another officer said to me that day. ‘But now I believe they will fight on, whatever happens.’
Officially, no one would suggest such a thing. ‘You must come – you must come,’ a ministry of information minder shouted to us in the lobby of the Hamdan Hotel. ‘You must see the Iranian prisoners.’ It was to be the first display of prisoners by both sides in the war, a theatrical presentation that would eventually involve thousands of captured soldiers, a press ‘opportunity’ which was a gross breach of the Geneva Convention. But we went along that bright October morning to see what the Iranians looked like. ‘Animals in a cell’ was Gavin’s apt comment.*
They were sitting in the far corner of a concrete-walled barrack hut, a dishevelled group of dark-haired young men, some in bandages and all in the drab, uncreased khaki uniform of the Iranian army. Unshaved, the seventeen men gaped at the television cameras as they sat on the bare mattresses that had been their beds for the past three days. ‘You are not permitted to talk to them,’ an Iraqi army major announced, and the Iranians looked again at the lenses and microphones that were thrust expectantly towards them. Asked by a journalist if any of the prisoners spoke English, a young bearded man below the latticed window said that he spoke German but the major shut him up. ‘They were taken prisoner at Ahwaz and Mohammorah,’ the major said. ‘What more do you want to know?’
But the prisoners talked with their hands and faces. About half had been injured, their heads and arms in bandages. A thin young man by the wall slyly made a victory sign with his fingers. Five prisoners had been told to hold copies of a Baghdad newspaper that pictured Saddam Hussein on the front page, but they had folded the paper in such a way that the portrait was no longer visible. The Iranian soldier who spoke German smiled and nodded at us as we were herded from the barracks hut. Then the Iraqi major announced that two prisoners would talk to us if we promised to take no pictures. Two sad, drawn young men, one with his chest bandaged in plaster, were eventually led into a messroom where a picture of Saddam, a Gainsborough reproduction and a bunch of pink plastic flowers vied for space along the wall.
The two soldiers were seated on steel chairs in the centre of the room while government officials and the major stood round them in order to ‘translate’. The wounded prisoner clutched his hands nervously and began to shake. The major wagged his finger in front of the first soldier. ‘They are asking about your casualties,’ he said. The man shrugged and proclaimed his ignorance. ‘I am an Iranian soldier,’ he said quietly. Were the Iranian mullahs in charge of the Iranian army, journalists asked, and the major translated this question as: ‘Aren’t religious people influencing your officers?’ It was true, the prisoner said sullenly. ‘The spirit of our soldiers is not what it used to be.’
And what, the world’s press wanted to know, did the two prisoners think of Ayatollah Khomeini? The major mistranslated the question thus: ‘Now that things have gone so badly for you, what do you think of Khomeini?’ The first prisoner replied that ‘opinion’ of the Ayatollah would not be the same after the war. But the wounded man glanced quickly at us and said that ‘if Ayatollah Khomeini brought on a war between two Muslim countries, this was wrong.’ The conditional clause in this reply was lost on the Iraqi major who then happily ordered the removal of the prisoners.
The Iraqi army, it seemed, would go to any lengths to display proof of victory and it spent a further hour showing off Iranian hardware captured in Khorramshahr. There was an American-made anti-tank launcher – made by the Hughes aircraft company and coded DAA-HOI-70-C-0525 – a clutch of Soviet-made armoured vehicles and an American personnel carrier on which the Iraqis had spray-painted their own definitive and revealing slogan for the day. ‘Captured,’ it said, ‘from the racist Persian Asians.’ Captured armour was to become a wearying part of the now increasingly government-controlled coverage of the war.
They bussed us up to Amara, 160 kilometres north of Basra and only 50 kilometres from the Iranian border, to show us twenty Chieftain tanks seized on the central front around Ahwaz, a fraction of the 800 Chieftains that Britain had sold to the Shah. Some had been hit by shells or grenades but we clambered onto them. A partly damaged hulk was lying in a field with its hatch open, and in I climbed to sit in the driver’s seat. A pouch on the wall to my left still contained the British Ministry of Defence