by Tony Horwitz
On the Iranian side, Khomeini cast the conflict more explicitly in religious terms. He named the repeated Iranian offensives after the Iraqi city of Kerbala, and spoke constantly of liberating both it and the neighboring city of Najaf. Iranians revere the two cities as the burial sites of seventh-century “martyrs”—Ali, Hassan and Hussein—whose deaths sparked the great schism in Islam between Sunni and Shiite. By invoking Kerbala, Khomeini was reminding Iranians that their cause was no less than a crusade against infidels.
The two leaders had one message in common: both advertised the conflict as a holy war, so those killed in battle were shaheed—martyrs—and entitled to a free pass to paradise. After eight years of war, Khomeini had reached Kerbala V, Saddam was busily erecting new monuments to Qadissi martyrs, and a million men had gone off to heaven, leaving the two leaders no closer to victory.
Beneath Baghdad’s war memorial was a museum to Saddam’s life, including a family tree tracing his ancestry to Mohammed, his birth certificate and his fifth-grade report card (he scored an 89 in history, his best subject). Not featured, though perhaps more revealing of his childhood milieu, is a pamphlet authored by his foster father, Khairalla Tulfah, titled: “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies.” However, there was a photograph of the car Saddam filled with bullets while trying to kill Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1959. Saddam was wounded in the attack and reputedly dug the bullet from his own leg while escaping to Syria. A statue downtown marks the site where the shooting took place. Iraq was the first country I had ever visited that enshrined an assassination attempt as the most glorious event in the nation’s history.
The rest of the capital seemed rather drab. As far back as the twelfth century, an Arab traveler lamented of Baghdad: “There is no beauty in her that arrests the eye, or summons the busy passerby to forget his business and gaze.” The flat, sunbaked plain surrounding the city offered little to build with, except mud. Invaders had periodically leveled most of the great buildings that did once exist. And Iraq’s vast oil wealth had finished the job, with swaths of the old city ripped down to make space for towering hotels and housing blocks.
To his credit, Saddam also spent much of Iraq’s wealth on improving the lives of ordinary people. The onetime Ottoman backwater was now among the more prosperous countries in Arabia, with villages electrified and schools and hospitals dotting the countryside. This modernization, though, was hard to see firsthand. Traveling outside Baghdad required official permission and an official escort. Two escorts, actually. Ministry of Information officials weren’t permitted to travel alone with foreigners, as there would be no one to listen in on the conversation.
This arrangement seemed rather cumbersome, so I opted instead for a day trip I could take on my own, to Babylon. The ancient city lies sixty miles south of Baghdad along a dull road bordered by date palms, mud-brick villages and fifty-foot-high placards of Saddam. Just outside Babylon, I came upon the biggest portrait I’d yet seen. It showed the president receiving inscribed tablets from a skirted Babylonian king, beneath the words “From Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hussein.”
Most of what was once Babylon has been pilfered by archaeologists or carted away to provide bricks for nearby towns. The Iraqis have rebuilt the ruins into a kind of fairy-tale castle with gaudy, blue-painted walls simulating the original glazed brick of the Ishtar Gate. A museum inside records some of Nebuchadnezzar’s haughty words: “Let everything my hand has made be immortalized for eternity.” Not to be outdone, his modern-day heir has inserted several bricks in the rebuilt Babylon, inscribed with the information that they were laid “in the era of the leader Saddam Hussein.”
On the day I visited, in mid-June, the temperature was about 110 degrees. There were no other tourists, only a handful of bedouin hustlers lurking in slivers of shade cast by free-standing pillars. One of them grasped my sleeve and unfolded his fist to reveal a tiny cuneiform tablet and a statuette of a Babylonian king.
“Very ancient,” he said. And very cheap, at only ten dollars.
Another man offered to guide me to the Tower of Babel, a short drive away. His car looked as though it had recently been unearthed in the excavations. We stalled beside a mound of dirt, about like your average landfill. “This is Babel Tower,” he said, adding in a hushed voice, “You need something old? You need a King Hammurabi?”
Depressed, and depleted by the heat, I drove back to Baghdad through the onetime Fertile Crescent, between the Tigris and Euphrates, as a voice on the radio wailed:
“You are the perfume of Iraq, oh Saddam,
The water of the two rivers, oh Saddam.
The sword and the shield, oh Saddam.”
That night I went to visit Mohammed the fishmonger at his restaurant by the Tigris. He was clubbing and gutting fish while the radio reported another advance by Iraqi troops. The war was fast approaching its end, with the borders back to where they had been when Saddam first invaded Iran in 1980.
“Our enemies should not forget,” Mohammed said, in a husky imitation of Rambo, appearing that week in Iraqi cinemas, “how we kicked Khomeini’s butt.”
The restaurant was empty except for four men riveted to a small television set, watching Iraq play soccer in the Arab Cup finals against Syria. Damascus had supported Iran throughout the eight-year Gulf war, exacerbating a longstanding feud between Saddam and the Syrian dictator, Hafez al-Assad. Their murderous rivalry was now being played out on the soccer field.
“This game is almost as important as beating the Persians,” Mohammed said.
At halftime, with the scored tied at zero, Mohammed suggested we slip across the street for a beer. Though straitlaced in most respects, Iraq is remarkably unbuttoned when it comes to drink and entertainment. Mohammed’s restaurant sat beside Abu Nawas Street, a neon-lit stretch of clubs and bars named for a medieval Arab poet who is famed for his erotic verse.
At one time, hundreds of Filipina and Thai “bargirls” plied their trade on Abu Nawas Street, but Iraqi women, some of them war widows, had recently inherited the trade. “The local talent,” Mohammed warned, “is not so good.”
We entered the first club just as two doormen carried out a white-robed Kuwaiti, feet first, smelling of whiskey and perfume. The Kuwaitis, barred from drinking at home, were among Abu Nawas Street’s best customers and were renowned for being cheap drunks.
Inside, the scene was reminiscent of the New Arizona in Cairo, with men huddled around whiskey bottles as three musicians played an atonal tune on tambourine, drum and violin. Mohammed picked out a rear booth upholstered with fake red velvet and cigarette ash. It was so dark that I couldn’t see Mohammed’s face. We were barely seated before a woman squeezed in beside me, whispering in my ear, “Pretty boy want to fickey fickey? Madame good, very good.”
Mohammed leaned across the pitch-black booth and lit a match an inch from the woman’s nose, revealing a haggard, heavily made-up face and the shoulders of a longshoreman. “By Allah!” he cried, shooing her away.
Mohammed had chosen the dark to attract the bargirls, who collected fifty dollars for a beer and a brief cuddle. As a Westerner, I served as bait. No sooner had the first woman departed than another muscled in, clutching me in a playful hammerlock.
Mohammed lit a second match. “Good grief!” he groaned. “What species is this?”
He yelled at the bartender to bring him “good girls, not so ugly,” and the procession continued, though the quality remained the same. In half an hour, Mohammed had exhausted his matches and the supply of women in the bar. A dancer in a sequin dress took the stage and began a vague sort of gyration that was billed as “Oriental dance.”
After five minutes of dancing, the woman began singing, and the acoustics were so bad that I couldn’t catch a word.
“What’s she singing?” I asked Mohammed.
He shrugged. “‘We love you, Saddam,’ something like this.” He scanned the bar for partners.
The woman began dancing again, and perfumed, drunk Kuwaitis stood up to shake with her. One tumbled in a giggling heap and had to be carried off the stage by his friends.
Mohammed sank deeper into the gloom. “I not have girlfriend in three years,” he moaned. “Who knows. Maybe when the war ends these Iraqi women get married and the Filipinas come back.” Draining his beer, he suggested we move on to a club called the Ali Baba.
As we stepped outside, the Arabian night exploded with machine-gun fire. Bright-red tracers streaked across the Tigris from antiaircraft guns positioned on the opposite bank. All Baghdad was celebrating. A guard by the door gave us the news. Iraq had outdueled Syria in overtime, two to one.
Mohammed smiled. “Iraq,” he said, “has kicked another butt.”
8
THE IRAQ-IRAN FRONT
Bodies
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
—HAMLET
The telephone shook me awake at six in the morning and a voice at the other end declared, “There has been another great victory.”
Half asleep, I wondered for a moment if I’d left the radio on. “Come to the airport immediately,” continued the voice, which I groggily recognized from my visits to the Ministry of Information. “Today you will go to the southern front.”
There were several dozen reporters already gathered at the airport, an international hodgepodge of Turks, Russians, Chinese, French, Americans and locally based Arabs.
“Where is your water?” asked one of the Iraqis, a veteran of trips to the front. I told him that I’d assumed water would be provided. “Are you kidding?” He cradled two water bottles as though they were vintage Moët. “And food—in a few hours, you will only dream of it.”
Information was also scarce. Even in victory, the Iraqis rarely disclosed strategic details or even the precise location of the battlefield. “Bodies, that’s all you get,” said an American cameraman. A few months before, the Iraqis had driven him for six hours through the desert, then stopped at a flat plain covered with Iranian corpses. “This Iraqi guy ran ahead of us shouting, ‘Here! Here! More murdered Persians!’ We filmed for an hour, then they drove us back to Baghdad. I never even found out where we’d been.”
Our trip was following a similar formula. During a long, unexplained delay at the airport, we inquired about the “great victory” we were being taken to see. One of our escorts responded by turning on a television, to show us a “victory tape.” It was stock footage of bombs bursting and rockets flaring, with Saddam’s face superimposed and a Wagnerian chorus singing in the background:
“The victory is for you, oh Saddam.
With our blood and with our soul
We sacrifice ourselves for you, oh Saddam.”
Exactly how many Iraqi souls had been sacrificed in the eight-year war remained a mystery. Two hundred thousand dead was the most common estimate, a staggering toll in a nation of only sixteen million people. Certain streets of Baghdad looked the way I imagined Berlin or Paris did in the 1920s. Young amputees gathered at the Babel Cinema, leaning their stumps on crutches as they studied posters for Bruce Lee films. Veterans rolled through the souk in wheelchairs, shopping piled on their plastic legs. Driving back from Babylon, I’d passed taxis with flag-draped coffins strapped to the roof. This was how bodies were ferried home from the front. At one point casualties were so high that the Iraqis stored corpses in freezers, releasing a few at a time to avoid panicking the public by flooding the capital with coffin-laden cabs.
To bolster morale, the Iraqis also tried to carry on as though the war hadn’t disrupted everyday life. “The flight time to Basra is fifty minutes,” the pilot announced as we settled into the Iraq Air 737, “and our cruising altitude will be twenty-seven thousand feet.” Every passenger on board was a reporter or Iraqi official. No commercial planes had flown to Basra for years.
The veneer of normality evaporated as soon as we landed at Basra, Iraq’s second city, near the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates. Green camouflage covered the terminal, and military aircraft crowded the runway. The Iraqis issued us helmets and loaded us into helicopters that swooped low over the desert to avoid detection by Iranian radar.
Wars have a way of finding inhospitable terrain. The plain east and north of Basra, the scene of most of the war’s fighting, is a treeless expanse of grit and marsh, torched by searing winds. Winter was the season for slaughter. In summer, when the temperature hovered at 120 degrees, small arms became too hot to handle and tank drivers risked being cooked in their metal canisters.
Closer to the front, the landscape had been completely made over for the convenience of killing. Barrels of long-range artillery bristled out of the earth, pointing the way to Iran. Bulldozers pummeled the plain into ridges and trenches that swelled, like waves of dirt, one after another for miles. From the helicopter, the Iraqi lines resembled sand-castle fortifications that some ugly gray tide had washed over. The only scenery was a billboard showing Saddam in a pith helmet and carrying a gun, as if ready to go “over the top” and into the Iranian trenches.
The helicopters set down, and we piled into buses, then into jeeps, then hurtled toward the front. At ground level, clutching the death seat of an army jeep, the war suddenly became real. Cannons drummed the desert, each thu-thump throbbing through the sand and rattling the jeep’s thin floor. Columns of smoke rose from the distant horizon. The driver, a vacant-eyed Iraqi soldier, stared out through a tiny space in the windshield; the rest of the glass was smeared with mud so a flash of glare wouldn’t lure the Iranian artillery.
Incoming shells had pockmarked the road. Every hundred yards or so, the driver slammed the brake to the floor, swerved around a blackened crater, then hit the accelerator again, reaching eighty in time to dodge the next crevasse. Tomorrow I may die, he said with his driving; today I may as well risk it all streaking down this fractured strip of tar.
He dropped two wheels onto the shoulder to pass a mangled jeep, splayed on the road like a run-over cat. There was a mechanical whirr as the photographers behind me loaded their cameras with film.
“Bodies, mon ami,” a French photographer said to the driver. “We must have bodies.”
The American beside him chimed in nonchalantly, “What we really need is a blown-out bunker with Iranians hanging out of it and Iraqis standing on top.” He checked his light meter with a quick scan of the desert. “You know, victor and vanquished in the same shot.”
The victors had told us nothing of the battle, except that it had taken place at a borderland of sand and marsh known as Majnoon. Majnoon is Arabic for “crazy,” a prewar name referring to the region’s gushing oil wells. The Iranians had captured Majnoon in 1984, and now, apparently, the Iraqis had crawled out of their trenches in a rare summer assault to “liberate” the territory.
We reached the foremost Iraqi line, a tangle of trenches and bunkers topped by leaking sandbags. In front of the trenches, barbed wire and spiked metal tank traps had been laid out as a welcoming mat for oncoming Iranians. Whatever shrubs had once sprouted here had been gassed, shattered or uprooted. There was no shade from the blazing sun and nowhere to hide outside the trenches. It looked like Flanders field, without the mud.
A bridge lay over the trench, and we drove across it, into what had been, until a few hours before, a no-man’s-land between the two armies. It was now a smoldering junkyard of burned rubber and blasted metal. Flat land mines lay strewn across the dust like runaway hubcaps. At points, it looked as though a giant lawn mower had run across the plain, chewing up and spitting out jagged bits of jeep, rifle, boot, helmet, canteen and bloodied uniform. The driver turned on his windshield wipers to see through the swirling smoke and dust. And in the backseat, the photographers cleaned their lenses, resuming their grisly refrain.
“This is all very scenic,” the American said, “
but where are the goddamn bodies?”
The jeep clawed through a cut in the ramparts and deposited us just inside the captured Iranian line. The Iraqis had cleared their dead from the field, but the Iranians lay where they’d fallen. A lone gunner sprawled straight back from his forward post, a splotch of red blossoming across his chest and staining the sand. His eyes and mouth were open in an expression of bemusement, as though someone had just shouted “Bang, bang, you’re dead!” and he’d soon leap to his feet and start playing soldier again.
A short distance away, the scene wasn’t so ambiguous. One stretch of trench was a corridor of splattered flesh, bodies overlapping one another, cut down together in a torrent of gunfire. Some of the bodies were beginning to bloat, giving off a horrible stench, as if from an outhouse stuffed with rotting meat. Limbs twisted in improbable, almost yogic contortions. One man had died clutching a gash in his groin, entrails oozing onto his thigh. Another’s wounds were hidden; he seemed to be dozing comfortably with his head on the stomach of a friend, eyes closed and face tilted toward the midday sun.
Our Iraqi escorts had chosen their spot well. This bit of battlefield lay on a narrow isthmus of sand between expanses of marsh; there hadn’t been much room for the Iranians to maneuver, and it was impossible to walk ten feet without coming upon more bodies. Bodies scattered amid loaves of bread, cans of Kraft cheese and an upturned teakettle, as though the predawn assault had caught the Iranians at breakfast; bodies flung like discarded clothing onto the tops of bunkers or halfway into the marsh; bodies curled up in foxholes; bodies that didn’t look like bodies, just pieces fanning out from a bloody core where the shell or grenade had hit.