by Stephen Orth
All the traffic signs are in Persian, Ayatollah Khamenei stares down from a number of gigantic posters, and everyone else is staring, too, as tourists here are scarce. My host is working until late afternoon, and I have five hours to kill. The traffic is a wild spectacle of sheet metal and wheels. If you meet people who are too perfect, too nice, and friendly, you automatically look for skeletons in the closet, for some sort of twisted hobby, for something that compensates for this nicer than niceness, something that shows that the person has weaknesses and flaws. With Iranians you don’t have to look far. In fact, you just have to go to the nearest main road in any city—their most warped hobby is driving. The second that any Iranian turns the ignition key, he or she forgets ever to have heard the term taarof, politeness, and morphs into a fishtailing, honking, fuming Saipa monster in hot pursuit of pedestrians.
I would have loved to have sought safety in a café, even a Starbucks would have been okay, but there are none, only fast-food joints with plastic tablecloths full of crumbs. I know laundromats in Berlin or Hamburg with more charm than the average Iranian hamburger joint. I buy a grilled lump of grouund meat in a bun that has seen better days and just stay there for an hour. What shall I do? I don’t even known the direction of the city center. I decide to try an experiment. I go out and wave down a cab. “Imam Khomeini Street,” I tell the driver. Every city in this country has a Khomeini Street, usually in the middle.
“Hotel?” asks the driver.
“No,” I reply. “City center.”
He doesn’t understand. With gestures he tries to tell me that Khomeini Street is quite long. I nod and try it with telepathy: just get going and when I like the look of somewhere, I’ll tell you to stop. The telepathy doesn’t seem to work. Instead, he asks passersby if they can speak English. He asks a bus stop line full of veiled women and a driver in the next lane. Nobody can.
I repeat “Khomeini Street,” together with a reassuring gesture intending to convey that it’s okay, that I know what I’m doing. Actually, I have no idea what I’m doing. Due to the lack of earthly assistance, the cab driver turns to Allah and starts muttering a prayer. In doing so, every now and then he rests his head on the steering wheel, which, considering the present traffic situation, is clear evidence of his trust in God.
After crossing an arched bridge over the River Karun, a medium-sized river with a color that doesn’t inspire much confidence, we seem to be approaching something like a center—inshallah. On the horizon I see the methane gas flares of a number of oil rigs.
The driver brakes and says, “Imam Khomeini” and points to a street on the left that is completely canopied. I would have liked to have given him the thumbs-up sign to say that everything is fine, but I am worried that it could be mistaken for an obscene gesture, so I just pay up and set off.
Sauntering through the world’s hottest city, with more than 1 million inhabitants, in the early afternoon with a heavy backpack is not a good idea, but I don’t have a better one. The air doesn’t actually seem to be too bad, but maybe I’m just lucky, as there is a slight breeze. Photorealistic murals of war martyrs adorn the walls of the houses, and stores sell car parts, household goods, and fruit. A couple youths next to a kiosk ask where I come from. They ask me to take a photo of them with a soccer magazine, then they switch to a sales pitch. One of them gets a pack of pills with Tamol XXX and Made in India written on it from the space next to a dumpster. He flexes his substantial biceps to show what the pills can apparently achieve and says “illegal.” After I turn him down he asks: “Whiskey? My place?” but we still can’t come to an agreement.
Instead, I go the Hoetl Iran—the huge illuminated sign on the roof has got the letters mixed up—to eat chicken and rice at the restaurant there. The room feels as if it has been cooled down to ten degrees. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons caresses the ears, and the waiters in white shirts are serving food to the rhythm of “La primavera.” The heat-afflicted Ahvazis would presumably love to have four seasons. There is no way that I would have visited the capital of the oil and gas province had Yasmin not suggested it as the starting point for our trip to two battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War.
At five in the afternoon Farshad picks me up in his Peugeot Pars. The slim forty-six-year-old with a mustache has just finished work as an engineer at a thermal power plant. “Welcome to the hottest city in Iran,” he says, pointing to the display on the dashboard—107 degrees Fahrenheit. “This is still harmless; in summer it is up to ten degrees hotter.”
“How do you survive?”
“By spending as little time as possible outdoors,” he says.
Farshad has been to Germany a number of times for energy conferences. He lists the cities: “Frankfurt, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Hamburg.” And he even remembers the names of subway stations: Messehallen, Schlump. “They’re supposed to be building a subway here, but it is extremely difficult because in some places the oil is only fifty feet below the surface.” The natural resources here are enormously valuable, but they are forever causing problems. Soon the airport here will be moved to a site ten miles away because a large amount of black gold has been discovered below the landing strip.
Farshad lives in the Koorosh district, in an expensively furnished apartment that includes a classy leather couch. On the wall there are Quran pictures and a painting of a Tuscan landscape and a wooden clock, which every half hour chimes a grotesquely distorted Big Ben melody. He introduces me to his wife, Maryan, and his two children: thirteen-year-old Shayan and eleven-year-old Shaqiba.
The most noticeable resident, however, is a yellow-beaked mynah with gray-black feathers, and the name doesn’t remain a puzzle for long, frequently saying “mynah,” with a hefty bobbing of the head. In the same way as parrots, mynahs can mimic sounds in robotic tones. Its repertoire, however, includes enough croaks, hiccups, and peeps to supply a number of pinball machines with sound effects. Farshad opens the cage. The bird hops out, then craps on my backpack before hopping onto my head. Still, better than the other way round. “We just bought it ten days ago for 400,000 toman at the bazaar,” says Farshad while cleaning my backpack with a tissue. “Watch out for your eyes.”
I cover my face with my hands. Being denied a feast of my eyes, the mynah pecks away at my forehead in the hope of finding something edible. This is not the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
The doorbell rings, and Yasmin arrives. Her plane from Tehran landed at the oil field airport an hour ago.
“What have you got on your head?” she asks.
“Mynaaah, mynaaah,” croaks the bird in answer.
WAR
AT THE ENTRANCE, next to a huge visitors’ car park there is a child’s coffin wrapped in an Iranian flag. In front of it are artillery shells, pale red plastic tulips, and a solitary dusty shoe. The wall behind is made of sandbags. A sign states: Welcome to the place where martyrs went to God, and the child in the coffin is one. In no other country in the world are so many martyrs revered as here; in every city there are posters of their faces on the streets. On the walls of housing blocks there are paintings of the war heroes, and hundreds of thousands of them rest in the enormous cemetery of Behesht-e Zahra in Tehran.
In this life they are idols, and in the afterlife they have a great time, at least if you believe the promises in the Quran. Those who die on the battlefield enter Paradise, regardless of the kind of life they had led up until then. They can expect servants, magnificent houses, and seventy-two virgins at their disposal. Soldiers who were about to be sent into battle were given a plastic key, Made in Taiwan, which was supposed to guarantee them quicker access to Paradise. In the firm belief of eternal rewards, human chains of young men walked hand in hand across minefields toward enemy machine gun fire. A number of mines remain on the battlefield of Fath ol-Mobin to this day. Visitors are not allowed to leave the designated trail. Several Iraqi tanks are scattered around looking like huge dead insects, and were it not for the shrubbery, you might think that they had been destroyed yeste
rday and not thirty years ago.
On September 22, 1980, 100,000 Iraqi soldiers with tanks attacked Khuzestan. Saddam Hussein wanted to seize the oil-rich province because he was convinced of a historical link to Iraq. He was hoping for support from Iranians of Arabic descent, who had long been campaigning for independence. And he was hoping for a victory within a few weeks, as Iran was militarily weak after the fall of the shah. But what followed was the longest war between two countries of the twentieth century, with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides and millions more wounded. In the almost-nine-year war the borders between the two countries were continuously moving with conquests and reconquests.
The scenes of the battles are now pilgrimage sites. According to official figures, 3.5 million tourists visited the battlefields in 2013, around 5 per cent of the population. The pilgrims are called “The Passengers of Light.” “The state subsidizes almost all the travel costs,” says Yasmin, who got her master’s degree in this kind of tourism. She is wearing black gloves because it is not considered acceptable to show nail varnish at holy sites. “One week, including full board, one night in a five-star hotel, and a trip to Khomeini’s birthplace for twenty thousand toman.” A seven-day, all-inclusive patriotic tour for five dollars—an unbeatable offer.
“Citizens are supposed to discover what foreigners did to us,” explains Yasmin, which is why film projects on the topic are state-sponsored. More than seven thousand Iran-Iraq War films have been made since 1988; the directors are certain not to make losses. For the government these subsidies are good investments, as the longer the memories of war remain in people’s minds, the more certain they can be that they will stay in power. Because the war shows that Allah was on the side of the Iranians, who managed to strike back at a far more powerful nation. Because the grief at the loss of family members is so intense, even today, many people are not prepared to risk their lives or the lives of their children for anything (rebellion against the regime, for example). Because it is always good to whip up hatred for the U.S. supporters of Iraq, and then people more readily blame the archenemy for internal deficiencies than mistakes of their own government.
On the ground in front of the entrance are paintings of the Israeli and American flags, and the latter is so faded that it is hardly recognizable. “Everyone who enters has to tread on them,” explains Yasmin. You have to make a detour to avoid them. The choice of the blue Star of David as a doormat is surprising, as during the war Israel supplied antitank missiles and Uzi machine guns to Iran. The propaganda machinery nowadays doesn’t want anything to do with that. For them Israel was always allied with Iraq.
A former commander of the Iranian troops, who introduces himself as Ali Sorkheh, guides us through the trail of the memorial. “Everyone should know the truth about the battlefields,” says the muscular fifty-seven-year-old with a hoarse voice. He is wearing sunglasses, and has white stubble and “Prima” sneakers. He’s been a guide for twenty-three years. “During Operation Fath ol-Mobin, 3,000 Iranian and 25,000 Iraqi soldiers died here, and 50,000 were captured.” And already, discovering the truth about the battlefields is not as simple as it seems. His numbers are exaggerated. According to independent estimates of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, some 5,000 Iranian soldiers died, while 14,000 Iraqi soldiers died or were taken prisoner during Operation Fath ol-Mobin. Sorkheh picks up a cartridge case. “Saddam,” he murmurs. “Many of us still have these things in our bodies.”
I ask him whether he has any war wounds. “My lungs are ruined from mustard gas. Germany supplied Iraq with chemical weapons.”
The hilly surroundings of clay soils and individual shrubs seem very dreary, as they consist mainly of two colors, light brown and green, exactly like the camouflaged tanks of which only the wrecks remain. As if to add a bit of color, a few places show posters of mutilated bodies, portraits of teenage martyrs, or shots of ayatollahs Khamenei or Khomeini next to patriotic slogans: It was a war of Truth against Lies or The greatest victims are the families of the martyrs.
Sorkheh shows us a hidden Iraqi bunker. “Exactly the same kind of bunkers as the Israelis built on the Golan Heights.” For him this is evidence that the Israeli military advisers were supporting the Iraqis.
The most striking building on the compound is the “Tomb of the Eight Unknown Soldiers,” which is still unfinished—a rectangular mud brick construction with a white tower whose stepped spires look like a ladder to heaven. At the entrance Sorkheh places his right hand on his heart and bows, then goes around laying his hand for a moment on the tombstone of each of the eight graves fixed to the ground in two rows of four. “No identification tags were found for these martyrs,” he says. Only the date of death and the battle are mentioned. Karbala 5, Ramedan, Val Fadj 8. Val Fadj means dawn, the time when the Iranians began most of their assaults. Yasmin points to a red bandana hanging on the wall.
Ya Hussein is printed on it. “This was the chant before every battle: ‘In the name of Imam Hussein,’” says Yasmin. The grandson of the Prophet Muhammad died 1,300 years ago, after being ambushed at Karbala. Every year, during the sacred month of Muharram, Shiites mourn their ancient martyr, and Karbala in Iraq is still their holiest pilgrimage site. Hussein is also supposed to be the guardian of the virgin Paradise reserved for victims of war. So, Ya Hussein is the Persian variation of Morituri te salutant.
When the neighboring countries finally agreed on a ceasefire in August 1988, the borders were exactly as they had been before the war. “The Iraqis built 150 miles of roads in six months in Khuzestan,” says former commander Sorkheh. “That was the only good that came out of the war.”
The next day one of these roads takes us to the groves of crownless date palms some seventy-five miles south of Ahvaz. Tens of thousands of tree trunks rise skyward, nothing remaining of the crowns but a few charcoaled leaf fronds. They have been there for more than twenty-five years, disfigured, lifeless, like a paralyzed ghost army guarding for all eternity the mud-colored plains of Khuzestan, the most valuable province, but surely not the most beautiful.
“These are the ‘trees of resistance,’” explains Yasmin. “Saddam had them all torched because they could have been used as cover by the Iranian soldiers. The trees died but didn’t fall, which is why they became a symbol of our fighting spirit and pride. Not one of them has been felled since the war.” Martyrs are particularly venerated in Iran, even if they are trees.
Ahmad Mahmoudi drags his left leg; he still has two bullets in his thigh, and he had four in his arm. He knows what it feels like to face a volley of bullets, and the sound of a tank shell exploding a few feet away. It is a miracle that he is still living. The dark-skinned forty-nine-year-old in military uniform is standing on a wooden jetty on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab and talks about the war to a group of more than twenty black-veiled tourists.
The jetty looks as if it were once a ferry terminal, but no ship crosses these waters. The border river Shatt al-Arab was one of the reasons Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. It is Iraq’s only waterway to the Persian Gulf and particularly valuable for merchant ships, and he no longer wanted to share this with his neighbors. We are in the town of Arvand Kenar, and looking across the river you can see Iraq, four miles as the crow flies to the town of Faw. We can see a blue mosque dome, transmission towers and minarets, a few old-fashioned dhows. Conspicuous No Swimming signs and steel tank traps ensure that no one gets silly ideas. From the moment of our arrival we notice that our presence is making the soldiers nervous. One asks if he can photograph me. “You are the first non-Muslim visitor here,” he says. Then he wants to know what I’m doing here.
“I’m a tourist and very interested in the Iran-Iraq War,” I answer. Initially, he seems to be satisfied, but he is never more than fifteen feet away from me and always snapping away on his digital camera.
The most striking exhibits in the open-air war museum are the naval boats and the heavy artillery, and a twenty-foot-long metal tube with a kind of cartoon on i
t. The colored illustration shows how soldiers made a pontoon out of five thousand such tubes, which was strong enough to carry tanks to the opposite bank. Above it stands a gigantic billboard at least fifty feet wide showing the two bearded Supreme Leaders, Khomeini and Khamenei. It is pointing toward the bank. On it the message WE ARE RESISTING can be read by anyone on the Iraqi side with a pair of binoculars.
The Iranians consider it a triumph to have driven back the invaders, even if, in truth, like in most wars, there was no winner.
No one knows the four-mile stretch of water to Iraq better than the veteran Ahmad Mahmoudi. Three armed soldiers form a circle around us as he tells us his story. “I was with the Basij paramilitary volunteer militia. Every night at about ten o’clock I snorkeled to the Iraqi bank to spy out assault targets. Two hours across, two hours back, despite waves and current. The enemy had radar, watchtowers, machine guns, and minefields, and they were armed to the teeth. Our strongest weapon was our belief in God, and we were never noticed. I wasn’t afraid; I was prepared to die.” Mahmoudi smiles a lot, and he smiles proudly when he is giving his account. He plays the role of war hero perfectly, as he already has done hundreds of times—an ideal person for the job of a line-toeing tourist guide. Behind him, a passenger ship rattles by, full speed to the Persian Gulf, as if trying to leave the former war zone behind as quickly as possible.
“Three to five men went into the water simultaneously, always the youngest, all between fifteen and twenty. I didn’t have a beard like this at that time.” Every night Mahmoudi swam for his life with a plastic key to Paradise around his neck. Never will he forget the beginning of Operation Dawn 8. “On February 11, 1986, we were two thousands snorkelers. We were the first to land to secure important posts, then came the highspeed patrol boats. We conquered Faw and managed to hold the city for two years and two months.”