sharp eye detected an element of hyperbole. Ramadi One, for example, was surrounded by so much glistening barbed wire, 9 metres deep and 5 metres high, that there was scarcely room for the prisoners to lean out of their hut windows, let alone play basketball. Ramadi Three appeared to have none of those friendly tuck shops and prison libraries. Perhaps, too, the inmates of the other camps did not speak in quite such scathing tones of Ayatollah Khomeini. For the boy soldiers in Major Ali’s Ramadi Two condemned Khomeini’s regime with an enthusiasm that had the Baath party officials nodding sagely and the military police guards grinning with satisfaction.
Mohamed Ismaili, a twenty-year-old from Kerman, for example, admitted he had broadcast over Iraq’s Farsi-language radio, telling his parents on the air that ‘this war is not a holy war’. Ahmed Taki, who was only seventeen, was even more specific. A thin, shy youth with his head totally shaved, he was a Basij volunteer sent to the battle front a year ago. ‘I was in school when a mullah came to our class and told us we should fight in the battle against Iraq,’ he said. ‘I heard Khomeini say that all young people should go to the front. But now I know it is not a holy war.’ The stories were all similar, of schoolboys told that God would reward them if they died in battle, a spiritual inspiration that underwent a swift transition once they entered Ramadi Two.
For after uttering such statements, few of these Iranian prisoners could return home under the Khomeini regime, even if the war suddenly ended. Some of them admitted as much. The Iranians, of course, had persuaded hundreds of Iraqi POWs to speak with an identically heretical tongue about Saddam. Perhaps that is what both sides wanted: prisoners who could not go home.
Major Ali seemed unperturbed. ‘There are maybe sixty or seventy prisoners who still support Khomeini,’ he said. ‘That’s not many – a very small percentage. Sometimes they mention him at their prayers – we never interfere with their religion.’ But the major did interfere with their news. The POWs could listen only to the Farsi service of Iraqi radio and television – hardly an unbiased source of information on the war – and the only outside information they were permitted to receive were the letters sent to them by their families through the International Red Cross. ‘Come and see the barracks,’ the major insisted. We walked into a hut containing a hundred teenagers, all in that same pallid, greyish-yellow uniform. They stood barefoot on the army blankets that doubled as their beds and the moment an Iraqi army photographer raised his camera, half of them bowed their heads. Their identity concealed, perhaps they could one day go home.
Each military setback for Iraq provided an excuse to break the rules of war once more. Faced with human-wave attacks, there was gas. Faced with further losses, there was a sea war to be commenced against unarmed merchantmen. A new and amoral precedent was set in early 1986 – just after the Iranian capture of the Fao peninsula – when Iraq shot down an Iranian Fokker Friendship aircraft carrying forty-six civilians, including many members of the Majlis and the editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan, Sayad Hassan Shah-Cherghi.
The Iranians wanted to take journalists to Fao, but I for one refused to take the usual night-time C-130 Iranian military transport plane to the front. If the Iraqis were prepared to attack civilian aircraft, they would certainly shed no tears if they destroyed the international press as it travelled to witness Iraq’s latest humiliation. So we took the train again, back down to Ahwaz and the war I had been covering for five and a half years.
Fao had a special meaning for me. It was at Fao that I first saw the Iran – Iraq war with my own eyes. It lay on a spit of land at the bottom of the Shatt al-Arab river, from which the Iraqi army had shelled Abadan. In those days, the Iraqis planned to take the eastern bank of the river and secure it for all time for Iraq. They had not only failed to capture the eastern bank; now they had lost part of the western bank – they had lost the port of Fao itself to the Iranians. The next target for the Iranians would be the great port of Basra with its Shia Muslim population and its straight roads north-west to the holy Shia cities of Kerbala and Najaf. I would be reporting if not from Basra itself, at least from the city in which I started off in this war.
But I wasn’t happy. There were frequent allusions in Tehran to ‘setbacks’ in the Fao battle. Rafsanjani made a disturbing reference to Iran’s need to hold on to Fao, while announcing that there were no plans to advance on Basra – which was odd because, if this was true, why bother to capture Fao in the first place? The Tehran newspapers described how the Iranian forces in Fao were ‘consolidating’ their positions – always a sign that an army is in difficulties. Then when we arrived in Ahwaz and were taken to the nearest airbase for a helicopter ride to the front line, the two American-trained pilots packed the machine with journalists and mullahs – and then aborted the flight. There was too much wind on the river, one of them claimed. There was a bad weather forecast for the afternoon. A cleric arrived to order the men to fly. Gerry ‘G. G.’ Labelle of the Associated Press, with whom I had spent years in Beirut during the war, was sitting beside me on the floor of the chopper and we looked at each other with growing concern as the helicopter lifted off the apron, hovered 2 metres above the ground, turned to face due west – and then gently settled back onto the tarmac. Like so many journalists in time of war, we had been desperate to get to the front line – and even more desperate to find a reason to avoid going.*
Part of me – and part of Gerry – was of the ‘let’s-get-it-over-with’ persuasion. Hadn’t I sped around the Dezful war front on an identical Bell helicopter scarcely a year before? Didn’t John Kifner and I admit that we had enjoyed those heart-stopping, shirt-tearing, speed-gashing rides up the wadis and over those hundreds of burned-out tanks? Wasn’t that what being a foreign correspondent in war was all about? Going into battle and getting the story and arriving home safe and sound and knowing you wouldn’t have to go back next day? We climbed off the helicopter and I could see the relief on the pilots’ faces. If they hadn’t wanted to go, then there was something very, very wrong with this journey to Fao.
In the grotty hotel in Ahwaz that night, I didn’t sleep. Mosquitoes came whining around my face and I ran out of bottled water, and the chicken I’d had for supper made me feel sick. ‘See you in the morning, Fisky,’ Labelle had said with a dark smile. Labelle was a New Yorker brought up in Arizona, a fast, tough agency man with a vocabulary of expletives for editorial fools, especially if they pestered him on the wire with childish queries about his reports. ‘How the fuck do I know if Saddam’s fucking son is fighting in this fucking war when I’m on the Iranian front line getting shelled by the fucking Iraqis?’ he was to ask me one day. ‘Sometimes I ask myself why I’m fucking working for this fucking news agency.’ But Labelle loved the AP and its deadlines and the way in which the wire bell would go ding-ding-ding-ding for a ‘bulletin’ story. ‘I imagine you know, Fisky, that old AK has bitten the dust at last,’ he told me over the phone in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini died. ‘I guess that means no more war.’
But on that hot and blasted morning in Ahwaz, after the mosquitoes and the sleepless night, I probably needed some of Labelle’s saturating humour. As the ministry minders called us to return to the airbase, he gave me one of his mirthless Steve McQueen smiles. ‘Well, Fisky, I’m told it’s a briefing at the usual bunker then a little mosey over the Shatt and a tourist visit to Fao. Lots of gunfire and corpses – should be right up your street.’ A few days earlier, a German correspondent had suffered a fatal heart attack during an Iraqi air raid on Fao. He and his colleagues had jumped for cover when the planes came in, but when they climbed back on to the truck on which they were travelling, the German had just stayed lying on the ground. The Iranians would later call him a ‘martyr’ of the ‘Imposed War’.
Labelle was right about the bunker. At the airbase, two Bell choppers with Iranian insignia on their fuselages were bouncing on the apron, their rotors snapping at the hot air, and into one of them we bundled, Labelle and I and maybe four other journalists and the usual crop of divines and, nose down, pitching in the wind, we swept over a date-palm plantation and flew, at high speed but only a few metres from the tree tops, towards that front line which all of us – save, I suppose, for our clerical brethren – had by now imagined as a triptych of hell. It was like a switchback, the way we cornered granaries and rose over broken electrical pylons and then fell into troughs of wind and sand and dust