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Basra – blitzed and battered, but not beaten

25 January 1987

Marie Colvin sends the first front-line report from inside Basra, Iraq’s besieged city.

In Basra, they say the day belongs to Iraq; the night to Iran. Iraq’s second city is under siege, and Iranian shells slammed into houses for the seventeenth successive day yesterday.

Two missiles hit residential areas on Friday. Long bursts of automatic fire and the sound of close fighting intermittently carry across the Shatt al-Arab waterway that flows past Basra’s corniche to the Gulf.

During the day the Iranian shells fall only about once an hour. But at nightfall the shelling begins in earnest, perhaps because the Iranians are using it to cover troop movements.

The streets remain deserted and only military cars and trucks dare venture out. The shells seem to fall at random throughout the city, crashing into homes, businesses and shops. People here believe that if the Iranians cannot take Basra, they will at least make it uninhabitable.

Although thousands have fled, many remain cowering in homes behind sandbags, piled high to window tops, leaving only cracks to let in daylight and air. Basra has taken on the semblance of a giant military camp, but it has not emptied.

The train I arrived in from Baghdad consisted of 20 coaches filled with soldiers heading to the front. The few women aboard wore the black of mourning.

I took a bus which arrived at 8.30am at Saad Square in the heart of Basra. The shelling began at 8.45am. The few pedestrians on the street started hurrying for cover.

One man stopped and gave me sound advice. ‘It’s not a good idea to walk around Basra when they are shelling,’ he said. ‘You’re very exposed here.’

The Ashrar neighbourhood is one of the heaviest hit in the city. A nearby hotel had its windows blown out and an air conditioner hung from one screw in a window. Branches from trees and masonry littered the streets. On a road leading into the square there was a large crater with a dead horse lying next to it.

In front of the Sheraton Hotel on the Corniche burned-out cars are scattered along the street. All the windows in the building have been shattered and the empty swimming pool is filled with shrapnel from a shell that blew apart a taverna.

While I was there, another shell slammed into the hotel, but did not explode. The building shuddered. An hour later a shell landed nearby on Al-Watani Street, the main street through the city centre which is lined with stores and night clubs which were thriving only three weeks ago.

I took refuge in a basement with a businessman who had been sleeping behind his desk for 16 hours. He gave a depressing view of the city’s chances. ‘I think this is how Germany must have felt in the last days of the Second World War,’ he said. ‘People are just waiting. It’s not that they think the Iranians will take Basra, but maybe they will make it impossible for us to live here.’

The western part of the city has escaped heavy shelling, and there shops are still open and people are on the streets. Even at night soldiers stand outside at corner restaurants eating kebabs.

But everywhere there are tales of tragedy. One soldier was crying as he described how three friends had gone out to telephone home when the bombardment appeared to ease on Wednesday. All three were killed by a shell.

The hospitals are overwhelmed. Members of the Popular Army, the militia that handles logistics for the regular army, make daily rounds asking for blood donations and the sick are being moved out of hospitals to make room for soldiers.

Last week, with doctors exhausted by the influx of wounded soldiers, engineers were called to the hospital to help with amputations.

At about 9 on the evening of my arrival the incoming fire became more frequent. The Iraqis sent up huge pink flares that hung suspended over the Shatt for 10 minutes. It was night time, and night time in Basra belongs to Iran.

Black banners of death fly over Baghdad

25 January 1987

After more than two weeks of fighting, the Iranian offensive which began on 9 January appears to have established a bridgehead of about 40 square miles, according to military analysts here. The Iranian front lines are about six miles east of Basra, writes Marie Colvin in Baghdad.

Iranian troops have infiltrated at night, adding incrementally to their occupied ground. But they have not been able to breach the first main defence line between them and their target of Basra, on the east side of the Shatt al Arab waterway which, farther south, forms the border between the two countries.

Iraq has not launched a counter-offensive on the ground, the only way it could drive the Iranians out of the marshes. Iraqi officials insist this is a deliberate strategy. Iraq’s acting prime minister, Taha Yassin Ramadan, in an interview with The Sunday Times, said: ‘We could easily repulse the Iranians but such an operation would be at the expense of losing the opportunity to kill as many of them as possible. Oddly enough they keep up their influx into this killing zone.’

Both states have about 1 million men under arms. But Iran, with its population of 45m, can afford more casualties. It relies on ‘human waves’ of young volunteers, who have been promised heaven if they are killed, to overwhelm the enemy’s initial defences, before sending in the revolutionary guards.

Iraq, with its smaller population of 14 million, cannot afford the huge casualties such tactics entail.

As the Americans realised in Vietnam, a ground counter-offensive would prove costly in Iraqi lives and would be politically unacceptable at home. So the Iraqis in this battle, as before, have stood back and used their superiority in arms to shell the Iranian positions.

The Iranian show of muscle is potentially frightening because of Ayatollah Khomeini’s vow that he will spread his brand of Shi’ite fundamentalism to the Gulf, beyond Iraq. Kuwait is the next state in line and the sound of the fighting in southern Iraq can be heard late at night in its capital, where the summit will be held. But Iraq goes into the summit holding a strong hand. Other Islamic states are known to resent the fact that Iran has completely ignored Iraq’s peace initiatives. Iran has said it will not end the war until the regime of President Saddam Hussein is ousted, while Iraq would settle for peace and a return to international borders. Iran has also lost its claim to be a pure revolutionary state because of the recent revelations that it bought arms from ‘Great Satan’ America and ‘Little Satan’ Israel.

Wine and lipstick lay Iran’s ghost to rest

29 October 1989

It might have been Manhattan. Guests sipped Scotch or wine and grumbled about the government. The last visitors dined on pot luck from the fridge and took a late-night tour of the wine cellar.

But this was Tehran. The host bought his Scotch on the black market for about 600,000 rials a bottle, or £372. The ‘cellar’ was a backyard shed hiding huge bottles of wine brewed from a Boots kit. Tame peacocks preened on the lawn and someone quietly smoked opium.

Iran has changed under its new president, Hojatolisalam Hashemi Rafsanjani. Most well-to-do Iranians have made their peace with the regime, and the mullahs need their skills. Their lifestyle is tolerated so long as it stays behind the villa walls in wealthy, tree-shaded northern Tehran.

Although women must still cover their heads in public, a new Tehran ‘look’ has replaced the voluminous chador. Trendy women wear stove-pipe jeans and high heels under three-quarter-length black raincoats and cover their heads with flowered scarves. Lipstick and black eyeliner have returned.

The feeling of relaxation can be deceptive. A group of West Germans had to be rescued by their ambassador a few weeks ago after a local revolutionary committee broke up their late-night party. Three other foreigners sentenced to 90 lashes for having affairs with local women had to be spirited out of the country.

But among Iranians, even former royalists have come round to Rafsanjani as the alternative to radical clerics and renewed revolutionary turmoil. ‘He’s a mullah but he’s the only hope for Iran,’ said a wealthy doctor.

Having squared the rich, Rafsanjani faces a new and much more serious threat. Tehran’s poor southern suburbs, home to the ‘oppressed’ in whose name Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed revolution in 1979, are seething.

Wages are low, prices mount daily, and housing is hard to find. Hopes raised by Rafsanjani’s election in August are fading fast. The discontent is dangerous. The poor feel they have as much claim to the revolution as the mullahs. Their street protests drove out the shah, and they could do it again.

Anger is openly expressed. Ismail, 34, a shoemaker in the Shahpur bazaar in southern Tehran, was one of Khomeini’s foot soldiers.

‘Everyone around here went out in the streets,’ he recalls. ‘Even the six-year-olds. They promised us everything. They said it was Allah’s land and we would get some of it.’

Ten years later, Ismail pays 40,000 of his 60,000-rial monthly wage (£37) to rent one ground-floor room in which he, his wife and three children eat, sleep and receive visitors. The home is meticulously clean but shabby and cramped.

The family’s energy goes into finding food. Subsidies should make staples such as sugar, rice and cooking oil cheap. But Ismail’s wife cannot remember the last time the government distributed rice in their neighbourhood.

A black market mafia controls food distribution and locals say government officials take bribes. Corruption goes beyond the bazaar. A surgeon said middle-men received state money for drugs but provided cheaper, often toxic, substitutes and pocketed the difference.

Despite the privations, Rafsanjani still enjoys tremendous goodwill among the poor as well as the rich. But Iran’s future will be determined by whether he can overcome radicals in the regime who oppose both his desire to open Iran to the West and to give more freedom to private businessmen at home.

To secure his position he has been quietly dismantling revolutionary committees, set up to enforce Khomeini’s line, and sending their members back to their own jobs.

He also seems to get support from an unexpected source. Khomeini’s daughter, Fatima, said last week she was considering running for parliament in elections due in December. She is intelligent and more astute than her ambitious brother, Ahmed.

She said Rafsanjani’s policies ‘followed the Imam’s mind‘, and she can cite Khomeini’s name with more authority than any radical.

Rumours abound of struggles in the leadership. The strangest concerns a mysterious shipment of gold allegedly linked to radicals trying to finance their own projects.

One night earlier this month national television showed film of two lorries loaded with 10 tonnes of gold ingots, worth $120 million, allegedly captured near the border with Pakistan. Three days later the government announced the bars were in base metal painted gold. Nevertheless the entire smuggled shipment went to the central bank. Ominous graffiti reads: Khar Khodefi ‘You can’t fool us here’.

The unsettled climate comes at a time when Rafsanjani is trying to find an accommodation with the United States so that he can convince foreign investors their money will be secure in Iran. But the situation is stalemated. President George Bush wants Rafsanjani to show good faith by securing the release of hostages in Lebanon. Rafsanjani told western correspondents last week that Iran needed a western gesture of good faith first.

There is so little contact between them that a friendly embassy sends facsimiles of the Tehran Times’s leaders to Washington every day because Americans for a while believed the regime was planting messages for the administration in the newspaper’s editorial page.