Читать книгу The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East - Robert Fisk - Страница 13

In March 1917, 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment carefully peeled a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It was a turning point in his life. He had survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 250 kilometres from its capital of Constantinople. He had then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate and enduring the ‘grim battle’ for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens’s attention was Maude’s official ‘Proclamation’ to the people of Baghdad, printed in both English and Arabic.

That same 11 by 18 inch poster – now framed in black and gold – hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this chapter. Long ago, it was stained with damp – ‘foxed’, as booksellers say – which may have been Dickens’s perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times, witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall eighty-six years later, ‘to having travelled in his knapsack for a length of time’. She called it ‘his precious document’ and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy, of the false promises of the world’s greatest empire, commitments and good intentions and words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens’s death. They read now like a funeral dirge:

PROCLAMATION

… Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Hulagu* your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers … and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile … But you, people of Baghdad … are not to understand that it is the wish of the British government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals … It is the hope and desire of the British people … that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth … Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain … so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.

(sd.) F. S. Maude, Lieutenant General,

Commanding the British Forces in Iraq

Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army – which included Arab soldiers – in Mesopotamia. My father Bill was originally in the Cheshire Regiment but was serving in Ireland the year Charles Dickens entered Baghdad, and would be sent to the Western Front in 1918. Dickens had a longer war. He ‘spoke, often & admirably’, his daughter Hilda would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at fifty-five had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion. But Munro’s leadership did not save Dickens’s married sister’s nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers ‘my father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his “nephew”. I don’t know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years.’*

The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than eighty years later, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan sent me an amused letter along with a series of twelve very old postcards which were printed by the Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms, another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him, others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, a building shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by ‘local [Arab] notables’ that ‘we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition’. But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters and ended in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle. The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of UN sanctions that followed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait when spare parts for pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague at the Independent, Patrick Cockburn, found ‘tombstones … still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed … a quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage.’ In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign.

Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets

gaped emptily, the shops were mostly closed … In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia coffins and half mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town (three hundred people were dying of it every day) the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves … There was no longer any life in the town …

The British held out wildly optimistic hopes for a ‘new’ Iraq that would be regenerated by Western enterprise, not unlike America’s own pipedreams of 2003. ‘There is no doubt,’ The Sphere told its readers in 1915, ‘that with the aid of European science and energy it can again become the garden of Asia … and under British rule everything may be hoped.’

The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army, but who ‘always entertained friendly ideas towards the English’, found that in prison in India they were ‘insulted and humiliated in every way’. These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand over Iraq to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz – to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of ‘independence’ for the Arab world if it fought alongside the Allies against the Turks – on the grounds that ‘some of the Holy Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia’.

British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia – the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that – and that ‘clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end’ – which was not how General Maude expressed Britain’s ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917. Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that ‘taking Mesopotamia … means spending millions in irrigation and development …’ Once they were installed in Baghdad, the British decided that Iraq would be governed and reconstructed by a ‘Council’, formed partly of British advisers ‘and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants’. Later, they thought they would like ‘a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives’.

The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became ‘oriental secretary’ to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion. ‘… The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased … they can’t conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it.’ Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude’s proclamation eleven months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told – which, of course, they were not – that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name and which was in fact written by Sir Mark Sykes, the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with François Georges Picot for French and British control over much of the postwar Middle East.

By September of 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain’s plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. ‘I imagine,’ the Times correspondent wrote on 23 September, ‘that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination … from the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration.’

Within six months, Britain was fighting an insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. ‘Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression. What would happen if we withdrew?’ Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to ‘anarchy and confusion’. By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on ‘local political agitation, originated outside Iraq’, suggesting that Syria might be involved. For Syria 1920, read America’s claim that Syria was supporting the insurrection in 2004. Arnold Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq, took a predictable line. ‘We cannot maintain our position … by a policy of conciliation of extremists,’ he wrote. ‘Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money … We must be prepared … to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions.’

There was fighting in the Shiite town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The authorities demanded ‘the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot’ and the leading Shiite divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house. Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a British target. ‘Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out,’ a political officer wrote. The British now realised that they had made one major political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq: the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. Wilson put it all down not to nationalism but ‘anarchy plus fanaticism’. All the precedents were there. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi in 1920, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2004. For Badr in 1920, read Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004. For ‘anarchy and fanaticism’ in 1920, read ‘Saddam remnants’ and al-Qaeda in 2004.

Another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed an officer, Colonel Gerald Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad. The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted ‘heavy punishment’ on the tribe. The location of this battle is today known as Khan Dhari; in 2003 it would be the scene of the first killing of an American occupation soldier by a roadside bomb. In desperation, the British needed ‘to complete the façade of the Arab government’. And so, with Churchill’s enthusiastic support, the British were to give the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Feisal, the son of Sherif Husain, a consolation prize for the man whom the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria. ‘How much longer,’ The Times asked on 7 August 1920, ‘are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?’

The British suffered 450 dead in the Iraqi insurgency and more than 1,500 wounded. In that same summer of 1920, T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – estimated that the British had killed ‘about ten thousand Arabs in this rising. We cannot hope to maintain such an average …’* Henceforth, the British government – deprived of reconstruction funds by an international recession and confronted by an increasingly unwilling soldiery, which had fought during the 1914–18 war and was waiting for demobilisation – would rely on air power to impose its wishes.

The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill’s support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen. So urgent was the government’s need for modern bombers in the Middle East that, rather than freighting aircraft to the region by sea, it set up a ramshackle and highly dangerous transit system in which RAF crews flew their often un-airworthy bombers from Europe; at least eight pilots lost their lives in crashes and 30 per cent of the bombers were lost en route. In Iraq, Churchill urged the use of mustard gas, which had already been employed against Shia rebels in 1920. He wrote to Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, that ‘you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment upon recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them.’

Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, later Marshal of the Royal Air Force and the man who perfected the firestorm destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other great German cities in the Second World War, was employed to refine the bombing of Iraqi insurgents. The RAF found, he wrote much later, ‘that by burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we’d warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt, and they soon stopped their raiding and looting …’ This was what, in its emasculation of the English language, the Pentagon would now call ‘war lite’. But the bombing was not as surgical as Harris’s official biographer would suggest. In 1924, he had admitted that ‘they [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.’

Lawrence remarked in a 1920 letter to the Observer that ‘these risings take a regular course. There is a preliminary Arab success, then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats.’ This same description entirely fits American military operations in Iraq in 2004, once the occupying powers and their puppet government lost control of most of Iraq. But Lawrence had, as a prominent member of the T. E. Lawrence Society put it, a maddening habit of being sardonic or even humorous about serious matters which was one of his less attractive traits. ‘It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions,’ he wrote in the same letter. ‘Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shooting down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly …’

In a less unpleasant mood, however, Lawrence spoke with remarkable common sense about the Iraqi occupation. ‘The Arabs rebelled against the Turks during the war not because the Turk Government was notably bad,’ he wrote in a letter to The Times the same year, ‘but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects … but to win a show of their own. Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom.’

Far more prescient was an article Lawrence published in the Sunday Times in August 1920 in words that might have been directed to British prime minister Tony Blair eighty-four years later:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows … We are today not far from a disaster.

Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers in Iraq that he resigned his post as Senior Air Staff Officer Iraq because he could no longer ‘maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb’. He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen, and after the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Suleimaniya, Charlton ‘knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally.’ It was to be a policy followed with enthusiasm by the United States generations later.

The same false promises of a welcoming populace were made to the British and Americans, the same grand rhetoric about a new and democratic Iraq, the same explosive rebellion among Iraqis – in the very same towns and cities – the identical ‘Council of Ministers’ and the very same collapse of the occupation power, all followed historical precedent. Unable to crush the insurgency, the Americans turned to the use of promiscuous air assault, just as the British did before them: the destruction of homes in ‘dissident’ villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons were allegedly concealed, the slaughter by air strike of ‘terrorists’ near the Syrian border – who turned out to be members of a wedding party. Much the same policy of air bombing was adopted in the already abandoned democracy of post-2001 Afghanistan.

As for the British soldiers of the 1920s, we couldn’t ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East eighty years ago. So we buried them in the North Wall Cemetery in Baghdad where they still lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties, opposite the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy. Among them is the mausoleum of General Maude, who died in Baghdad within eight months of his victory because he chose to drink unboiled milk: a stone sarcophagus with the one word ‘MAUDE’ carved on its lid. When I visited the cemetery to inspect it in the summer of 2004, the Iraqi guarding the graves warned me to spend no more than five minutes at the tomb lest I be kidnapped.

Feisal, third son of the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, was proclaimed constitutional monarch by a ‘Council of Ministers’ in Baghdad on 11 July 1922 and a referendum gave him a laughably impossible 96 per cent of the vote, a statistic that would become wearingly familiar in the Arab world over the next eighty years. As a Sunni Muslim and a monarch from a Gulf tribe, he was neither an Iraqi nor a member of Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority. It was our first betrayal of the Shias of Iraq. There would be two more within the next hundred years. Henceforth, Mesopotamia would be known as Iraq, but its creation brought neither peace nor happiness to its people. An Anglo-Iraqi treaty guaranteeing the special interests of Britain was signed in the face of nationalist opposition; in 1930, a second agreement provided for a twenty-five-year Anglo-Iraqi alliance with RAF bases at Shuaiba and Habbaniya. Iraqi nationalist anger was particularly stirred by Britain’s continued support for a Jewish state in its other mandate of Palestine. Tribal revolts and a 1936 coup d’état created further instability and – after a further coup in 1941 brought the pro-German government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to power – Britain reinvaded Iraq all over again, fighting off Luftwaffe attacks launched from Vichy Syria and Lebanon – and occupying Basra and Baghdad.* British forces paused outside the capital to allow the regent, the Emir Abdullah, to be first to enter Baghdad, a delay that allowed partisans of Rashid Ali to murder at least 150 of the city’s substantial Jewish community and burn and loot thousands of properties. Five of the coup leaders were hanged and many others imprisoned; one of the latter was Khairallah Tulfa, whose four-year-old nephew, Saddam Hussein, would always remember the anti-British nationalism of his uncle. The German plan for a second Arab revolt, this time pro-Axis and supported by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini – whose journey to Berlin will be told later in our story – came to nothing.

But Iraq remained an inherently weak state, young King Feisal the Second having no nationalist credentials – since he was anyway not an Iraqi – and since the government was still led by a group of former Arab Ottoman officials like Nuri es-Said, who contrived to be prime minister fourteen times before his most bloody demise. On 14 July 1958, Iraqi forces under Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qassim stormed the royal palace. Es-Said was shot down after trying to escape Baghdad dressed as a woman. Feisal, the regent and the rest of the royal family were surrounded by soldiers and machine-gunned to death after trying to flee the burning palace. Qassim’s new military regime enraged the United States. Not only did Qassim take Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad pact but he threatened to invade Kuwait. He also failed to quell a mass Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq and was eventually brought down by another coup in February 1963, this one largely organised by the Baath party – but with the active assistance of the CIA. Qassim was taken to the radio station in Baghdad and murdered. His bullet-riddled body was then shown on television, propped up on a chair as a soldier laughingly kicked its legs.

The Baath had been founded in Syria in 1941 – inspired, ironically, by Britain’s re-invasion of Iraq – as a secular, pan-Arab movement intended to lift the burden of guilt and humiliation which had lain across the Arab world for so many generations. During the centuries of Ottoman rule, Arabs had suffered famine and a steady loss of intellectual power. Education had declined over the years and many millions of Arabs never learned to read and write. Baath means ‘rebirth’, and although its Syrian Christian founder, Michel Aflaq, was himself a graduate of the Sorbonne – and wore an outsize fez – it had a natural base among the poor, the villages and tribes and, of course, within the army. Saddam Hussein was an early adherent, and among the first Baathists to try to kill Qassim; his subsequent flight across Iraq, his own extraction of a bullet in his leg with a razor-blade, and his swim to freedom across the Tigris river – at almost exactly the same location where American Special Forces were to find him in 2003 – was to become an official Saddam legend.

Despite splits within the Baath, Saddam Hussein emerged as vice-chairman of the party’s Regional Command Council after a further coup in 1968. He would remain nominally the second most powerful man in Iraq until 16 July 1979, when President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam’s cousin, retired. There followed the infamous dinner party at the presidential palace at which Saddam invited his own party cadres to denounce themselves. The execution of his Baathist colleagues began within days.

As Saddam slowly took control of Iraq, the Kurdish insurrection began again in the north and President Sadat of Egypt, by his journey to Jerusalem in November 1977, took the most populous Arab country out of the Arab – Israeli conflict. The Camp David agreement made this final. So it was that Saddam would preside over what the Iraqis immediately called the ‘Confrontation Front Summit’ in Baghdad. This involved turning the Iraqi capital – however briefly – into the centre of the Arab world, giving Saddam exposure on the eve of his takeover from President al-Bakr. A vast tent was erected behind the summit palace, five hundred journalists were flown into Iraq from around the world – all telephone calls made by them would be free as well as bugged – and housed in hotels many miles from Baghdad, trucked to a ‘press centre’ where they would be forbidden any contact with delegates and watched by posses of young men wearing white socks. We knew they were policemen because each wore a sign on his lapel that said ‘Tourism’.

The latter was supposed to occupy much of our time, and I have an imperishable memory of a long bus journey down to Qurnah, just north of Basra, to view the Garden of Eden. Our bus eventually drew up next to a bridge where a fetid river flowed slowly between treeless banks of grey sand beneath a dun-coloured sky. One of the cops put his left hand on my arm and pointed with the other at this miserable scene, proudly uttering his only touristic announcement of the day: ‘And this, Mr Robert, is the Garden of Eden.’

Before the summit, a lot of Arab leaders were forced to pretend to be friends in the face of ‘the traitor Sadat’. President Assad was persuaded to forget the brutal schism between his country’s Baath party and that of al-Bakr and Saddam. The Syrians announced that Assad and al-Bakr would discuss ‘a common front against the mad Zionist attack against our region and the capitulationist, unilateral reconciliation of the Egyptian regime with Israel’. Once in Baghdad, Assad, who had maintained an entire army division on his eastern border in case Iraq invaded – he already had 33,000 Syrian troops deployed in Lebanon – and al-Bakr talked in ‘an atmosphere of deep understanding’, according to the Syrian government newspaper Tishrin. Unity in diversity. King Hussein of Jordan would have to travel to the city in which the Hashemite monarchy had been exterminated only twenty years earlier. Baath party officials were sent to the overgrown royal cemetery in Baghdad to scythe down the long grass around the graves of the Hashemites in case the king wanted to visit them. Even Abu Nidal, the head of the cruellest of Palestinian hit-squads, was packed off to Tikrit lest his presence in Baghdad offend the PLO leader, Yassir Arafat.

And so they all gathered, old al-Bakr and the young Saddam and Arafat and Hussein and Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Reporters were banned from the conference chamber but photographers were allowed to view these men much in the way that visitors are permitted to see the embalmed body of Lenin. Masquerading as part of Michael Cole’s BBC television crew, I walked into the chamber and shuffled along the rows of princes and presidents who sat in waxworks attitudes of concern and apprehension, past Arafat, who repeatedly and embarrassingly gave a thumbs-up to the cameras, past a frowning King Hussein and a glowering Saddam. I watched the future Iraqi leader carefully, and when his eyes briefly met mine I noted a kind of contempt in them, something supercilious. This was not, I thought, a man who had much faith in conferences.

And he was right. The Saudis made sure that they didn’t anger the United States, and after three days of deliberation the Arab mountain gave forth a mouse. Egypt would be put under an economic boycott – just like Israel – and a committee would be dispatched to Cairo to try to persuade Sadat to renounce Camp David. To sweeten the deal, they were to offer him $7 billion annually for the next ten years to support Egypt’s bankrupt economy. The unenviable task of leading this forlorn delegation to Cairo fell, rather sadly, to Selim el-Hoss, the prime minister of Lebanon whose own war-battered country was then more deeply divided than the Arab world itself. Sadat snubbed them all, refusing to meet the ministers. The money was a bribe, he accurately announced, and ‘all the millions in the world cannot buy the will of Egypt’.

The nature of the Iraqi regime was no secret, nor was its ruthlessness. The British had already become involved in a trade dispute with the government in 1978 after Iraqi agents in London murdered Abdul Razzak al-Nayef, a former Iraqi prime minister who had been condemned to death by the Baghdad authorities. A British businessman, a representative of Wimpey’s, had been languishing for a month in Baghdad’s central prison without any charges, and a British diplomat, Richard Drew, was dragged from his car in the city and beaten up, apparently by plain-clothes police.

But the search for ‘spies’ within the body politic of Iraq had been established eleven years earlier, and to understand the self-hatred which this engendered in the regime – and Saddam’s role in the purges – it is essential to go back to the record of its early days. After I first saw Saddam in Baghdad, I began to build up a file on him back home in Beirut. I went back to the Lebanese newspaper archives; Beirut was under nightly civil war bombardment but its journalists still maintained their files. And there, as so often happened in the grubby newspaper libraries of Lebanon, a chilling pattern began to emerge. At its congress in November 1968, the Baath party, according to the Baghdad newspaper Al-Jumhouriya, had made ‘the liquidation of spy networks’ a national aspiration; and the following month, the newly installed Baath party discovered a ‘conspiracy’ to overthrow its rule. It accused eighty-four people of being involved, including the former prime minister, Dr Abdul Rahman Bazzaz, and his former defence minister, Major General Abdul Aziz Uquili. The charges of spying, a Lebanese newspaper reported at the time, ‘were levelled in the course of statements made in a special Baghdad radio and television programme by two of the accused, an ex-soldier from the southern port of Basra and a lawyer from Baghdad.’ The interview was personally conducted, according to the Beirut press, ‘by Saddam Tikriti, secretary general of the Iraqi leadership of the ruling Baath party’. According to the same newspaper, ‘the interview was introduced by a recording of the part of the speech delivered by President al-Bakr in Baghdad on December 5th [1968] where he said “there shall no longer be a place on Iraqi soil for spies”.’

The slaughter began within six weeks. At dawn on 27 January 1969, fourteen Iraqis, nine of them Jews, were publicly hanged after a three-man court had convicted them of spying for Israel. They claimed that Izra Naji Zilkha, a 51-year-old Jewish merchant from Basra, was the leader of the ‘espionage ring’. Even as the men were hanging in Liberation Square in Baghdad and in Basra, a new trial began in Baghdad involving thirty-five more Iraqis, thirteen of them Jews. Only hours before the January hangings, the Baath – of which the forty-year-old ‘Saddam Tikriti’ was just now, according to the Lebanese press, ‘the real authority’ – organised a demonstration at which thousands of Iraqis were marched to the square to watch the public executions and hear a government statement which announced that the party was ‘determined to fulfil its promise to the people for the elimination of spies’. The Baghdad Observer later carried an interview with the revolutionary court president, Colonel Ali Hadi Witwet, who said that the court reached its verdicts regardless of the defendants’ religion, adding that seven Jews had been acquitted. When the next batch of ‘spies’ were executed on 20 February, all eight condemned men were Muslims. As usual, their conviction had been secret, although the night before their execution Baghdad radio broadcast what it claimed was a recording of the hearing. The condemned men had been accused of collecting information about Iraqi troop deployment. Their leader, Warrant Officer Najat Kazem Khourshid, was one of the eight, although his ‘trial’ was not broadcast. Baghdad radio later told its listeners that ‘the Iraqi people expressed their condemnation of the spies.’

By May 1969, the Baathist failure to suppress the Kurdish rebellion had led to the arrest of a hundred more Iraqis, including twenty-four who had served in the previous regime. One of these was the lord mayor of Baghdad, Midhat al-Haj Sirri, who was accused of leading a CIA intelligence network. Former ministers arrested included Ismail Khairallah, Fouad Rikabi, Rashid Musleh, Siddik Shansal and Shukri Saleh Zaki. The Baath leadership sought the ‘people’s’ opinion. Delegates to a meeting of farmers’ trade unions roared their support when President al-Bakr declared that he was determined to ‘chop off the heads of the traitors’. The lord mayor was duly brought to the Baghdad television studios to ‘confess’ his role as a CIA agent while another defendant, Dr Yussef al-Mimar – an ex-director general of the ministry of agrarian reform – broke down and implicated former senior ministers in the defection of Mounir Rufa, an Iraqi air force pilot who had flown his Mig-21 fighter-bomber to Israel three years earlier.

Al-Mimar also claimed that he was recruited into the CIA by an Iraqi businessman in Beirut in 1964, and ordered by a CIA front company masquerading as investment brokers first to open an investment business in Libya and then to secure an invitation to Baghdad for President Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury, Robert Anderson. How much of this ‘confession’ bore any relation to the truth it is impossible to know. Four Iraqi civilians – Taleb Abdullah al-Saleh, Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, Abdul Jalil Mahawi and Abdul Razzak Dahab – had been hanged the previous month for spying for the CIA. On 15 May 1969, the Baathist regime hanged another ten men after one of them, Abdul Hadi Bachari, had appeared in a television ‘confession’. They were accused of working for both Israel and the United States and included an army sergeant and an air force lieutenant.

In June, for the first time, a convicted ‘spy’ told Iraqi television he had worked for British intelligence. Named as Zaki Abdul Wahab, a legal adviser to the Iraqi businessman in Beirut, he was accused in the Baghdad press of being ‘a British-American agent’. By July, another eighty prominent Iraqis were on trial for espionage. They were merely the prelude to thousands of hangings, almost all for ‘subversion’ and ‘spying’. Eleven years later, when Saddam Hussein was confirmed in power, Iraqi hangmen were dispatching victims to the gallows at the rate of a hundred every six weeks. In 1980, Amnesty International reported the recent executions of 257 people.

In 1979 came Saddam’s own arrest of five of the twenty-one members of his revolutionary command council, accusing all of them of espionage for Syria, whose president had visited Baghdad only two years earlier for those talks of ‘deep understanding’ with al-Bakr. The revolutionary court condemned the five men to death without appeal, and the very next morning, Saddam Hussein and several of his senior advisers went to the central prison and personally executed them. Saddam himself used his service revolver to blow out one of the victims’ brains.

In those early days of the regime, the names of newly executed Iraqis would be read on state television every afternoon at 4 p.m. An old Iraqi friend of mine would recall for me in 2003 how her relatives were imprisoned and how, each afternoon, she would dose herself with morphine before sitting down in front of the television screen. ‘I don’t know how I survived those broadcasts,’ she said. ‘The man who read the names had a thin face and sharp eyes and he read them out in a very harsh way. His name was Mohamed al-Sahhaf.’ This was the same Mohamed al-Sahhaf who, grey-haired and humorous, was minister of information during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, the ‘Comical Ali’ who provoked President George W. Bush to laugh at his claims that US forces had not reached Baghdad when their tanks were crossing the Tigris river. From brutal apparatchik to friendly buffoon in just thirty years. He was later to record his memories for Al-Arabia satellite television – without recalling his days as spokesman for the hangman of Baghdad.

So what lay behind this ferocious passion for executions that Saddam manifested, this controlled cruelty that became part of the regime’s existence?* I once asked this of Mohamed Heikal, as we sat on the lawn of his farm in the Nile Delta, wildly coloured birds cawing from the palm trees and a servant producing chilled beer in delicate mugs of blue glass.

‘I will tell you a story, Robert,’ he began. Heikal’s stories were always brilliant. With Heikal, you had to remain silent throughout. His recollections were a theatrical performance as well as a feat of memory, his hands raised before his face when he wished to express shock, eyebrows arching towards heaven, Havana cigar brandished towards me if he thought I was not paying sufficient attention; they were stories that usually had a sting in the tail.† Heikal knew Saddam Hussein – in fact, he knew almost every Arab leader and was probably treated with greater deference than most of them – but he had no illusions about the Baath party.

‘On my first visit to Baghdad after the takeover of power, I met the minister of planning. He was a very nice, urbane, cultured man whom I immediately liked. When I returned to Iraq some time later, I asked to see him again. But each time I asked a minister where he was, I would be sidestepped. “You must ask the president this question when you meet him,” they would say. Every time I asked to see the minister of planning, it was the same reply. So when I came to see Saddam, I asked him if I could meet the minister of planning again. Saddam just looked at me. Why did I want to see him? he asked me. I said he seemed a very intelligent and decent man. Saddam looked at me very seriously and said: “We scissored his neck!” I was taken aback. Why? I asked. What had he done wrong? Had Saddam any proof of wrongdoing? “We don’t need proof,” Saddam replied. “This isn’t a white revolution in Iraq. This is a red revolution. Suspicion is enough.” I was speechless. Oh yes, and Robert, that blue beer mug you are drinking from – it was given to me personally as a gift by Saddam Hussein. It is Iraqi glass.’ I put down the beer.

I am in Tehran now, in 1997, in a cheap hotel in the centre of the city and, later, at a cosy restaurant that serves jugs of cold drinking yoghurt, and sitting opposite me is Dr Hussain Shahristani, holder of a doctorate in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto and formerly chief scientific adviser to Saddam’s Iraqi Atomic Energy Organisation, a Shia Muslim married to a Canadian with three children. His story is so frightening, so eloquent, so moving and so terrible that it deserves to be told in full, in his own words, without a journalist’s interruptions. The next pages therefore belong to Dr Shahristani:

In 1979, there was a backlash by the regime in Iraq because of activists in the Shia community. By the summer, the regime had started large-scale executions and mass arrests. I voiced my concern about human rights at atomic energy meetings. I knew I was very crucial to their atomic energy programme – I thought that they would not arrest me for voicing my concern. I wanted Saddam to know what I said. I was wrong. A little earlier, the regime had arrested and executed one of my cousins, Ala Shahristani – he was on his honeymoon and had only been married for fourteen days. He was not associated with any party. He was arrested in the street and taken away and his wife and sister were brought to the torture chamber to see him. They had given him a hideous torture. They had filled him with gas through his rectum and then beaten him. They threatened his young wife in front of him and then they banged his head into the wall, so hard that the wall was shaking. Then they killed him.

By this time, Saddam was president and he came to see us and he told us that he was going to redirect us at the Atomic Energy Organisation, that we were going to work on what he called ‘strategic projects’. Until July 1979, we had been involved on purely peaceful applications of atomic energy. I and my colleague, Dr Ziad Jaafar, were Saddam’s two advisers; we were reputable, internationally trained scientists. We were also close friends. I discussed this with him. I said: ‘If Saddam wants military applications, no way am I going to continue with this organisation.’

At that time, we didn’t take it seriously because we knew Iraq had limitations. I assumed I would be just thrown out of the organisation. They came to the Atomic Energy Organisation when I was talking to the board of directors on December 4th 1979. They said: ‘Could we have a word with Dr Hussain?’ As I stepped outside, they put handcuffs on me, shoved me into a car and took me to the security headquarters in Baghdad. At security headquarters, they took me in to the director of security, Dr Fadel Baraq, who was later executed by Saddam. He said that some people who had been arrested and brought to the headquarters had given my name. I denied any involvement in political parties, I said I was a practising Muslim but that I had never taken part in subversive activities.

Then they brought me to a man I knew, Jawad Zoubeidi, a building contractor. He had been so badly tortured, I hardly recognised him. Jawad said: ‘I know Dr Hussain. He comes to the mosque and takes part in our religious activities.’ For them, ‘religious activities’ meant anti-government activities. They said to me: ‘Better tell us all or you’ll regret it.’ Then they took me to the torture chamber in the basement. They blindfolded me and pushed me down the stairs into the chamber. It was a big room. My hands were tied behind my back and I was pulled up into the air by my hands. After five minutes, the pain was so severe in the shoulders that it was unbearable. Then they gave me shocks on sensitive parts of my body. By the end of the beating you are naked. There were shocks on my genitals and other parts of my body.

After fifteen minutes they came to me and said: ‘Sign.’ I was in a very cold sweat. They know you’ll faint. They brought me down and gave me a short rest. I fell asleep for a few minutes. But this went on day and night, day and night. It went on for twenty-two days and nights. Four of them did it, in shifts. Baraq, who had a PhD in military psychology from Moscow, was standing there. At one point, he said: ‘Look, Dr Hussain, I’ll tell you what your problem is – you think you are smart enough and we are stupid. You may be smart in your own field but we know what we are doing. Just tell us what you know and get this over.’

I knew Saddam. He knew me. But this could happen to me. I remember once, Saddam said to me: ‘You are a scientist. I am a politician. I will tell you what politics is about. I make a decision. I tell someone else the opposite. Then I do something which surprises even myself.’

The torture techniques in Baghdad were routine and varied in severity. The electric shocks could be everywhere. But sometimes they would burn people on the genitals and go on burning until they were completely burned off. They did the same with toes. They sometimes beat people with iron on the stomach or the chest. But with me, they were very careful not to leave any sign on me. I saw one man and they had used an iron on his stomach. They used drills and made holes in bones, arms and legs. I saw an officer, Naqib Hamid, and they dissolved his feet in acid. There was another torture where they would put sulphuric acid in a tub. They would take a man and start by dissolving his hands. Once, the founder of the Dawa party,* Abdul Saheb Khail, was totally dissolved. Baraq said to me: ‘Have you heard about Khail – there is where we dissolved him.’

In the final stages of torture, they have a table with an electrical saw. They can saw off a hand or a foot. The majority talk. The people who have refused to talk are exceptional. Adnan Salman, a head of the Dawa, refused to talk. He was brought in – I saw him – and by that time they had a lot of confessions by other men who had been tortured. Adnan Salman was a teacher. Adnan knew – he was prepared. He told them: ‘My name is Adnan Salman. I am in charge of the Dawa party and none of these people are responsible for our activities. These will be my last words to you. You will never extract a single word from me.’ They brought three doctors and told them that if Adnan died under torture they would be executed. He didn’t utter a single word. Sometimes you would hear the doctors, so scared because they could not bring him back from unconsciousness. I was in another torture room and could hear everything. I was in Abu Ghraib prison when I heard Adnan had been executed. He had not died under torture.

One prisoner told me he was seventeen and was the youngest prisoner and so they made him sweep the corridors of the internal security headquarters every morning at seven o’clock. He saw a peasant woman from the south with tattoos, he said, a woman from the marshes with a girl of ten and a boy of about six. She was carrying a baby in her arms. The prisoner told me that as he was sweeping, an officer came and told the woman: ‘Tell me where your husband is – very bad things can happen.’ She said: ‘Look, my husband takes great pride in the honour of his woman. If he knew I was here, he would have turned himself in.’ The officer took out his pistol and held the daughter up by the braids of her hair and put a bullet into her head. The woman didn’t know what was happening. Then he put a bullet into the boy’s head. The woman was going crazy. He took the youngest boy by the legs and smashed the baby’s brain on a wall. You can imagine the woman. The officer told the young prisoner to bring the rubbish trolley and put the three children in it, on top of the garbage, and ordered the woman to sit on the bodies. He took the trolley out and left it. The officer had got into the habit of getting rid of people who were worthless.

I was taken to the revolutionary court. Mussalam al-Jabouri was the judge and there were two generals on each side of him. They asked me my name and if I had anything to say. The charges were that I was a ‘Zionist stooge’, an ‘Israeli spy’ and ‘working with the Americans’ and ‘a collaborator with the Iranians’. They realised I wasn’t a member of the Dawa party. The court handed down a sentence they had decided before I was taken there – life imprisonment. My own defence lawyer called for my execution. He had only a written statement to make: ‘This person has closed the doors of mercy – give him the severest penalty.’ I said to the court: ‘This Iraqi state which you are governing, we established it with our blood. My father was sentenced by the British, as for me I am president of the Palestinian Association in Toronto. A person with this background cannot be an Israeli agent.’ The lawyer said: ‘So you are a Russian spy.’ I said: ‘I have a family tree – from the Prophet Mohamed’s time, peace be upon him.’

I was taken to Abu Ghraib prison and put in a small cell with forty people inside. By the time I left in May, 1980, we were sixty people to a cell. I worked out that there were three death sentences for every prison sentence. So when a thousand people went to Abu Ghraib, that meant there were three thousand executions. That May, they took me to the Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters and now the torture was much worse. In the previous torture centre, they were allowed a 10 per cent death rate. Here they were allowed 100 per cent. The head was Barzan Tikriti, the head of Saddam’s human rights delegation to Geneva. Dr Ziad Jaafar was brought there because he told Saddam that the nuclear programme couldn’t continue without me, without Dr Shahristani. He said that Iraq needed Shahristani the chemist. Saddam took this as a threat. Jaafar was never shown to me. They tortured twenty people to death in front of him. So he agreed to return to work.

Then one day they came and shaved me and showered me, brought me new pyjamas, blindfolded me, put cologne on me, put me in a car and took me to a room in what looked like a palace. There was a bedroom, sitting room, videos, a television … Then one day Barzan Tikriti came with Abdul-Razak al-Hashimi – he was to be Iraqi ambassador to France during the Kuwaiti occupation in 1990. He was a Baathist, a very silly man with a PhD in geology from the United States. He was the vice-president of the Atomic Energy Organisation and he stood by the door like a guard. I just sat there, lying down, both my hands completely paralysed. A man arrived. He said: ‘You don’t know me but we know you well. Saddam was extremely hurt when he heard you had been arrested – he was very angry with the intelligence people. He knows about your scientific achievements. He would like you to go back to your work at the Atomic Energy Organisation.’ I said: ‘I am too weak after what I have been through.’ He said: ‘We need an atomic bomb.’ Barzan Tikriti then said: ‘We need an atomic bomb because this will give us a long arm to reshape the map of the Middle East. We know you are the man to help us with this.’ I told him that all my research was published in papers, that I had done no research on military weapons. ‘I am the wrong person for the task you are looking for,’ I said. He replied: ‘I know what you can do – and any person who is not willing to serve his country is not worthy to be alive.’

I was sure I would be executed. I said: ‘I agree with you that it is a man’s duty to serve his country but what you are asking me to do is not a service to my country.’ He replied: ‘Dr Hussain, so long as we agree that a man must serve his country, the rest is detail. You should rest now because you are very tired.’ After this, I was kept in several palaces over a number of months. They brought my wife to see me, once at a palace that had been the home of Adnan Hamdan, a member of the revolutionary command council who had been executed by Saddam. But they realised I wouldn’t work for them and I was sent back to Abu Ghraib. I spent eight years there. I wasn’t allowed books, newspapers, radio or any contact with any human being.

I knew I was doing the right thing. I never regretted the stand I took. I slept on the concrete floor of my cell, under an army blanket that was full of lice. There was a tap and a bucket for a toilet. I got one plate of food every day, usually stew without meat in it. I suffered from severe back pains from sleeping on the concrete. I made up mathematical puzzles and solved them. I thought about the people who had accepted the regime, who could have fought it when it was weak and did not. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I had done the right thing. I knew that my family would understand the reasons for it. I wished Bernice would take the kids and leave the country. That would have been much easier for me. She said that as long as I was alive, she would never leave the country.

Hussain Shahristani eventually escaped from Abu Ghraib during an American air raid in February 1990 after friends helped him disguise himself as an Iraqi intelligence officer, and he made his way via Suleimaniya to Iran. Bernice remembered a visit to her husband in prison when she could not recognise his face. ‘I could only recognise his clothes,’ she said. ‘But I knew it was him because I saw a tear running down his cheek.’

Just two months after Dr Shahristani’s mind-numbing transfer from Abu Ghraib prison to the palace in 1980, Saddam decided to deny what he had already admitted to Shahristani the previous year: his plan to possess nuclear weapons. I watched this typical Saddam performance, staged on 21 July 1980, in front of hundreds of journalists – myself among them – in the hall of Iraq’s highly undemocratic national assembly. Perhaps the chamber was just too big, because when he entered, the first impression was of a tiny man in an overlarge double-breasted jacket, a rather simple soul with a bright tie and a glossy jacket. He began not with the cheery wave adopted by so many Arab leaders but with a long, slightly stilted salute, like a private soldier desperately ill at ease among generals. But when Saddam spoke, the microphone – deliberately, no doubt – pitched his voice up into Big Brother volume, so that he boomed at us, his sarcasm and his anger coming across with venom rather than passion. You could imagine what it was like to be denounced before the revolutionary command council.

With an autocrat’s indignation that anyone should believe Iraq wanted to build an atom bomb – but with the suggestion that the Arabs were perfectly capable of doing so if they chose – he denied that his country was planning to produce nuclear weapons. He also condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and US military involvement in the Gulf, sneered at the Syrian Baathist leadership, accused British businessmen of bribery and belittled accurate reports of Kurdish unrest in Iraq. ‘We have no programme concerning the manufacture of the atomic bomb,’ he said. ‘We have no such programme for the Israelis to thwart … we want to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes.’

His argument was artful. ‘A few years ago, Zionists in Europe used to spread the news that the Arabs were backward people, that they did not understand technology and were in need of a protector. The Arabs, the Zionists said, could do nothing but ride camels, cry over the ruins of their houses and sleep in tents. Two years ago, the Zionists and their supporters came up with a declaration that Iraq was about to produce the atom bomb. But how could a people who only knew how to ride camels produce an atom bomb?’ Iraq had signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but no one asked if the Israelis were making atom bombs at their nuclear centre at Dimona in the Negev desert. ‘Arab nations are on the threshold of a new age and will succeed in using atomic energy. Millions of Arabs will be able to use this advanced technology.’ Saddam kept using the word ‘binary’ over and over again, as if Iraq had just split the atom.

His statements were laced with references to the ‘Arab nation’, and the ghost of Gamal Abdel Nasser – whose name he invoked on at least three occasions – was clearly intended to visit the proceedings. Regarding his own regime as an example of the purest pan-Arab philosophy, he clearly saw himself as the aspiring leader of the Arab world. But he could not resist, just briefly, hinting at the truth. ‘Whoever wants to be our enemy,’ he shouted at one point, ‘can expect us as an enemy to be totally different in the very near future.’ He had made his point: if the Arabs were able to use advanced nuclear technology in the near future and if Israel’s enemy was going to be ‘totally different’, this could only mean that he was planning to possess nuclear weapons. It was no secret that Iraq’s Osirak reactor was expected to be commissioned in just five months’ time.

Then came Iran. He believed, he said, in the right of the Iranian people to self-determination, but ‘Khomeini has become a murderer in his own country.’ At one point, Saddam began to speak of the 35,000 Iraqi Shiites of Iranian origin whom he had just expelled from Iraq – he did not mention the figure, nor the fact that many of them held Iraqi passports – and he suddenly ended in mid-sentence. ‘We have expelled a few people of Iranian origin or people who do not belong to Iraq,’ he began. ‘But now, if they want to come back …’ And there he suddenly ended his remark. It was an oblique but ominous warning of the punishment Saddam intended to visit upon Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

His press conference went on long into the night and into the early hours of the next morning. He spoke without notes and, although he would not regard the comparison as flattering, he often improvised his speech as he went along in much the same way that President Sadat of Egypt used to do. I noted in my report to The Times next day that ‘when the president smiled – which he did only rarely – he was greeted by bursts of applause from fellow ministers and Baath party officials.’ When several of us were close to Saddam after his speech, he offered his hand to us. In my notes, I recorded that it was ‘soft and damp’.

Two years later, Richard Pim, who had been head of Winston Churchill’s prime ministerial Map Room at Downing Street during the Second World War, used exactly the same words – ‘soft and damp’ – when he described to me his experience of shaking hands in Moscow with Josef Stalin, upon whom Saddam consciously modelled himself. It was one of Stalin’s biographers who noted in 2004 that in the 1970s Saddam had dutifully visited all of Stalin’s fifteen scenic seaside villas on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia, some of them Tsarist palaces; these were presumably the inspiration for the vast imperial – and largely useless – palaces which Saddam built for himself all over Iraq.*

For the West, however, Saddam was a new Shah in the making. That, I suspected, was what his press conference was all about. He would be a Shah for us and a Nasser for the Arabs. His personality cult was already being constructed. He was a new version of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, it was said in Baghdad – he would soon become a far more disturbing version of an ancient Arab warrior – and his face now appeared across the country, in Kurdish dress, in Arab kuffiah, in business suit, digging trenches in guerrilla uniform, revolver tucked Arafat-style into his trouser belt, on dinar banknotes. He was, a local poet grovellingly wrote, ‘the perfume of Iraq, its dates, its estuary of the two rivers, its coast and waters, its sword, its shield, the eagle whose grandeur dazzles the heavens. Since there was an Iraq, you were its awaited and promised one.’

Saddam had already developed the habit of casually calling on Iraqis in their homes to ask if they were happy – they always were, of course – and my colleague Tony Clifton of Newsweek was himself a witness to this kind of Saddamite aberration. During an interview with the president, Clifton rashly asked if Saddam was never worried about being assassinated. ‘The interpreter went ashen-grey with fear and there was a long silence,’ Clifton was to recall. ‘I think Saddam knew some English and understood the question. Then the interpreter said something to him and Saddam roared with laughter and clapped me on the shoulder. He didn’t stop laughing, but he said to me: “Leave this room now! Go out onto the street! Go and ask anyone in Iraq: Do you love Saddam?” And he went on laughing. And all the people in the room burst out laughing. Of course, you couldn’t really do that, could you? You couldn’t go up to Iraqis and ask them that. They were going to tell you that they loved him.’*

Saddam had inherited the same tribal and religious matrix as the British when they occupied Iraq in 1917. The largest community, the Shia, were largely excluded from power but constituted a permanent threat to the Sunni-dominated Baath party. Not only were their magnificent golden shrines at Najaf and Kerbala potent symbols of the great division in Islamic society, but they represented a far larger majority in Iran. Just so long as the Shah ruled Iraq’s eastern neighbour, its religious power could be checked. But if the Shah was deposed, then the Baathists would be the first to understand the threat which the Shia of both countries represented.

Shiites have disputed the leadership of Islam since the eighth-century murder of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed, at Najaf and believe that Ali’s descendants, the Imams, are the lawful successors of Mohamed. Their fascination with martyrdom and death would, if made manifest in modern war, create a threat for any enemy. The Sunnis, adherents of the sunnah (practice) of Mohamed, became commercially powerful from their close association with the Mamelukes and the Ottoman Turks. In many ways, Sunni power came to be founded on Shia poverty; in Iraq, Saddam was going to make sure that this remained the case. This disparity, however, would always be exacerbated – as it was in the largely Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia – by an extraordinary geographic coincidence: almost all the oil of the Middle East lies beneath lands where Shia Muslims live. In southern Iraq, in the north-east of Saudi Arabia and, of course, in Iran, Shiites predominate among the population.

Saddam tolerated the Shah once he withdrew his support for the Kurdish insurgency in the north – the Kurds, like the Shia, were regularly betrayed by both the West and Iraq’s neighbours – and agreed that the Iraqi-Iranian frontier should run down the centre of the Shatt al-Arab river. He had been prepared to allow Ayatollah Khomeini to remain in residence in Najaf where he had moved after his expulsion from Iran. The prelate was forbidden from undertaking any political activity, a prohibition that Khomeini predictably ignored. He gave his followers cassettes on which he expressed his revulsion for the Shah, his determination to lead an Islamic revolution and his support for the Palestinian cause. One of his closest supporters in Najaf was Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi – later to be the Iranian ambassador to Syria who sent Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon in 1982 – who was imprisoned three times by the Iraqi authorities.* Khomeini’s theological ambassador was Ayatollah Sayed Mohamed Bakr Sadr, one of the most influential and intellectual of the Shia clergy in Najaf, who had written a number of highly respected works on Islamic economy and education.

But he also advocated an Islamic revolution in Iraq, relying – like Hussain Shahristani – on his own political importance to protect him from destruction. Once Khomeini was expelled by Saddam – to Turkey and ultimately to Paris – Bakr Sadr was in mortal danger. With an Islamic revolution under way in Iran, Saddam would have no qualms about silencing Khomeini’s right-hand man in Najaf, let alone his followers. They were to suffer first. Bakr Sadr, sick at his home, was arrested and imprisoned in Baghdad – only to be released after widespread demonstrations against the regime in Najaf. The Baath then announced the existence of the armed opposition Dawa party and pounced on Bakr Sadr’s supporters. The Iranians were later to list the first martyrs of ‘the Islamic Revolution of Iraq’ as Hojatolislam Sheikh Aref Basari, Hojatolislam Sayed Azizeddin Ghapanchi, Hojatolislam Sayed Emaddedin Tabatabai Tabrizi, Professor Hussain Jaloukhan and Professor Nouri Towmeh. The Baath decided to crush the influence of the Shia theological schools in Najaf by introducing new laws forcing all teachers to join the party. Bakr Sadr then announced that the mere joining of the Baath was ‘prohibited by Islamic laws’. This determined his fate – although it was a fate that Saddam was at first unwilling to reveal.

For months, reports of Bakr Sadr’s execution circulated abroad – Amnesty International recorded them – but there was no confirmation from the regime. Only when I asked to visit Najaf in 1980 did a Baath party official tell the truth, albeit in the usual ruthless Baathist manner. It was a blindingly hot day – 23 July – when I arrived at the office of the portly Baathist governor of Najaf, Misban Khadi, a senior party member and personal confidant of Saddam. Just before lunchtime on this lunchless Ramadan day, as the thermometer touched 130 degrees, the admission came. Had Ayatollah Bakr Sadr been executed? I asked.

‘I do not know an Ayatollah Bakr Sadr,’ Khadi said. ‘But I do know a Mohamed Bakr Sadr. He was executed because he was a traitor and plotted against Iraq and maintained relations with Khomeini. He was a member of the Dawa party. He was a criminal and a spy and had a relationship with not just Khomeini but with the CIA as well. The authorities gave his body back to his relatives – for burial in Wadi Salam. The family have not been harmed. They are still in Najaf.’

I remember how, as Khadi spoke, the air conditioner hissed on one side of the room. He spoke softly and I leaned towards him to hear his words. This was enough to send a tingle down the spine of any listener. Khomeini’s lack of respect for his former protectors now smouldered at the heart of the Baathist regime that once did so much to help him. ‘Khomeini speaks about crowds of people flocking to see Bakr Sadr in his absence,’ Khadi said softly. ‘But in court that man admitted that he spied. He was hanged just over five months ago. But these are small things to ask me about. We execute anybody who is a traitor in Iraq. Why do reporters ask unimportant questions like this? Why don’t you ask me about the development projects in Najaf?’

This was a bleak, dismissive epitaph for the man who accompanied Khomeini into fourteen years of exile. Wadi Salam – the Valley of Peace – is the cemetery where so many millions of Shiites wish to be buried, within a few hundred metres of the golden shrine of the Imam Ali. The family were permitted to give him a traditional Muslim funeral and he now lay in a narrow tomb amid the hundreds of thousands of tightly packed, hump-shaped graves whose swaddled occupants believe that their proximity to Ali’s last resting place will secure the personal intercession of the long-dead holy warrior on the day of resurrection. But there was another grave beside that of Bakr Sadr, and it was a more junior Baath party official who took some delight in expanding the governor’s brutal story.

‘We hanged his sister, too,’ he said. ‘They were both dressed in white shrouds for their hanging. Bint Huda was hanged around the same time. I didn’t see the actual hanging but I saw Bakr Sadr hanging outside the Abu Ghraib prison afterwards. They hanged him in public. He was in religious robes but with a white cloth over him and he was not wearing his turban. Later they took him down and put him in a wooden box and tied it to the roof of a car. Then he was taken back to Najaf. Why do you ask about him? He was a bad man.’

The history of the Baath party in Iraq might be written in the blood of ulemas and their families and the demise of the Shia clergy was to become a fearful theme over the coming years. Already, Imam Moussa Sadr, the leader of the Shia community in Lebanon and a relative of Bakr Sadr, had disappeared while on a visit to Libya in August of 1978. A tall, bearded man who was born in Qom and who looked younger than his fifty years, Moussa Sadr had been invited to Libya to observe the ninth anniversary celebrations of Colonel Ghadafi’s revolution. All he would talk of in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, one Lebanese newspaper reported, was the situation in Iran. Had the Shah’s Savak secret police seized Moussa Sadr? Had Ghadafi ‘disappeared’ him for Saddam? He was supposed to have boarded Alitalia Flight 881 to Rome on 31 August, on his way back to Beirut. His baggage turned up on the carousel at Fiumicino airport – but neither Moussa Sadr nor the Lebanese journalist travelling with him were on the plane. Many Shiites in Lebanon still believe that their Imam will return. Others are today trying to bring criminal charges against Ghadafi. Moussa Sadr, who founded the Amal – Hope – movement in Lebanon, was never seen again.

In Najaf, the Shiites were cowed. No one openly mentioned Bakr Sadr’s name in the ancient dusty city with its glorious mosque, built around the solid silver casket of the Prophet’s son-in-law, who was also his cousin. One stall-holder shrugged his shoulders at me with exaggerated ignorance when I mentioned Bakr Sadr. The banners in the streets of Najaf that boiling July all praised Saddam’s generosity – each slogan had been personally devised by local shopkeepers, an information ministry functionary insisted – and in one road there hung a small red flag bearing the words: ‘May the regime of Khomeini, the liar and traitor, fall to pieces.’

The elderly Grand Ayatollah Abulqassem al-Khoi, the rightful heir to the Shiite leadership in Najaf but a man who believed that the people should render unto God the things that are God’s and unto Saddam the things that are recognisably Baathist, had lacked the necessary influence to smother the unrest – just as he would fail to control the mobs during the southern Iraqi uprising in 1991. There were to be no interviews with the old man. But the governor was quite prepared to take me to the house in which Khomeini had once lived. A single-storey terraced building with walls of flaking blue paint, it stood in a laneway suitably named Sharia al-Rasoul – the Street of the Prophet – in the southern suburbs of Najaf.

They tell you that the house has a varnished wooden front door and this is true; but the midday heat was so harsh that it sucked all colour from the landscape. The heat smothered us in the shade and ambushed us in fiery gusts from unsuspecting alleyways until all I could see was a monochrome of streets and shuttered houses, the fragile negative of a city dedicated to the linked identities of worship and death. Ayatollah Khomeini must have loved it here.

But the city was changing. The roads had been resurfaced, a construction project had erased one of Khomeini’s old ‘safe’ houses from the face of the earth, and Iraq’s government was doing its best to ensure that the Shia now lacked nothing in this most holy of cities; new factories were being built to the north, more than a hundred new schools – complete with Baath party teachers – had been completed, together with a network of health centres, hotels and apartment blocks. The city’s beaming governor drove me through the drained and sweltering streets in his white Mercedes, pointing his pudgy finger towards the bazaar.

‘I know everyone here,’ Misban Khadi said. ‘I love these people and they always express their true feelings to me.’ Behind us, a trail of police escort cars purred through the heat. Khadi, though a Shiite, did not come from Najaf but from the neighouring province of Diyala. He came to the Imam Ali mosque every day, he claimed, and gestured towards a banner erected over the mosaics of the shrine. It was from a recent speech by Saddam. ‘We are doubly happy at the presence here of our great father Ali,’ it said. ‘Because he is one of the Muslim leaders, because he is the son-in-law of the Prophet – and because he is an Arab.’

Baathist officials made this point repeatedly. All the Iraqis of Iranian origin had already been expelled from Najaf – ‘if only you had telephoned me yesterday,’ Khadi said irritatingly, ‘I could have given you the figures’ – and the message that Shia Islam is a product of the Arab rather than the Persian world constantly reiterated. Had not Saddam personally donated a set of gold-encrusted gates to the Najaf shrine, each costing no less than $100,000? The governor stalked into the bazaar across the road. Because it was Ramadan, the shutters were down, so hot they burned your skin if you touched them. But a perfume stall was still open and Khadi placed his mighty frame on a vulnerable bench while the talkative salesman poured his over-scented warm oils into glass vials.

‘Ask him if he enjoys living in Najaf,’ the governor barked, but when I asked the salesman instead if he remembered Khomeini, his eyes flickered across the faces of the nearest officials. ‘We all remember Khomeini,’ he said carefully. ‘He was here for fourteen years. Every day, he went to pray at the mosque and all the people of Najaf crowded round him, thousands of them, to protect him – we thought the Shah would send his Savak police to kill him so we stood round Khomeini at the shrine.’ There was a moment’s silence as the perfume seller’s critical faculties – or lack of them – were assessed by his little audience.

‘But here’s a little boy who would like to tell you his view of Khomeini,’ said the governor, and an urchin in a grubby yellow abaya shrieked ‘Khomeini is a traitor’ with a vacant smile. All the officials acclaimed this statement as the true feelings of the people of Najaf. Khadi had never met Khomeini but confidently asserted that the Imam had been a CIA agent, that even Grand Ayatollah Abolqassem al-Khoi of Najaf had sent a telegram to Qom, blaming Khomeini for killing the Muslim Kurds of northern Iran. Al-Khoi may have done that – his fellow teacher, Ayatollah Sahib al-Hakim, had been executed by the regime – but this did not spare his family. In 1994, just two years after al-Khoi’s death, his courageous 36-year-old son Taghi was killed when his car mysteriously crashed into an unlit articulated lorry on the highway outside Kerbala. He had been a constant critic of Saddam’s persecution of the Shia and told friends in London the previous year that he was likely to die at Saddam’s hands. At the demand of the authorities, his burial – and that of his six-year-old nephew who died with him – went without the usual rituals.

Four years later, Ayatollah Sheikh Murtada al-Burujirdi, one of Najaf’s most prominent scholars and jurists, a student of the elder al-Khoi and another Iranian-born cleric, was assassinated as he walked home after evening prayers at the shrine of Ali. He had been beaten up the previous year and had escaped another murder attempt when a hand grenade was thrown at him. Al-Burujirdi had refused government demands that he no longer lead prayers at the shrine. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the principal marja al-taqlid – in literal Arabic, ‘source of emulation’ – was still under house arrest and the Baathists were promoting the more pliable Sayed Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, cousin of the executed Sadiq. But Sadiq al-Sadr himself was assassinated by gunmen in Najaf nine months later after he had issued a fatwa calling on Shiites to attend their Friday prayers despite the government’s objection to large crowds. Al-Khoi’s son Youssef – Taghi’s brother – blamed the Baathists, and rioting broke out in the Shia slums of Saddam City in Baghdad. But the history of Shia resistance did not end with the fall of Saddam. It was Sadiq al-Sadr’s son Muqtada who would lead an insurrection against America’s occupation of Iraq five years later, in 2004, bringing US tanks onto the same Najaf streets through which Saddam’s armour had once moved and provoking gun battles across Sadr City, the former Saddam City whose population had renamed it after the executed Bakr Sadr.

These were just the most prominent of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who would be murdered during Saddam’s twenty-four-year rule. Kurds and communists and Shia Muslims would feel the harshest of the regime’s punishments. My Iraqi files from the late Seventies and early Eighties are filled with ill-printed circulars from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, from Iraqi trade unions and tiny opposition groups, naming thousands of executed men and women. As I thumb through them now, I come across the PUK’s magazine The Spark, an issue dated October 1977, complaining that its partisans have been jointly surrounded by forces of Baathist Iraq and the Shah’s Iran in the northern Iraqi village of Halabja, detailing the vast numbers of villages from which the Kurdish inhabitants had been deported, and the execution, assassination or torturing to death of 400 PUK members. Another PUK leaflet, dated 10 December 1977, reports the deportation of 300,000 Kurds to the south of Iraq. Yet another dreadful list, from a communist group, contains the names of 37 Iraqi workers executed or ‘disappeared’ in 1982 and 1983. Omer Kadir, worker in the tobacco factory at Suleimaniya – ‘tortured to death’; Ali Hussein, oil worker from Kirkuk -‘executed’; Majeed Sherhan, peasant from Hilla – ‘executed’; Saddam Muher, civil servant from Basra – ‘executed’… The dead include blacksmiths, builders, printers, post office workers, electricians and factory hands. No one was safe.

This permanent state of mass killing across Iraq was no secret in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the West was either silent or half-hearted in its condemnation. Saddam’s visit to France in 1975 and his public welcome by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, who bestowed upon the Iraqi leader ‘my esteem, my consideration, and my affection’, was merely the most flagrant example of our shameful relationship with the Iraqi regime. Within three years, agents at the Iraqi embassy in Paris would be fighting a gun battle with French police after their diplomats had been taken hostage by two Arab gunmen. A French police inspector was killed and another policeman wounded; the three Iraqi agents claimed diplomatic immunity and were allowed to fly to Baghdad on 2 August 1978, just two days after the killing. US export credits and chemicals and helicopters, French jets and German gas and British military hardware poured into Iraq for fifteen years. Iraq was already using gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers when Donald Rumsfeld made his notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad to shake Saddam’s hand and ask him for permission to reopen the US embassy. The first – and last – time I called on the consulate there, not long after Rumsfeld’s visit, one of its young CIA spooks brightly assured me that he wasn’t worried about car bombs because ‘we have complete faith in Iraqi security’.

Iraq’s vast literacy, public health, construction and communications projects were held up as proof that the Baathist government was essentially benign, or at least worthy of some respect. Again, my files contain many Western press articles that concentrate almost exclusively on Iraq’s social projects. In 1980, for example, a long report in the Middle East business magazine 8 Days, written with surely unconscious irony, begins: ‘Iraqis who fail to attend reading classes can be fined or sent to prison where literary classes are also compulsory. Such measures may seem harsh, but as Iraq enters its second year of a government drive to eliminate illiteracy, its results have won United Nations acclaim.’

In 1977, the now defunct Dublin Sunday Press ran an interview with former Irish minister for finance Charles Haughey in which the country’s human rights abuses simply went unrecorded. It was not difficult to see why. ‘An enormous potential market for Irish produce,’ it began, ‘including lamb, beef, dairy products and construction industry requirements was open in Iraq … Charles Haughey told me on his return from a week-long visit to that country.’ Haughey and his wife Maureen, it transpired, had been ‘the guest of the 9-year-old socialist Iraqi government’ so that he could inform himself ‘of the political and economic situation there and to help to promote better contact and better relations between Ireland and Iraq at political level’. Haughey, who had met ‘the Director General of the Ministry of Planning, Saddam Hussein’, added that ‘the principal political aspect of modern Iraq is the total determination of its leaders to use the wealth derived from their oil resources for the benefit of their people …’ The Baath party, the article helpfully informed its readers, ‘came to power in July 1968 without the shedding of one drop of blood’.

The British understood the Iraqi regime all too well. In 1980, gunmen from the ‘Political Organisation of the Arab People in Arabistan’ – the small south-western corner of Iran with a predominantly Arab population, which is called Khuzestan – had taken over the Iranian embassy in London; the siege ended when SAS men entered the building, capturing one of the men but killing another four and executing a fifth in cold blood before fire consumed the building.* Less than three months later, however, on 19 July 1980, I was astonished to be telephoned at my Baghdad hotel and invited by the Iraqi authorities to attend a press conference held by the very same Arab group which had invaded the embassy. Nasser Ahmed Nasser, a 31-year-old economics graduate from Tehran University, accused the British of ‘conspiring’ with Iran against the country’s Arabs and demanded the return to Iraq of the bodies of the five dead gunmen.

Nasser, a mustachioed man with dark glasses, a black shirt and carefully creased lounge trousers, spoke slowly and with obvious forethought when he outlined his group’s reaction to the killings. ‘We will take our vengeance,’ he said, ‘because now our second enemy is England.’ He claimed that he had been sentenced to death in absentia in Iran. But his arrival for the conference in the heavily upholstered interior of the Iraqi information ministry made it clear that the Baghdad government fully supported his cause and must have been behind the seizure of the embassy in London. A senior official of the ministry acted as interpreter thoughout Nasser’s resentful peroration against Britain and Iran.

The Arabs of Khuzestan had been seeking autonomy from Khomeini’s regime, and many Arab insurgents in the province had been executed or imprisoned, Nasser said. It was to demand the release of the jailed men that the gunmen had attacked the embassy in London. Nasser agreed that there was a ‘link’ between the insurgents and the Iraqi Baath party and we should have questioned him about this. ‘Iraq’s Arab Socialist Baath Party’s motto – one unified Arab nation – is a glorious motto and we are Arabs,’ he said. ‘We follow this motto.’ What did this mean? On reflection, we should have grasped its import: Saddam was preparing a little Sudetenland, another Danzig, a piece of Iran that he might justifiably wish to liberate in the near future.

But of course, we asked about the siege in London rather than the implications of Iraq’s support for the rebels. ‘When we went to the embassy in London, our aim was not to kill,’ Nasser said. ‘We were not terrorists. We selected the British government as our negotiator because Britain is a democratic country and we wanted to benefit from this democracy. The British knew – all the world knew – that we did not intend to kill anyone … But for six days, they did not answer our requests or publicise our demands. They cut off the telex and the telephone … They did not have to kill our youths – they could have taken them prisoner and put them on trial.’ Nasser blamed Sadeq Khalkhali, the Iranian judge, for the torture of Arabs in Khuzestan – ‘he employs torturers who break the legs and shoot the arms of prisoners before knifing them’ – and claimed that Arabs in the province had first accepted the Iranian revolution because ‘it came in the name of Islam’ but that they now wanted autonomy ‘just like the Kurds, Baluchis and Turks’. When we asked how the Arabs in the Iranian embassy had brought their weapons into Britain, Nasser replied: ‘How did the Palestinians get guns into Munich? How do Irish revolutionaries bring guns to Britain? We are able to do the same.’ Again, no one thought to ask if the guns reached Britain in the Iraqi diplomatic bag. Nasser himself came from the Iranian port of Khorramshahr, for which he used the Arab name ‘Al-Mohammorah’. So was al-Mohammorah going to be Danzig?

Britain, however, made no protest to Iraq over the siege – or over the extraordinary press conference so obviously arranged by the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It was an eloquent silence. Of course, there were those who questioned Britain’s cosy relationship with Iraq. There was an interesting exchange in the House of Lords in 1989 – a year after the end of the eight-year Iran – Iraq war and shortly after the arrest in Baghdad of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft and his friend, the British nurse Daphne Parish – when Lord Hylton asked how the British government ‘justify their action in guaranteeing new credits to Iraq of up to £250 million in view of that country’s detention of British subjects without trial, refusal to release prisoners of war following the ceasefire with Iran and its internal human rights record’. For the government, Lord Trefgarne replied that ‘the Iraqi Government are in no doubt of our concerns over the British detainee, Mrs Parish, and over Iraq’s human rights record … we are a major trading nation. I am afraid that we have to do business with a number of countries with whose policies we very often disagree … we do not sell arms to Iraq.’ Hylton’s response – that ‘while I appreciate that this country is a trading nation … is not the price that we are paying too high?’ – passed without further comment.

Bazoft, who was Iranian-born and held British identity papers but not citizenship, had visited the Iraqi town of Hilla in Parish’s car in a hunt for evidence that Iraq was producing chemical weapons. He was arrested as he tried to leave Baghdad airport, accused of spying and put on trial for his life, along with Parish. A month later, Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave was noting privately of Iraq that ‘I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly, nor can I think of any major market where the importance of diplomacy is so great on our commercial position. We must not allow it to go to the French, Germans, Japanese, Koreans, etcetera.’ He added that ‘a few more Bazofts or another bout of internal repression would make it more difficult’. Waldegrave’s words were written only months after Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds of Halabja. Geoffrey Howe, the deputy prime minister, decided to relax controls on the sale of arms to Iraq – but kept it secret because ‘it would look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.’

Bazoft was sentenced to death on 10 March 1990. The Observer attacked Saddam over the conviction – not, perhaps, a wise decision in the circumstances – and British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd offered to fly to Baghdad to meet the Iraqi president. Saddam, according to the Iraqi foreign ministry, ‘could not intervene while under political pressure’. But by then, a grim routine had begun, one of which my own research back in Beirut had made me painfully aware. Back in 1968, convicted Iraqi ‘spies’ would confess their guilt on television. Then they would be executed. In 1969, the lord mayor of Baghdad had confessed – on television – to ‘spying’ and he had been executed. And Bazoft had appeared on television, and confessed to spying – only later did his friends discover that he had been tortured with electricity during interrogation. In February 1969, before the execution of seven ‘spies’, Baghdad radio had announced that the Iraqi people ‘expressed their condemnation of the spies’ – they were then put to death. In May 1969, the farmers’ trade union delegates had applauded President al-Bakr’s decision to ‘chop off’ the heads of a CIA ‘spy ring’. They were duly hanged. Now, on one of his interminable visits to Iraqi minority groups, Saddam asked in front of a large group of Kurds if they believed that the ‘British spy’ should hang. Of course, they chorused that he should. It was the same old Baathist technique; get the people to make the decision – once they knew what it should be – and then obey the people’s will.

On the morning of 16 March 1990, Robin Kealy, a British diplomat in Baghdad, was informed that Bazoft was to be executed that day. He arrived at the Abu Ghraib prison to find the young man still unaware of his fate, still planning a personal appeal for his life to Saddam. It was Kealy’s mournful duty to tell Bazoft the truth. Kealy declined an invitation to be present at the hanging. Eight days later, four Heathrow luggage handlers heaved his coffin off a regular Iraqi Airways flight to London. No Foreign Office representative, relative or friend attended at the airport. The coffin was taken to a cargo shed to await burial. His friend Daphne ‘Dee’ Parish was given fifteen years. Bazoft’s last words to Kealy were: ‘Tell Dee I’m sorry.’

Throughout the early years of Saddam’s rule, there were journalists who told the truth about his regime while governments – for financial, trade and economic reasons – preferred to remain largely silent. Yet those of us who opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 were quickly accused of being Saddam’s ‘spokesmen’ or, in my case, ‘supporting the maintenance of the Baathist regime’ – this from, of all people, Richard Perle, one of the prime instigators of the whole disastrous war, whose friend Donald Rumsfeld was befriending Saddam in 1983. Two years after Rumsfeld’s initial approach to the Iraqi leader – followed up within months by a meeting with Tariq Aziz – I was reporting on Saddam’s gang-rape and torture in Iraqi prisons. On 31 July 1985, Wahbi Al-Qaraghuli, the Iraqi ambassador in London, complained to William Rees-Mogg, the Times editor, that:

Robert Fisk’s extremely one-sided article ignores the tremendous advances made by Iraq in the fields of social welfare, education, agricultural development, urban improvement and women’s suffrage; and he claims, without presenting any evidence to support such an accusation, that ‘Saddam himself imposes a truly terroristic regime on his own people.’ Especially outrageous is the statement that: ‘Suspected critics of the regime have been imprisoned at Abu Ghoraib [sic] jail and forced to watch their wives being gang-raped by Saddam’s security men. Some prisoners have had to witness their children being tortured in front of them.’ It is utterly reprehensible that some journalists are quite prepared, without any supporting corroboration, to repeat wild, unfounded allegations about countries such as Iraq …

‘Extremely one-sided’, ‘without presenting any evidence’, ‘outrageous’, ‘utterly reprehensible’, ‘wild, unfounded allegations’: these were the very same expressions used by the Americans and the British almost twenty years later about reports by myself or my colleagues which catalogued the illegal invasion of Iraq and its disastrous consequences. In February 1986, I was refused a visa to Baghdad on the grounds that ‘another visit by Mr Fisk to Iraq would lend undue credibility to his reports’. Indeed it would.*

So for all these years – until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – we in the West tolerated Saddam’s cruelty, his oppression and torture, his war crimes and mass murder. After all, we helped to create him. The CIA gave the locations of communist cadres to the first Baathist government, information that was used to arrest, torture and execute hundreds of Iraqi men. And the closer Saddam came to war with Iran, the greater his fear of his own Shia population, the more we helped him. In the pageant of hate figures that Western governments and journalists have helped to stage in the Middle East – peopled by Nasser, Ghadafi, Abu Nidal and, at one point, Yassir Arafat – Ayatollah Khomeini was our bogeyman of the early 1980s, the troublesome priest who wanted to Islamicise the world, whose stated intention was to spread his revolution. Saddam, far from being a dictator, thus became – on the Associated Press news wires, for example – a ‘strongman’. He was our bastion – and the Arab world’s bastion – against Islamic ‘extremism’. Even after the Israelis bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, our support for Saddam did not waver. Nor did we respond to Saddam’s clear intention of driving his country to war with Iran. The signs of an impending conflict were everywhere. Even Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, was helping stoke opposition to Khomeini from Iraq, as I discovered when I visited him in his wealthy – but dangerous – Paris exile in August 1980.

It had been the bright idea of Charles Douglas-Home, the foreign editor of The Times, to chase the remains of the Shah’s old regime. ‘I’m sure Bakhtiar’s up to something,’ Charlie said over the phone. ‘Besides, he knows a lot – and his daughter is stunningly beautiful!’ He was right on both counts, although Bakhtiar – so Francophile that he had joined the French army in the Second World War – looked more impressive in his photographs than he did in person. Newspaper pictures portrayed him as a robust man with full, expressive features, his eyes alight for the return of Iranian democracy. In reality, he was a small, thin man, his cheeks somewhat shrunken, his clothes slightly too large for him, a diminutive figure sitting on a huge sofa with seven heavily armed gendarmes outside to protect him.

Even in his Paris apartment, with the noise of the city’s traffic murmuring away outside and the poplar trees swaying in the breeze beyond the sitting-room window, you could feel the presence of the Iranian assassination squads that Tehran had ordered to kill Bakhtiar. When they had called less than two weeks earlier under the command of a 29-year-old Lebanese Islamist called Anis Naccache, they left behind a dead woman neighbour, a murdered French policeman and a bullet-smashed door handle, a souvenir of bright, jagged steel that lay beside the little table next to Bakhtiar’s feet.

This had not served to dampen Bakhtiar’s publicly expressed hatred of Khomeini or his theocratic regime. He admitted to me, uneasily and only after an hour, that he had twice visited Iraq to talk to officials of the Baath party – an institution that could hardly be said to practise the kind of liberal democracy Bakhtiar was advocating – and had broadcast over the clandestine radio that the Iraqis operated on their frontier with Iran, beaming in propaganda against the regime. ‘Why shouldn’t I go to Iraq?’ he asked. ‘I have been in Britain twice, I have been to Switzerland and Belgium. So I can go to Iraq. I contacted people there. I was invited to deal with the authorities there. I have a common point with the Iraqi government. They, like other Muslim countries, are against Khomeini by a large majority. It is possible to work together. This radio that is on the border with Iran is broadcasting what the Iranian people like to listen to. It has broadcast my statements on cassette. That is the only possible way when a dictatorship is established somewhere.’

Bakhtiar, like many Western statesmen, suffered from a Churchill complex, a desire to dress himself up in the shadow of history. ‘When Khomeini arrived in Iran, I said we had escaped from one dictatorship [the Shah’s] but had entered an even more awful one. Nobody believed me. Now, they have plenty to complain about but they do not have the courage to say it. So why do people talk about a coup d’état? I know that I have people on my side in the army … I remember when I was a student in Paris, there was an English leader by the name of Winston Churchill who saw the dangers of dictatorship. Other people were very relaxed about it all and wanted to do deals with Hitler. But Churchill told them they were on the point of extinction. In the same way I knew that Mr Khomeini could not do anything for Iran: he is a man who does not understand geography, history or the economy. He cannot be the leader of all those people in the twentieth century, because he is ignorant about the world.’

The Shah had died in a Cairo hospital six days before my interview with Bakhtiar, although he seemed quite unmoved at his former king’s departure. ‘The death of a person does not give me happiness. I am not the sort of man who dances in the streets because someone is dead and I am alive – I did not even do that when Hitler died. And God knows, I am an anti-fascist as you know yourself. The king was a sick man, a very sick man – and I think that even for him, death was a deliverance, morally and physically.’ What Bakhtiar wanted was a provisional government ‘which would go to Iran and which, under the 1906 constitution, would call for a constituent assembly, calmly and without emotion, and would study the different constitutions for Iran’.

Bakhtiar was already painfully out of touch with Iran, unaware that Khomeini’s revolution was irreversible, partly because it dealt so mercilessly with its enemies – who included Bakhtiar himself. Naccache and his Iranian hit squad had bungled the first attempt to kill him.* Just over eleven years later, on 9 August 1991, more killers arrived at Bakhtiar’s home. This time they cut his head off. Accused of helping the murderers, an Iranian businessman told the Paris assize court that Bakhtiar ‘killed 5,000 people during his thirty-three days in power. Secondly, he was planning a coup d’état in Iran … thirdly, he collaborated with Saddam Hussein during the Iran – Iraq war …’†

Just as Saddam was planning the destruction of the Iranian revolution, so Khomeini was calling for the overthrow of Saddam and the Baath, or the ‘Aflaqis’ as he quaintly called them after the name of the Syrian founder of the party. After learning of Bakr Sadr’s execution and that of his sister, Khomeini openly called for Saddam’s overthrow. ‘It would be strange,’ he wrote on 2 April 1980,

if the Islamic nations, especially the noble nation of Iraq, the tribes of the Tigris and Euphrates, the brave students of the universities and other young people turned a blind eye to this great calamity inflicted upon Islam and the household of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, and allowed the accursed Baath party to martyr their eminent personalities one after the other. It would be even more strange if the Iraqi army and other forces were tools in the hands of these criminals, assisting them in the eradication of Islam. I have no faith in the top-ranking officers of the Iraqi armed forces but I am not disappointed in the other officers, the non-commissioned officers or their soldiers. I expect them to either rise up bravely and overthrow this oppression as was the case in Iran or to flee the garrisons and barracks … I hope that God the Almighty will destroy the system of oppression of these criminals.

Oppression lay like a blanket over the Middle East in the early 1980s, in Iraq, in Iran, and in Afghanistan. And if the West was indifferent to the suffering of millions of Muslims, so, shamefully, were most of the Arab leaders. Arafat never dared to condemn the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan – Moscow was still the PLO’s most important ally – and the kings and princes and presidents of the Arab world, who knew better than their Western counterparts what was happening in Iraq, were silent about Saddam’s deportations and tortures and executions and genocidal killings. Most of them used variations of the same techniques on their own populations. In Syria, where the ‘German chair’ torture was used to break the backs of opposition militants, the bloodbath of the Hama uprising lay less than two years away.*

In Iran, the authorities turned brutally against members of the Bahai faith whose 2 million members regard Moses, Buddha, Christ and Mohamed as ‘divine educators’ and whose centre of worship – the tomb of a nineteenth-century Persian nobleman – lies outside Acre in present-day Israel. By 1983, Amnesty estimated that at least 170 Bahais had been executed for heresy among the 5,000 Iranians put to death since the revolution. Among them were ten young women, two of them teenagers, all hanged in Shiraz in June of 1983. At least two, Zarrin Muqimi and Shirin Dalvand, both in their twenties, were allowed to pray towards Acre before the hangmen tied their hands and led them to the gallows. All were accused of being ‘Zionist agents’. Evin prison began to fill with women, some members of the Iraqi-supported Mujahedin-e-Qalq – People’s Mujahedin – others merely arrested while watching political protests. They were ferociously beaten on the feet to make them confess to being counter-revolutionaries. On one night, 150 women were shot. At least forty of them were told to prepare themselves for execution by firing squad by writing their names on their right hands and left legs with felt-tip markers; the guards wanted to identify them afterwards and this was often difficult when ‘finishing shots’ to the head would make their faces unrecognisable. But Bahais were not the only victims.

Executions took place in all the major cities of Iran. In July 1980, for example, Iranian state radio reported fourteen executions in Shiraz, all carried out at eleven at night, including a retired major-general – for ‘making attacks on Muslims’ – a former police officer, an army major charged with beating prisoners, an Iranian Jew sentenced for running a ‘centre of fornication’ and seven others for alleged narcotics offences. One man, Habib Faili, was executed for ‘homosexual relations’. Two days earlier, Mehdi Qaheri and Haider Ali Qayur were shot by firing squad for ‘homosexual offences’ in Najafabad. Naturally, Sadeq Khalkhali presided over most of these ‘trials’.

Amnesty recorded the evidence of a female student imprisoned in Evin between September 1981 and March 1982 who was held in a cell containing 120 women, ranging from schoolgirls to the very old. The woman described how:

One night a young girl called Tahereh was brought straight from the courtroom to our cell. She had just been sentenced to death, and was confused and agitated. She didn’t seem to know why she was there. She settled down to sleep next to me, but at intervals she woke up with a start, terrified, and grasped me, asking if it were true that she really would be executed. I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, and reassure her that it wouldn’t happen, but at about 4 a.m. they came for her and she was taken away to be executed. She was sixteen years old.

A frightening nine-page pamphlet issued by the Iranian Ministry for Islamic Guidance – but carrying neither the ministry’s name nor that of its author – admitted that ‘some believe only murderers deserve capital punishment, but not those who are guilty of hundreds of other crimes … Weren’t the wicked acts of those upon whom [the] death penalty was inflicted tantamount to the spread … of corruption … The people have indirectly seconded the act of the revolutionary courts, because they realise the courts have acted in compliance with their wishes.’ The same booklet claimed that trials of senior officials of the Shah’s government had to be carried out swiftly lest ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements tried to rescue them from prison.

Khomeini raged, against the leftists and communists who dared to oppose his theocracy, and the Great Satan America and its Iraqi ally. Why did people oppose the death penalty, he asked. ‘… the trial of several young men … and the execution of a number of those who had revolted against Islam and the Islamic Republic and were sentenced to death, make you cry for humanity!’ The ‘colonial powers’ had frightened Muslims with their ‘satanic might and advancement’ – Khomeini’s prescient expression for the ‘shock and awe’ that US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld would call down on Iraq almost exactly twenty years later – and now communists were ‘ready to sacrifice [their] lives out of love of the party’ while the people of Afghanistan were ‘perishing under the Soviet regime’s cruelty’.

Here Khomeini was on safe ground. From Afghan exile groups and humanitarian organisations there came a flood of evidence that Soviet troops were now carrying out atrocities in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch was reporting by 1984 that it had become clear ‘that Soviet personnel have been taking an increasingly active role in the Afghan government’s oppression of its citizens. Soviet officers are not just serving as “advisors” to Afghan Khad agents who administer torture – routinely and savagely in detention centres and prisons; according to reports we received there are Soviets who participate directly in interrogation and torture.’ The same document provided appalling evidence of torture. A 21-year-old accused of distributing ‘night letters’ against the government was hung up by a belt until he almost strangled, beaten until his face was twice its normal size and had his hands crushed under a chair. ‘… mothers were forced to watch their infant babies being given electric shocks … Afghan men … were held in torture chambers where women were being sexually molested. A young woman who had been tortured in prison described how she and others had been forced to stand in water that had been treated in chemicals that made the skin come off their feet.’ After Afghans captured a Soviet army captain and three other soldiers in the town of Tashqurghan in April 1982, killed them, chopped up their bodies and threw them in a river, the brother of the officer took his unit – from the Soviet 122nd Brigade – to the town and slaughtered the entire population of around 2,000 people.

An exile publication of the Hezb Islami in Pakistan listed the murder in Afghanistan of twenty-six religious sheikhs, mawlawi and other leaders, often with their entire families, from Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Konar and Ghazni. The Soviets always claimed their village raids were targeted at insurgents, ‘terrorists’ or the ‘remnants’ of the dushman – ironically, they would use the Afghan Persian word for ‘enemy’ – but inevitably most of the victims would be civilians. It was a pattern to be repeated by US forces in Iraq almost a quarter of a century later. Photographs in exile magazines showed the victims of Soviet napalm attacks, their faces burned off by chemicals. One Soviet officer who launched his career amid the Afghan atrocities was General Pavel Grachev, later to be Russian defence minister. He it was who would earn the sobriquet ‘the Butcher of Grozny’, after forgetting the lessons of the Afghan war and the defeat of the Soviets by the mujahedin and Osama bin Laden’s Arab fighters, by launching the Chechnya war on Boris Yeltsin’s behalf and bragging that he could sort out the Chechens in a matter of hours. Wiser counsels had warned that he would unleash a ‘holy war’.

And now, across much of this landscape of horror in Muslim south-west Asia, an epic of bloodletting was about to begin as an obsessive, xenophobic and dictatorial nationalist and secular Arab regime prepared to destroy the Muslim revolutionary forces that were bent on its destruction. As long ago as October 1979, the documents found in the US embassy in Tehran would reveal, the Iranian government feared that the Iraqis were being encouraged to foment further rebellion among Iranian Kurds. Ibrahim Yazdi, the Iranian foreign minister, told American diplomats that ‘adequate assurances had been given to Sadam Husayn [sic] with regard to the Shia majority in Iraq’ to calm his fears of Shia nationalism; but ‘if Iraqi interference continued, Iran would have to consider agitating among the Iraqi Shia community.’ By November, the Americans were reporting that the Iraqi regime was convinced that Iran wished to pursue a claim to the Arab but largely Shia island of Bahrein, which Saddam Hussein had thought he might negotiate with Tehran after meeting Yazdi at a summit in Havana, but that the Iraqis now believed real power lay in ‘the Iranian religious establishment which is hostile to Iraq’.

Just how militarily powerful the two regimes were in 1980 obsessed both sides in the forthcoming struggle. Back in 1978, the Shah, boasting of his ‘very good relations’ with Saddam’s Iraq, claimed that Iraq had ‘more planes and tanks than Iran has’, even though Iran had acquired 80 F-14 Tomcats from the United States – to counter any strikes from the Soviet Union – which could counter Mig high reconnaissance and fighter aircraft. All the Iranian F-14 pilots had been trained in the United States. Before the Shah’s fall, according to one of the documents discovered in the US embassy in Tehran, America believed that:

Iran’s … military superiority over Iraq rests primarily on the strength of its Air Force, which has more high-performance aircraft, better pilot training … and ordnance such as laser-guided bombs and TV-guided missiles that are unavailable to Iraq. The Iranian navy also is far superior to that of Iraq; it could easily close the Gulf to Iraqi shipping … The two states’ ground forces are more nearly balanced, however, with each side possessing different advantages in terms of equipment and capable of incursions into the other’s territory. The disposition of ground forces and the greater mobility of Iraqi forces could in fact give Baghdad a substantial numerical advantage along the border during the initial stages of an attack.

This was an all-too-accurate prediction of what was to happen in September 1980 – and was presumably also known to Saddam Hussein and his generals in Iraq. They would have been comforted to know that, according to the same assessment, Iran’s reliance on US equipment meant that ‘if US support was withdrawn, the Iranian armed forces probably could not sustain full-scale hostilities for longer than two weeks’. But this was a woefully inaccurate forecast, which may have led Saddam to take the bloodiest gamble of his career.

The revolution had certainly emasculated part of the Iranian army. Every general had been retired – more than 300 of the Shah’s senior officers departed in three weeks – and conscription had been lowered from two years to one. As they prepared for a possible American invasion during the hostage siege, the Iranians desperately tried to rebuild their army to a pre-revolution complement of 280,000 men. But pitched battles in Kurdistan meant that every Iranian army unit had been involved in combat by the autumn of 1980. The Revolutionary Guards, who would provide the theological military muscle in any defence of Iran, were – or so I wrote in a dispatch to The Times from Tehran on 26 November 1979 – ‘zealous, overenthusiastic and inexperienced’, while the army’s firepower might have been considerably reduced. Its 1,600 tanks, including 800 British-made Chieftains and 600 American M-60s – all purchased by the Shah – sounded impressive, but the Chieftains, with their sophisticated firing mechanism, may have been down to half strength through lack of maintenance. The M-60s were easier to maintain. The new army was commanded by Major-General Hussain Shaker, who had been trained by the Americans at Fort Leavenworth.

The Islamic government in Tehran put more faith in its air force, mainly because air force cadets had played a leading role in fighting the imperial army during the revolution. In the days after the Shah’s fall, the air force was the only arm of the services permitted to appear in uniform outside its bases. But the F-14s were in need of US maintenance, and although pilots could still fly the older F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers, much of the US and British radar system had broken down and the US technicians who serviced it had long ago left Iran.*

For months in early 1980, there had been violent incidents along the Iran – Iraq border. Tony Alloway, our stringer in Tehran – increasingly isolated but still doggedly filing to us – was now reporting almost daily artillery duels between Iraqis and Iranians. In The Times on 10 April, he reported on tank as well as artillery fire across the border near Qasr-e Shirin. Sadeq Qotbzadeh, now the Iranian foreign minister, was quoted as saying that his government was ‘determined to overthrow the Iraqi Baathist Government headed by that United States agent Saddam Hussein’. On 9 April alone, 9,700 Iraqis of Iranian origin were forced across the border into Iran with another 16,000 soon to be deported. Four hundred of the new arrivals were businessmen who complained that they had been falsely invited to the commerce ministry in Baghdad and there stripped of their possessions, loaded onto lorries and sent to the frontier.

In April, I got a taste of what was to come when pro-Iranian militiamen in Beirut fought street battles with pro-Iraqi gunmen. At the American University Hospital, I counted fifty-five dead, some of them civilians, as armed men, bloodstained bandages round their faces and arms, were brought to the hospital on trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns. Clouds of smoke billowed up from the Bourj el-Barajneh Palestinian camp where six charred corpses were found inside an Iraqi Baath party office.

Often, the Iranians would complain that Iraqi aircraft had entered Iranian airspace; in early July 1980, Iraqi jets passed above Kermanshah province on two separate days, coming under fire from Iranian anti-aircraft guns. The pilots were presumably trying to locate Iran’s ground-to-air defence positions. On 3 July Kayhan newspaper in Tehran was reporting that the Iraqi regime had set up a ‘mercenary army’, led by an Iraqi officer, near Qasr-e Shirin. By August, regular artillery fire was directed across the border in both directions. Iranian claims that their villages were coming under constant attack were dismissed by Iraq as ‘falsehoods’. The Iraqi foreign ministry, however, listed twenty shooting incidents – against Iraqi villages and ships in the Shatt al-Arab around Basra – between 18 and 22 September. Ever afterwards, Saddam Hussein would claim that the Iran – Iraq war began on 4 September, by which time Iraq had complained of artillery firing at its border posts and neighbouring oil refineries on ninety-eight occasions. Iraq denounced Iran for violating the Shah’s 1975 agreement with Baghdad which set the two countries’ common frontier along the Shatt al-Arab, declaring the treaty ‘null and void’.

Although a major conflict seemed inevitable, the UN Security Council would not meet to discuss the hostilities until after the Iraqis invaded Iranian territory; Iraq had made strenuous efforts to prevent seven non-aligned members of the Council from going to the UN chamber. Had Iran not been a pariah state after its seizure of the US embassy, it could have obtained a favourable motion and vote. But in the end, UN Security Council Resolution 479 did not even call for a withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Iranian territory, but merely for a ceasefire – which would satisfy neither party. Iran was convinced that the whole world had now turned against its revolution and was supporting the act of aggression by Saddam.

Fathi Daoud Mouffak, a 28-year-old Iraqi military news cameraman, was to remember those days for the rest of his life. Almost a quarter of a century later, he was to recall for me in Baghdad how he set off one morning in September 1980 from the Iraqi ministry of defence towards a location near Qasr-e Shirin. ‘When we arrived we found our border checkpoints attacked and destroyed – and our Iraqi forces there were less than a brigade,’ he said. ‘We visited Qasr-e Shirin and Serbil Sahab. All our checkpoints there had been destroyed by artillery from the Iranians. We filmed this and we found many dead bodies, our martyrs, most of them border policemen. I had never seen so many dead before. Then we brought our films back to Baghdad.’ Across Iraq, Mouffak’s newsreel was shown on national Iraqi television under the title ‘Pictures from the Battle’. It provided a kind of psychological preparation for the Iraqi people, perhaps for Saddam himself. For on 22 September, on the first day of what the Iranians would call the ‘Imposed War’, Saddam’s legions with their thousands of tanks, armour and artillery swept across the frontier and into Iran on a 650-kilometre front.