I think I will never see my husband again – yes, sometimes I think this.’
Zulaika returned to her village of Baharqa. ‘It was some days later. We were used to the aircraft. I had left the village early with three of my children – the other three were with their grandfather – to go to the fields but I saw the two aircraft come low over Baharqa and drop bombs. There was a lot of smoke and it drifted towards us on the wind. It covered the land. We were hiding ourselves behind a small hill but we saw it coming towards us. The smoke had a nice smell, like medicine. Then my smallest children, Sarbas and Salah, started to cry. They started having diarrhoea but it didn’t stop. I couldn’t help them so I took them to the hospital in Irbil. The doctors were afraid. They gave them injections and medicine but it was no use. Both of them started to go black, as black as asphalt, and they both died nine or ten days later. The older child, when he died, he was vomiting his lungs. I buried them in the village cemetery. A lot of children died there. Now, if I go back there, I would not be able to find them.’
Zulaika says she will never marry again. How does she see her life, we ask. ‘I am living just to raise my children, that is all. In my dreams, I dream about my children who died. In one dream, I dream that my husband says to me: “You didn’t take care of the children as you promised. This is the reason why they died.”’
For some of the soldiers in the Iraqi army – the perpetrators, not the victims – the memory of those chemical attacks will also remain with them for ever. It is now July 2004, almost a quarter of a century after the start of the Iran – Iraq war, sixteen years since the Anfal operation against the Kurds. Under the occupation of the Americans and its puppet government, Baghdad has become the most dangerous city on earth. Suicide bombings, executions, kidnappings are the heartbeats of the city. But I arrive at the little market garden behind Palestine Street to buy a fir tree for the balcony of my hotel room, something to keep me sane in the broiling heat of midsummer Iraq. The garden is a place of flowers and undergrowth and pot plants and it is ruled over by Jawad, a 44-year-old with a sharp scar on his forehead, but who knows he lives in jenah. Jenah means ‘heaven’.
But Jawad, I quickly discover, has also lived in hell. When I ask about the scar, he tells me that a piece of Iranian shell cut into his head during a bombardment on the Penjwin mountain during the Iran – Iraq war. He was a radio operator and spent thirteen years in the Iraqi army. ‘I lost almost all my friends,’ he says, rubbing his hands together in a false gesture of dismissal. ‘What happened to us was quite terrible. And what happened to me. I can’t remember the name of one of my dead friends – because the shell fragment in my head took my memory away.’
Not all his memory, however. Jawad moves silently through the trees, only the trickle of water from a fountain and the back-cloth sound of Baghdad’s traffic disturbing his journey. A white ficus tree, perhaps? Very good for withstanding the heat. A green ficus tree? The only fir trees for sale are so deeply rooted, they would take an hour to dig up. All his life, Jawad has worked in the market garden, along with his father. The heat accentuates the smells so that the smallest rose is perfumed, white flowers turning into blossom.
Yes, Jawad survived the entire Iran – Iraq war. He loathed Saddam, he says, yet he fought for him for eight terrible years. ‘I was at Ahwaz, I was at the Karun river, in the Shamiran mountains, in the Anfal operation, at Penjwin. I was a conscript and then a reservist but I refused to become an officer in case I had to stay in the army longer.’ In my notebook, I put a line beside the word Anfal. Jawad had crossed the Iranian frontier in 1980. He had entered Khorramshahr and then, when Khorramshahr was surrounded, he had retreated out of the city at night.
‘I first noticed the gas being used east of Amara. Our artillery were firing gas shells into the Iranians. I couldn’t smell the gas but I soaked my scarf in water and held it to my nose. Because I was a radio operator, I had a lot of equipment round me that protected me from the gas. These were black days and we suffered a lot. After I was wounded, they insisted on sending me back to the front. I had a 35 per cent disability and still they sent me back to the war.’
Jawad manoeuvres a dark green potted plant onto the path, waving his hands at the birds that spring from the undergrowth. If heaven really is a warm and comfortable garden, then Jawad lives in it. And the Anfal operation? I ask. Did he see the effects with his own eyes? Jawad raises his hands in an imploring, helpless way.
‘We saw everything. Would you believe this, that when they started using the gas strange things happened? I saw the birds falling from the sky. I saw the little beans on the trees suddenly turning black. The leaves decayed in front of our eyes. I kept the towel round my face, just as I did near Amara.’
And bodies?
‘Yes, so many of them. All civilians. They lay around the villages and on the hillsides in clumps, as if streets of people had gathered at the same place to die. Some were scattered, but there were many women who held children in their arms and they all lay there dead. What could I do? I could say nothing. We soldiers were too frightened even to discuss it. We just saw so many dead. And we were silent.’
‘War against War’ and the Fast Train to Paradise
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
WILFRED OWEN, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’
In the hush of the curtained front room, the two former Iraqi pilots and the man who had been second-in-command of Saddam Hussein’s air force sat in front of me in silence. The pilots spoke the heavily accented French they had learned while training on their Mirage fighter-bombers at Cherbourg. I had asked them about the USS Stark. But why now? they wanted to know. Why, sixteen years after an Iraqi Mirage had fired two missiles at the American guided-missile frigate in the Gulf – incinerating thirty-seven of its crew – did I want to know why they had almost sunk the ship? Why not discuss the growing anarchy in Baghdad under American occupation? That very morning in 2003, a car bomb had exploded outside the gates of the American headquarters at Saddam’s former Republican palace.
All three men feared that I was a spy, that I was trying to identify the pilot who killed the young American seamen more than a decade and a half ago. Why else would I ask if he was still alive? I told them I would never betray any human being, that I was a journalist – not an intelligence officer – that I would no more hand them over to the Americans than I would hand Americans over to them. I knew that senior Iraqi air force personnel had all remained in contact with each other after the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, that they now constituted an air force without aircraft. But I also suspected, correctly, that many of these men were now involved in the anti-occupation insurgency. I tried to explain that this was the one Iraqi air force mission that changed the Middle East. Their colleague’s actions on 17 May 1987 had – through one of those grotesque double standards which only Washington seemed able to produce – brought Iran to its knees.
The ex-general looked at me for almost another minute without speaking. Then he gave what was almost a mundane operational report. ‘I saw him take off from Shaiba,’ he said. ‘It was a routine flight over the Gulf to hunt for Iranian ships. There was a “forbidden zone” from which we had excluded all ships and the Stark was in that zone. The pilot didn’t know the Americans were there. He knew he had to destroy any shipping in the area – that’s all. He saw a big ship on his radar screen and he fired his two missiles at it. He assumed it was Iranian. He never saw the actual target. We never make visual contact – that’s how the system works. Then he turned to come home.’
Seventy kilometres north-east of Qatar, the American Perry-class frigate’s