But how could such a pampered army fight when the Iranians stormed towards them in their tens of thousands?
The Iranians had learned that opposing massed Iraqi armour with poorly maintained Chieftain tanks was suicidal – the wreckage of dozens of Chieftains destroyed in the initial battles outside Dezful more than a year earlier still littered the desert. At Ein Khoosh, I padded round the broken Iraqi tanks for more than an hour. I noticed one whose severed turret had been blown clean off the base of the vehicle, landing with its gun barrel intact beside a small field. Around the turret and the decapitated tank stood a cluster of Iranian troops and peasants, all holding handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses.
The dead crew were unrecognisable, burnt paper creatures from another planet who still lay in their positions, the gunner’s body crushed beneath the turret. A carpet of flies lay upon the scorched armour. An Iranian soldier looked to the sky and ran his hand briefly downwards over his short beard, a gesture of respect to God for the bloody victory that He had granted Iran over its enemies. But the tank itself had not been shelled to destruction – there was not a shell crater in the area, just a jagged hole in the armour near the turret plates. It had been destroyed by a hand-launched anti-tank rocket. In the desert, other Iraqi tanks had suffered an almost identical fate; they had ‘brewed up’ on the battlefield after one point-blank round.
It was clear that the Iranians had used scarcely any heavy artillery or tanks in their six-day battle. They simply poured men into the Iraqi lines and caught their enemies off guard. The Iranians had been experimenting with human-wave attacks. The Iraqi front line had been overwhelmed by thousands of young men holding only rocket-propelled grenades and rifles. ‘The West fought two world wars and gave us their military manuals,’ an Iranian officer smugly remarked to me. ‘Now we are going to write tactical manuals for the West to read.’ We noticed the lack of Iranian corpses in the desert, but could not help seeing from our helicopter small tyre tracks across the sand. Could these be the motorcycles of the boy soldiers we had heard about, the fourteen-year-olds and their brothers who were encouraged to wear the sword of martyrdom around their necks as they drove through the Iraqi minefields to clear them for the infantry, dressed in heavy winter coats so that their shredded bodies would be held together for burial in their home villages? Kifner and I asked to see the youngest survivors of the battle, and the Iranians immediately understood what we wanted.
Under shellfire, they took us to a new Iranian front line of earthen revetments on the Dusallok Heights and we ran down these trenches like any soldiers of the 1914–18 war. The Iran – Iraq conflict was increasingly coming to resemble the great mire of death that entombed so many hundreds of thousands on the Somme and at Verdun. The dugout in which we sought shelter was small and a thick dust hung in the air. There were weapons on the mud and wooden-framed walls – a captured Iraqi machine gun and an automatic rifle – and a few steel helmets piled in a corner. The light from the sandbagged doorway forced its way into the little bunker, defining the features of the boys inside in two-dimensional perspective, an Orpen sketch of impending death at the front. There was no monstrous anger of the guns, only a dull, occasional vibration to indicate that the Iraqis had not abandoned all their artillery when they retreated from Dezful.
There, however, the parallels ended. For the youngest soldier – who welcomed us like an excited schoolboy at the entrance – was only fourteen, his voice unbroken by either fear or manhood. The oldest among them was twenty-one, an Islamic volunteer from Iran’s ‘Reconstruction Crusade’, who expounded the principles of martyrdom to us as the guns boomed distantly away. Martyrdom, I was made to understand, was a much-discussed subject in this dugout because it was much witnessed.
Yes, said the fourteen-year-old, two of his friends from Kerman had died in the battle for Dezful – one his own age and one only a year older. He had cried, he said, when the authorities delayed his journey to the battle front. Cried? I asked. A child cries because he cannot die yet? Were we now to have baby-wars, not wars which killed babies – we had specialised in them throughout the twentieth century – but wars in which babies, boys with unbroken voices, went out to kill? The fourteen-year-old’s comments were incredible and genuine and terrifying at one and the same time, clearly unstaged, since we had only by chance chosen his dugout when we took cover from the shellfire outside.
There was no doubt which of these boy soldiers most clearly understood the ideology of martyrdom inside this claustrophobic bunker of sand and dirt. When I asked about the apparent willingness of Iranians to die in battle, the soldiers nodded towards a very young man, bearded and intense with a rifle in his hand, sitting cross-legged on a dirty rug by the entrance. In the West, he said, it was difficult – perhaps impossible – to understand Iran’s apparent obsession with martyrdom. So did he want to die in this war?
The young man spoke loudly, with almost monotone passion, preaching rather than answering our question. Hassan Qasqari, soldier of the volunteer Reconstruction Crusade, was a man whose faith went beyond such questions. ‘It is impossible for you in the West to understand,’ he said. ‘Martyrdom brings us closer to God. We do not seek death – but we regard death as a journey from one form of life to another, and to be martyred while opposing God’s enemies brings us closer to God. There are two phases to martyrdom: we approach God and we also remove the obstacles that exist between God and the people. Those who create obstacles for God in this world are the enemies of God.’
There was no doubt that he identified the Iraqis with these theologically hostile forces. Indeed, as if on cue from God rather than the army of Saddam Hussein, there was a loud rumble of artillery and Qasqari raised his index finger towards heaven. We waited to hear where the shell would fall, fearing that direct hit that all soldiers prefer not to think about. There was a loud explosion beyond the trench, just beyond the bunker, the vibration shaking the dugout. Then there was silence. I could not imagine this speech in an Iraqi dugout. For that matter, I could not have heard it in any other army. Perhaps a British or American military padre might talk of religion with this imagination. And then I realised that these Iranian boy soldiers were all ‘padres’; they were all priests, all preachers, all believers, all – now I understood the phrase – ‘followers of the Imam’. There was another pulsation of sound outside in the trench.
Qasqari seemed grateful for the shell-burst. ‘Our first duty,’ he proclaimed, ‘is to kill the enemy forces so that God’s order will be everywhere. Becoming a martyr is not a passive thing. Hossein, the third Imam, killed as many of his enemies as possible before he was martyred – so we must try to remain alive.’ If we could not understand this, Qasqari explained, it was because the European Renaissance had done away with religion, no longer paying attention to morality or ethics, concentrating only upon materialism. There was no stanching this monologue, no opportunity to transfuse this belief with arguments about humanity or love. ‘Europe and the West have confined these issues to the cover of churches,’ Qasqari said. ‘Western people are like fish in the water; they can only understand their immediate surroundings. They don’t care about spirituality.’
He bade us goodbye with no ill will, offering Kifner and me oranges as we left his dugout for the dangerous, bright sand outside. How should we say goodbye to them? We looked into their eyes, the eyes of children who were, in their way, already dead. They had started on their journey. The next shell landed a hundred metres behind us as we ran the length of the trench, a thunderous explosion of black and grey smoke that blew part of the roadway into the sky and frightened us, not so much for our peril but because it put martyrdom into a distinct and terrible perspective.
We returned to the jubilant city of Dezful just an hour before Saddam’s revenge came screaming out of the heavens, two massive blasts followed by towering columns of black smoke that spurted into the air from one of the poorest residential areas of the city. It was the tenth ground-to-ground missile attack on Dezful since the start of the war, and by the time I reached the impact point the images were as appalling as they were banal. A baby cut in half, a woman’s head in the rubble of her home, a series of arms and legs laid out beside each other next to a series of torsos in the hope that someone might be able to fit the correct limbs onto the right bodies. Hundreds of men dug through the crushed yellow bricks with their hands. Most Iranian homes in Dezful were built of these cheap, thin bricks, without concrete or structural support. They were made for destruction.