by Robert Fisk
Exactly how many men died in the war may never be known—the Iraqis have not given precise figures—but the man who was in charge of the Revolutionary Guards during the 1980–88 conflict insisted to me that the Iranians lost well under 500,000 men. Mohsen Rafiqdoost, who by 1995 was running a multi-million-dollar foundation for the war wounded and the families of dead soldiers, claimed to me that 220,000 Iranians were killed and 400,000 wounded. “We think the Iraqis lost five hundred thousand dead. We don’t know how many of their men were wounded. In addition to our Iranian war dead, we lost seventy thousand dead in the Islamic revolution the year before the war began.”
Even today, the figures must be constantly revised upwards. The bodies of at least 27,000 Iranian soldiers were found on the borders of Iraq after the end of the war in 1988. In July 1997—nine years after the ceasefire—Iran was holding mass funerals for another 2,000 soldiers whose remains had only recently been discovered near the frontier. Four hundred of them were given a state funeral in Tehran attended by President Mohamed Khatami, while the bodies of the other 1,600 were buried in ceremonies in twenty-two towns around the country. Many of the casualties died in the first months of the war when the Iraqi army entered Khorramshahr and attacked Abadan.
Among the soldiers trying to fight off the Iraqi invaders was Mujtaba Safavi. He told me his story as he sat in the back of a Tehran taxi, locked into one of the capital’s fume-clogged, traffic-jammed streets.
I was captured about twenty miles outside Abadan. We were surrounded at night. We had no chance. They took us to a big prison camp in Iraq, in Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein. Our first years there were very hard. They killed some of us, tortured others. It was a year before the Red Cross visited us, took our names and brought us books. The younger ones among us were stronger than the older ones. I think it was because the younger ones felt their life was still in front of them. But two of our men in the prison killed themselves; they couldn’t stand it any more. You know, if you are a prisoner, you have got to be very, very strong. I learnt a lot about myself in the prison, about how strong I could be. When the Red Cross brought me letters from home, they were already a year old. I wrote letters back and my mother still has them, but I do not want to read them now. They will remind me of terrible days.
When I asked Mujtaba the date of his release, he said it was the year after the war ended, 1989. He had been in prison camps for ten years—longer than any British Second World War POWs. When we met in 1995, Iran still maintained that 15,000 of its soldiers were being held in Iraq, some of them fifteen years after their capture.
When Gholamreza reached Khorramshahr, he shook his head at the ruins still strewn across the city. Fought over for two years and bombarded by the Iraqis for another six years, its brick-built apartments and factories were turned to dust by repeated Iraqi counter-offensives. It was Iran’s—not Iraq’s—Stalingrad. In the centre of the city, by a waterway littered with overturned, burned-out cargo ships, next to a mosque whose blue tiles were still being repaired, was a small museum of photographs marking the thirteenth anniversary of the city’s liberation. “The photographer who took these pictures was martyred later in the war,” the guide said. His right hand gestured to a corpse on the floor.
The soldier’s body was so graphically re-created in wax, the dark blood seeping through his back, his face buried in sand, his helmet covering most of his hair, that for a moment I believed the Iranians had preserved a real soldier’s remains. Next to the sand pit with its “martyr” stood a large portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini beneath the legend: “Martyrdom Is the Highest Point in Human Life.” The photographs were of splintered trees and smashed railway yards, of ruined mosques and pulverised homes and bodies in side streets.
Another poet who fought in the war caught the sense of fury when he wrote about Khorramshahr under Iraqi occupation. Parvis Habib Abadi used traditional Iranian symbols of love—the butterfly hovering round a candle—and the anger of Abu Zaher, loyal friend of the Prophet Mohamed, to illustrate his rage:
My friend, how lonely we are,
Away from this city that was ours,
The candle’s guttered out, the butterfly consumed by fire
Everywhere, in every alley, I see just ashes, rubble, blood,
A head here, over there some long, blood-matted hair,
No hands left to comb it with.
So until the time that head is recomposed upon the corpse,
I wear my clothes as a shroud, screaming like Abu Zaher
To put fear in all my enemies.
But one man who liberated Khorramshahr had not wanted to die. He sat with me in a restaurant in Abadan, munching on his fish and potatoes, his mouth open, making too much noise. “I was in the naval service of the army and we came in at the liberation. I didn’t see many bodies. You know, most of the Iraqis surrendered, 20,000 of them—can you imagine it? All with their hands up, like this.” And there in the restaurant, to the surprise of fellow diners, he stuck his hands on his head, palms down. “But we should have ended the war then, in 1982. Saddam had offered a ceasefire, the Saudis offered Iran $70 million to rebuild. If we’d have stopped then, Saddam would have been overthrown by his own people. But another group of people had the Imam’s ear and Khomeini decided to continue the war until Saddam was destroyed, to fight for Najaf and Kerbala and capture Basra. It was a big mistake. I decided to keep clear of the war then and got a job in Tehran. It went on for another six years. And we didn’t even win. We only got all our lost territory back when Saddam was facing you after his invasion of Kuwait.”
This was a rare voice of dissent. During the war, I remember, the dead would talk to the living, a permanent rebuke to those who might find fault with the military conduct of the conflict. The Revolutionary Guards had a house magazine, The Guardian of Islam, which carried memorial tributes to their newly dead comrades under an unimpeachable text: “Count not as dead those killed in the cause of God—but alive and living with their Lord.” Shortly before he fell on the Shatt al-Arab, Hossein Chair-Zarrin would write in ungrammatical Persian that “I am being dispatched for the first time to the front—I had heard about the attack so I wanted to take part in it . . .” But to his mother, he wrote as if already in the afterlife: “Dear Mother, your son has broken loose from the chains of [worldly] captivity, of slavery and self-betrayal . . . Yes, dear Mother, your child has become a captive of Islam and has reached obedience, devotion and sincerity—of course if God accepts.”
I was to grow used to reading these testaments with their convictions and—for want of a better word—their self-righteousness. Abulhassan As-Haq was almost blithe in his will. “Martyrdom is not a rank that everyone deserves,” he wrote just before his death. “I am writing this will even though I think the possibility of being martyred is remote—but anyway, there’s no shame in a young man having that ambition. I’m not frightened of the day of resurrection . . . when the first drop of martyr’s blood is spilt, all his sins are cleansed . . . Yes, my dear ones, death will eventually take us all—no one lives for ever in this world—so why give away this golden opportunity?”
Now Khorramshahr was being rebuilt. There were new schools, two new hospitals, new factories and apartment blocks under construction. But the port was still in ruins, its wrecked ships blocking the river. At the harbourside, I stood next to one hulk—the Race Fisher, registered in Barrow-in-Furness—taking photographs, until two cops in black shirts turned up. The man from Islamic Guidance sprang out of Gholamreza’s taxi to rescue me. “They are suspicious of foreigners with cameras,” he said meekly. “People were hurt very badly in this city.”
I toured one of the new hospitals where a doctor told me that the war was a “necessary” event in his life, as in the lives of all who fought. “I was twenty-one at the time and had a friend, Hossein Sadaqat from Tabriz. He was an Azeri, a good friend, very loyal. And one day during an advance, he was hit in the head by something and his brains came out all over me. I was ri
ght beside him, you see. I didn’t want to believe it. There were no last words, nothing. Then I got hit in the shoulder by a piece of eighty-millimeter mortar shell. I was half-conscious and felt nothing at first, the pain came later.” He pulled up his shirt to show me the wound. All over Iran, men showed me wounds, in their arms, their necks, their legs. One man talked to me through a false jaw—the original had been shot off—while another coughed through his words. He had been gassed. But when I asked the doctor if it had been worth it—all the pain, suffering, sacrifice—his face lit up. “Of course. We were defending our earth and our Islamic heritage. And we were angry, angry at our enemy.”
That was what the Dezful poet Ghaysar Amin Pour felt when his home city came under nightly air attack. Perhaps because of this anger, his poem seems closer to us than others, touched with spite, even cynicism:
I wanted to write a war poem
But I knew it wasn’t possible.
I would have to put down my cold pen
And use a sharper weapon.
War poems should be written with the barrels of a gun,
Words turned into bullets . . .
Here it’s always red alert,
The siren never ends its moaning
Over corpses that didn’t finish their night’s sleep,
Where bat-like jets which hate the light
Bomb the cracks in our blind blackout curtains . . .
We can’t even trust the stars in case they’re spies,
We wouldn’t be surprised if the moon blows up . . .
Sometimes, this sense of indignation becomes political. Here, for example, is what Yahya Fuzi—thirty-one years old now, twenty-four when he fought in the war—said at that same Tehran University philosophy seminar:
War taught us about why people in the West who say they believe in freedom and human rights were ready to relegate these ideas to the background during our war. This was a major lesson for us. When Saddam invaded us, you were pretty silent, you didn’t shout like you did when Saddam invaded Kuwait ten years later. But you were full of talk about human rights when he went to Kuwait. The crimes of Saddam were much more publicised then.
Another student, bespectacled, interrupted:
In our revolution in 1979, anti-dictatorial slogans were our cries against the Shah. But the war with Iraq completed this process of nation-building. At the top of a hill under shellfire, we would have guys from Baluchistan and Kurdistan and other provinces all together. We all had to defend the same hill. And we had a lot of immigrants because of the war, people from Khuzestan driven out of their homes by the Iraqis, who fled to Tehran and Tabriz. There was this interaction with the rest of the population, an ethnic infusion. In this war, we were isolated, abandoned by everyone else, so we came to the conclusion that it was good to be alone—and we learnt about our fellow citizens, we felt united for the first time.
The idea that the Iran–Iraq War was, in a sense, the completion of the Islamic revolution in Iran—at the least, an integral part of it—was widely felt. The middle classes, who tried their best to stay out of the war, cut themselves off from history. The sons of the rich, using their visas to Canada, the United States, Britain or France, saw no reason to participate in what they regarded as a war of madness. “I spent the war in Canada, watched it on television and was glad I wasn’t there,” a twenty-nine-year-old told me at a party in Tehran. I couldn’t dispute his logic but I wondered whether it had not deprived the rich, the old guard Iranians who regretted the revolution, of their claim to Iran. They, too, were isolated by the war, because they refused to defend their country.
But it is the dead rather than the survivors who speak most eloquently. South of Tehran, at Behesht-i-Zahra, close to the tomb of the old man who sent them to die, lie tens of thousands of Iranians who returned in body bags from the war. Still they arrive there today, in plastic bags, a skull or two with a body tag, recovered from the battlefields as the Iranians go on digging for lost souls along the western front. New graves are still being dug for corpses yet to be found.
The tombs are not marked, like those of our world war dead, with simple, identical gravestones, but with slabs of inscribed marble, engraved pictures, photographs, flags, sometimes even snapshots taken by frightened comrades in the minutes after death, the shells still falling around them, pictures of bodies covered in blood. I had seen this before at Chasar in the mountains above Tehran. But this graveyard is on a galactic scale, the Gone With the Wind of cemeteries, Iran’s city of the dead. There is even a fountain that squirts blood-red water into the sky, the polar opposite of Saddam’s seashell and concrete monument in Baghdad, although both, in their way, possess the same dull, frightening sanctity.
So here lies Namatallah Hassani. “Born August 1st, 1960, martyred October 30th, 1983 at Penjwin, student of the Officer’s College,” it says on his grave. “You have to sacrifice yourself before love—that is to say, you must follow the Imam Hossein.” A face printed on a cloth screen shows Hassani, young with a small goatee beard. And here lies Mohamed Nowruzbei, “Martyred 1986, place of martyrdom Shalamcheh,” and Bassim Kerimi Koghani, “Born 1961, martyred April 22nd, 1986, place of martyrdom Fakeh.”
Many of these young men wrote their last messages to their families just before they died, long rhetorical speeches that begin with flowery praise of Khomeini and then disintegrate into humanity when they finish with personal wishes to their family. “I hope that I have done my duty by sacrificing my blood in the name of Islam,” wrote Mohamed Sarykhoni, born 1963, killed in action March 17th, 1984, at Piranshahr in Iranian Kurdistan. But then he goes on:
Give my best wishes to my father and mother, my sisters, my brothers, my friends. I hope they have been satisfied with me. I ask God to protect, forgive and bless you. To my wife, I say: it’s true that my life was very short and I couldn’t do all that I intended to provide for you. But I hope this short time we were together will be a wonderful memory for you. Take care of my child because he is my memory—for you and for my family too.
They speak from among the dead, these men. Hassan Jahan Parto, who was twenty-one when he was killed at Maimak in 1983, writes to his parents: “I advise my generous father and my family not to cry if I am martyred—don’t be sad because your sadness would disturb my soul.” But they do cry, the families, praying over the graves each Friday afternoon, eating beside their dead sons and husbands and brothers.
Mustafa Azadi, a Basij volunteer, was fighting in the hot desert at Shalamcheh when he was given the news that his nephew Haj Ali Jasmani had been killed. He offers me dates at the graveside. “He was one of the first men to join the Revolutionary Guards, and he fought until his martyrdom. He was hit by a shell. I was in the battle front when I heard the news. We were close to each other but it wasn’t possible for me to see his body. What do I think now? That all the martyrs have put a responsibility on our shoulders to defend our faith.”
This sounds too anachronistic to us Westerners, too much like John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” whose martyrs warn the living that “If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders fields.” Today we have seen through this martyrocracy: dictatorship—as opposed to government— by the dead. We think now of waste rather than responsibility. Robert Parry, a British soldier of the Second World War who participated in “regime change” in Iraq and Persia—he was part of the occupation force in Baghdad and Basra after the overthrow of Rashid Ali in 1941—was to write to me in 2004 with his own observations about the “lie” that dead soldiers “gave their lives for their country”:
Some magnificent men did just that by volunteering for suicide missions. Others gave their lives to save comrades. But for the vast majority coming back alive was their sustaining hope. Death took them without asking whether or not they wished to give. I lost a cousin in the 1914–18 war. Little more than a boy, half-trained, he was marched up into the front line. Arrived there, and out of curiosity, he looked out over the parape
t. A German sniper got him. No time, like Hamlet, to choose.
To give or not to give. That is the question.
I had taken Mujtaba Safavi, the ex-POW, with me to Behesht-i-Zahra, and he translated for each mourner, slowly, sometimes very moved by their stories. Bahrom Madani described his dead cousin Askar Tolertaleri, killed at Maout, as “fascinated by God.” Mohamed Junissian saw his son Said just ten days before his death. “We were talking at home. And his mother asked him: ‘Why are you going back to the front again?’ My son said he had to defend his country. His mother said: ‘But you can be more useful to us here.’ He said it was good to be at home but that the enemy was in our land and we have to push them back. I agreed with him.” An old man with a grey beard said he had lost his nineteen-year-old son Hormuz Alidadi in a minefield twelve years ago at Dashdaboz. “It was God’s will,” he said. “We thank God he fought for Islam and his country.”
Mohamed Taliblou only got his son Majid’s remains back in 1994, “a few bones” dug up in the mud at Penjwin. “I have no feelings. He went to defend Islam and his country. It was in 1985, and I heard he had been wounded. One of his friends who was with him at the front came to see me and said: ‘I saw Majid fall down, but I didn’t see if he died or not.’ It was during a counter-attack by the Iraqis. He was killed by a single bullet.”
Mohamed Reza Abdul-Malikian wrote of last goodbyes in a poem called “Answer”: