The Martyrdom of Hossein Kharrazi

war 
 
The Martyrdom of Hossein Kharrazi  

Christopher de Bellaigue 

Hossein Kharrazi's bicycle was leaning against the wall of his parents'
house in Isfahan. Mrs Kharrazi told me to come in, rearranging her
chador so it wouldn't slide off her head. I took off my shoes and she
showed me into a living-room that looked onto a courtyard with a
persimmon tree in the middle. There was a big mural on one of the walls,
a copy of a photograph I'd seen before. It showed Hossein in combat
fatigues, talking into two microphones that had been taped together. He
was telling his men why the war against Iraq was a sacred war, and that
if they were killed they would go to paradise.

I was drawn to the fragility of Hossein's features, to his delicate
nose and lips. His hair was receding prematurely, but you could imagine
him laughing like a boy. Although he had been right-handed, he was
holding the microphones in his left hand; this meant the photograph had
been taken after 1984, when he lost his right arm. Hossein had borne his
disability with neither pride nor shame. It was as integral to him as
his faith, and his will to fight.

'Sit down! Sit down!' His father, a pale old man without a hair on his
head, came into the room, smiling. I smiled back, partly because Mr
Kharrazi was wearing pink striped pyjamas. We sat down on a lurid red
carpet. I remarked that, apart from the mural, the room contained no
sign of Hossein. 'After he was martyred,' Mr Kharrazi said, 'everyone
wanted photos of him. Soon, we'd given most of them away. That's why we
had this one painted on the wall. No one can cart that off, can they?'
Shortly after the 1979 Revolution, Hossein Kharrazi and about fifty
other Isfahanis volunteered to help put down a separatist rebellion in
Iranian Kurdistan. In Tehran, I had come across a man who had fought
under Hossein in Kurdistan and then during the Iran-Iraq War of the
1980s, when Hossein commanded Isfahan's volunteer forces. Talking about
him, the man had described qualities - piety, courage, modesty and
selflessness - that seemed to correspond to an archaic Persian ideal of
manhood, passed down by the epics. At the same time, he'd spoken
protectively, as if Hossein were still vulnerable 16 years after his
death.

During the hour or so I spent with them, the Kharrazis gave me a subtly
different impression. The Hossein they spoke of needed no protection: he
had longed for martyrdom in the service of God and the Revolution. Mr
Kharrazi repeated much of what I had learned from official
hagiographies: that Saddam had offered a reward to anyone who could
capture Hossein; that Hossein had taken leave to go to Mecca, for fear
of dying without having made the pilgrimage; that Hossein had been
posthumously honoured by the top brass of the regime.

Unlike the old soldier I had met in Tehran, Mr and Mrs Kharrazi had
stopped mourning Hossein. 'We're satisfied if God is satisfied,' Mr
Kharrazi said. He meant me to infer that God had honoured Hossein by
drawing him to his side, and that humans had no business questioning his
will.

Since Hossein's death, his parents had received senior ayatollahs and
cabinet ministers in their house. They had, I guessed, enjoyed some of
the privileges that are granted to the parents of important martyrs,
such as discounted trips to Mecca and a place among the bigwigs during
the annual commemorations. Mrs Kharrazi sniffed when I asked her whether
she mixed with the mothers of other martyrs; she evidently considered
herself a cut above them. It made sense to me that the Kharrazis had
enlarged Hossein's public image, and put it on their wall. It was the
public Hossein, not the private one, who had made them what they were.
While Mrs Kharrazi was preparing tea, her husband showed me a
photograph of Hossein's lolling head, covered in dust. A trickle of
blood was coming out of the side of his mouth. Mr Kharrazi smiled at his
beautiful martyrdom, and looked up, expecting me to smile too.
I learned from Mrs Kharrazi that there had been an argument. In 1985,
Hossein had decided to get married, but his mother hadn't approved of
the girl: it took four months for her to lift her veto. Hossein was
killed two weeks before his son, Mehdi, was born. As often happens in
such cases, his widow immediately contracted a second marriage, to
Hossein's younger brother.

Shortly before I left, I turned off my tape-recorder, and repeated
something I had heard vaguely expressed in Tehran. 'Isn't it true that
there was a dispute between Hossein and some important officials,
shortly before he died?'

The Kharrazis glanced at each other. Mr Kharrazi said: 'There was no
such dispute.' She said: 'Of course, there may have been little
problems, but only little ones.' Her husband nodded, and said, 'Nothing
big, though,' and his smile grew chilly.

On 22 September 1980, after months of skirmishing, propaganda and
Iraq's occupation of some border areas, Saddam's well-equipped Army
invaded Iran. Saddam wanted to destroy the Islamic Revolution; he feared
it would spread, and destroy him. He wanted to suck Iran's
Arab-dominated province of Khuzistan, rich in oil, into his sphere of
influence. Finally, he wanted a military victory that would give him
leadership of the Arab world - a vacant position, now that Egypt had
made peace with Israel. He was materially and morally supported by most
Arab countries - Syria and Libya were notable exceptions. Most Western
countries, fearing Khomeini's Iran, were not displeased.

Only unwarranted caution and military incompetence stopped Saddam from
seizing even more than the four thousand square miles of Iran that he
had taken by mid-October. In many places, the regular Army was incapable
of resisting. During the Revolution, the Army had lost many senior
officers and 140,000 men to desertions and purges. Thanks to sanctions
provoked by the continuing US Embassy hostage crisis, and the new
republic's brittle relations with most countries, the Army's access to
Western-made parts and arms had been severely curtailed. (The Soviet
Union imposed an arms embargo on both belligerents.) Logistically, Iran
was caught unawares; it took one division six weeks to get from a base
in eastern Iran to the theatre in the west.

A few days after he heard about the invasion, Hossein Kharrazi
commandeered two buses and took his men to Ahwaz. They were not members
of the regular Army, but had joined a volunteer corps called the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which Khomeini had set up to harness
the young ideologues who had brought him to power. It immediately
entered into rivalry with the regular forces, whom Khomeini suspected -
rightly, in the case of some officers - of favouring a restoration of
the monarchy.

Hossein had become leader of his group of Isfahanis in an informal
election. At 23, he was older than the others; bright as well as
fervent, he was able to articulate their ideals. History had restarted
with the Revolution and Khomeini's return from exile, just as it had
restarted with the Prophet's migration from Mecca to Medina in 622, and
the setting up of the first Islamic administration. It was the duty of
good Muslims, Hossein argued, to protect the Revolution from Iraq and
its Western paymasters. If they were killed - as long as they had not
actively sought death, but rather the glory of Islam - they would go to
heaven. (The Koran and the sayings of the Prophet made that clear.) If
they stayed alive, and won, they would create a clean, pious society.
Hossein's troops were young and poor. Many were illiterate. The Shah's
rule had disoriented them; the elite had been devoted to money, while
much of the rest of society continued to profess its old attachment to
spiritual rewards. These boys had been deprived of both. Now, wealth was
being measured in ways that favoured them. You were rich if you enjoyed
the favour of God and Khomeini, if you were going off to Khuzistan for a
grand adventure, a love affair with the Revolution. You were worth a
million if your mother shed tears of dread and pride on your shoulder:
'God speed your return!' A few of the boys - the more thoughtful ones -
conceived of heaven abstractly. It was a state of grace, God's mingling
with the soul. Most of them, however, thought of paradise as a mild
spring day, and heavenly facilities as things that could be smelt,
touched or tasted.

When Hossein and his men reached Ahwaz, they presented themselves at
the IRGC's regional headquarters. Before the Revolution, it had been a
golf club patronised by Americans working at a nearby atomic complex.
Now, the clubhouse had been renamed the Barracks of Those Awaiting
Martyrdom. Men who might once have been caddies or flunkeys issued
orders and prayed on the floor of the bar. The music system played
sacred laments. Ahwaz was also the regional headquarters of the
Mobilisation of the Oppressed, the Basij. Khomeini had set up the Basij
in the first days of the war. It was to be an irregular volunteer force,
commanded by the IRGC. Khomeini said he wanted twenty million basijis.
Since they had few guns, their weapon would be faith. There was joy, and
chaos. Basijis roamed around the town. Some were 70-year-old holy
warriors, a bit confused, doing their bit. There was an IRGC unit for
women. The volunteers were taught how to fight while wearing a chador.
The basijis were encouraged to wear the piebald Palestinian scarf, the
kaffiyeh, lest they forget that, while Saddam was a considerable danger,
he was still only a tentacle of the fiendish Zionist threat. A
Revolutionary Guard got about $200 a month, and whatever ammunition
could be spared. A basiji got much less. If there wasn't a gun for him,
he was expected to steal one from the enemy.

The IRGC gave Hossein and his men four hours' training, assigned them
some basijis, and sent them south. A few miles north of the port city of
Khorramshahr, which was in Iraqi hands, they met some enemy tanks. Some
of the men had never seen a tank before and were dismayed when their
bullets bounced off them. One of them had a grenade launcher, which he
had not been trained to use; by trial and error, he disabled one of the
oncoming tanks. The Iraqis withdrew, and Hossein's men realised that the
enemy, though well armed, had no stomach for the fight. Hossein gave the
order to dig in, but neither he nor his men knew how; there had been no
call for trenches in Kurdistan. The hole they dug - 'a grave', in the
words of one of his men - obeyed none of the basic precautions that have
governed trench building since World War One.

Iraq's advance ended, the rains set in and Khomeini made it clear that
he would not - contrary to Saddam's expectations - sue for peace. The
IRGC's hand was strengthened by the failure of the regular Army's winter
offensives; the volunteer forces got more resources and prestige as a
result. (This trend accelerated after President Abol-Hasan Bani-Sadr,
who had championed the regular Army, was ousted, and fled abroad.)
Amid the squalor of war, a splendid society was being created. The unit
was its microcosm. There were no formal ranks. The men addressed one
another as 'brother'. Hossein was obeyed because his authority, everyone
assumed, came from God. When there was a shortage of food, Hossein would
pretend he wasn't hungry, and give his share to the younger troops. He
took guard duty like the rest, and went on dangerous reconnaissance
missions. He taught them:

No drop of liquid is more beloved of God than a drop of blood shed for
him.

The best deed of the faithful is fighting for God.

Participate in holy war, so you will be happy and need nothing.
One hour of holy war is better than sixty years of worship.
The wives of those who have gone to war must be respected and treated
as inviolable.

An ideologically pure army is better than a victorious army.
Hossein and his men were comforted by thoughts of the twelfth Imam, the
last infallible descendant of the Prophet. Shias believe that he lives
hidden among them, and will one day re-emerge to establish his perfect
caliphate. 'No one missed the cities,' one of Hossein's men told me,
'because they were still full of sin; here, in the field, we were
fighting alongside God.'

To compensate for their tactical ignorance and the scarcity of armour
and artillery, IRGC commanders specialised in surprise night attacks,
often across difficult terrain, and in the creative use of flooding to
'drown' enemy formations. As they began their first, limited offensives,
some commanders showed disregard for the lives of the ordinary basijis -
an indifference equalled only by some of the basijis, who styled
themselves 'seekers after martyrdom'. On one occasion, the head of the
IRGC flew to Tehran to ask for advice about an engagement; Khomeini
advised him to consult the Koran.

By the middle of 1981, Hossein's force was up to brigade strength -
around three thousand men. (He named this brigade after the Imam
Hossein, who had died gloriously while combating tyranny in the name of
Islam. A few months later, it would become a division of three
brigades.) He was going regularly to Isfahan, to consult Ayatollah
Taheri, who was supervising the city's war effort, and to visit the
families of martyred soldiers. (The IRGC was also leading the civil war
against the People's Mujahidin, an armed opposition group that had
declared war on Khomeini's state.) Thanks to Taheri's efforts, the
city's mosques had been turned into recruiting stations, and the bazaar
into a supply depot. War mothers pickled vegetables and knitted clothes.
Supplies were taken to the front in bazaar traders' trucks. Isfahanis
still tell the story of a peasant woman who travelled all day from her
village to a collection point in the city, where she donated an egg to
the war effort.

Talking to his men, I get the impression that Hossein cared more about
the average basiji than many commanders did; a fruitless death, he
maintained, didn't count as martyrdom. His troops, although
conspicuously brave, didn't fight with the recklessness of volunteers
from Tehran. Hossein encouraged the growing number of basijis under his
command to go home to Isfahan during lulls; they returned to the front
when an offensive was brewing. As Iran started to recover its territory,
the Brigade of Imam Hossein was involved in every major operation.
Privilege and responsibility gave his men swagger. During one night
raid, Hossein's commandos overran an Iraqi installation, but didn't
return to their lines before they had used the Iraqis' showers, and
dined on the enemy's superior tinned food.

On 1 May 1982, his men silently crossed pontoon bridges that had been
thrown across a strategic river, and moved towards the Iraqi border to
cut off Khorramshahr, the only major city Iraq had managed to hold onto.
Three weeks later, they were among the first Iranian troops to enter the
city, after an offensive that involved 150,000 Iranian troops from the
IRGC, Basij and regular forces. The Iraqis fled; as many as twelve
thousand were captured. Except for some land near the border, Iran was
free.

The day after I met the Kharrazis, I had an appointment with a cleric,
Mr Rafi'i, in a 17th-century seminary. At the beginning of the war
especially, the clerics were very influential. Each IRGC battalion was
assigned one. They answered the men's questions on everything from
martyrdom to daily observances. One of Hossein Kharrazi's junior
commanders was a cleric. During a desperate fight for control of a
gorge, he climbed into full view of the Iraqis and questioned their
manhood - he became famous for that. The clerics had to deal with men
who claimed to have had visions of the twelfth Imam. As the war
progressed, and nerves frayed, there was an epidemic of such claims.
Whenever a 'seer' was martyred, other men would rip pieces of clothing
off his corpse to keep as relics. This trend was bad for discipline, and
probably blasphemous. Encouraged by Hossein and a few other commanders,
the clerics intervened. From them on, seers were persuaded, sometimes
violently, to recant.

The seminary was set round a courtyard, bounded by cells set in vaulted
niches, with tiled porticos on three sides. A sheet of water and a path
divided the grass into four lawns. The leaves of the cypress trees
almost obscured the vivid blue dome over the prayer hall.

Mr Rafi'i hadn't arrived. I walked to the far end of the courtyard, and
sat down on a marble platform that supported one of the porticos. Some
seminarians were crossing the courtyard on their way to class. A few
were reading on the balconies of the first-floor cells. A door slammed.
Shortly after the Revolution, I had been told, there had been three
hundred seminarians here. Roughly a third were killed in the war. A
movement made me look up. A man was walking slowly towards me. He had a
bulging red head, and wore a checked shirt, not the cleric's gown and
turban that I had expected. It was Mr Rafi'i.

He looked like the farmer he had been before he became a seminarian
thirty years ago. As my ears got used to his thick rural accent, my eyes
were drawn to his forehead. Many Shias have a purplish blotch there,
from the baked tablet of sanctified earth they press down on as they
pray. Mr Rafi'i's blotch had acquired a crust, with small features of
its own. It seemed to laugh whenever he did, like a wizened sprite
living in his head. Mr Rafi'i's job was to teach seminarians the
sayings, sermons and letters of the Imam Ali. For Shias, Ali is the
supreme example of a just and generous sovereign. During his caliphate,
he is said to have bought two shirts and offered the finer to his
servant. His judges were so independent one found against him in a case.
Many Iranian revolutionaries longed to create a regime like his. 'We
carried out the Revolution because we wanted to make a just society,' Mr
Rafi'i said. 'We fought the war to protect it.'

I wanted to find out what Mr Rafi'i had done as a volunteer during the
war. He smiled when I inquired whether he, like others I had met, had
received military training in Shia-dominated South Lebanon. When I asked
him about wounds he had received, he said: 'I don't talk about things
like this, because that's hypocrisy. Whatever I did, I did for God.'
Instead he talked about Hamid, a young seminarian. 'He was 16 years old.
He was a good boy: pure! They all were all pure, back then.' His
inference was clear. 'I remember - such a fine-looking boy! Like the
moon! He had an accident - I've forgotten what it was - and his front
teeth were smashed in. I said he should go to the dentist and get his
teeth repaired, and he said: "I'm not going to bother going to the
dentist, because I've been summoned." A few days later, we went out to
try and get an idea of the enemy's strength in our sector. There were 22
of us, in a column. As we set out, Hamid kissed me on both cheeks. He
smelt of eau de cologne, and he'd put on clean clothes.' If you're going
to meet God, there's a protocol to be followed. 'The Iraqis were on the
heights above us. When we came under fire, we hit the deck, and Hamid
was next to me. I noticed my leg was hot, and I thought, "I've been
hit," but something stopped me looking down. I was afraid. Then, a few
second later, I felt that my groin and stomach were also hot and wet,
and I looked down, and I saw I hadn't been hit. It was Hamid's blood. I
looked at his face. He smiled, and slept.' Mr Rafi'i wept briefly, his
eyes straying up to the sky. Perhaps he was crying at the beauty of
Hamid's martyrdom, as much as the loss.

'How did you get out of that situation,' I asked, 'when the Iraqis were
on the heights above you?'

'Oh, we managed.' He waved his hand vaguely - I sensed there had been
an act of bravery. He was still thinking of Hamid. He said: 'You have to
be clean to be a martyr. It's an honour, you know. Not everyone is
summoned like that.' And then, anticipating my next question: 'God
didn't want a grizzly old sinner like me.' We laughed.

'What did the men do before they went off to battle?' I asked. 'Did
they pray? Were they silent? Did they chatter to try and forget their
nerves?'

Mr Rafi'i said: 'I remember, before one operation, my battalion was
given leave to go to the nearest town, to the public bathhouse. Normally
before an operation, you do your martyrdom ablutions, and ask God to let
you come to him. At any rate, everyone went along to the baths - we must
have been about four hundred people. And I got a shock, I can tell you,
because the lads in the bathhouse started playing around, splashing each
other with cold water. Afterwards, someone told me you could hear the
shouts and laughter from down the street.'

'Did you joke around and splash, too?'

'No, it's not correct behaviour for a cleric to behave like that. I
washed quickly, and left.'

'How many of the boys who went to the bathhouse are still alive?'
'There can't be more than a few dozen.'

After the liberation of Khorramshahr, the Iraqis observed a unilateral
ceasefire, and the international community urged Iran to negotiate. But
it invaded Iraq, and went from being the injured party to being the
aggressor. Didn't he think it would have been better to stop there and
then, after Khorramshahr? He was vexed. 'Why don't you go and ask Saddam
why he invaded Iran in the first place? Do you think Saddam is the kind
of man to go back and sit in his place, like a good schoolboy? He would
have regrouped and rearmed, and then invaded us again. We needed to
drive Saddam right back, and teach him a lesson.' He started to cough,
weakly, like a kitten. His face had got redder. A yellow scum had
accumulated at the corners of his mouth (I later found out that he'd
been gassed in the war). He excused himself.

There's a story that, a few months after Khorramshahr, Khomeini advised
the nation's top military and political leaders to end the war, and they
demurred. Perhaps the story was invented, or altered, to cast certain
members of his entourage, who now occupy very high office, in a bad
light. As far as I can ascertain, few people wanted to stop after
Khorramshahr. Casualties - at most, sixty thousand Iranian dead - were
sustainable. People were convinced that force could be used to export
the Revolution. Israel's invasion of South Lebanon had made this
objective urgent: if something wasn't done, the whole region could fall
to the Zionists. The war would go on until Saddam was toppled, and the
forces of Islam had destroyed Israel. Mr Rafi'i came back, carrying two
glasses of water.

'What happened to justice?' I asked.

'What justice?'

'The just society you were fighting to create.'

He smiled: 'If you pursue God, you generate a perfume; you must have
heard this. Do you smell it now in Iran?'

I thought. 'No.'

'What do you smell?'

'A few days ago, some policemen were beating up some kids and
students.' (I had witnessed a small demonstration, held to commemorate a
larger pro-democracy protest three years before.)

'Back then, there was a perfume in Iran; you know what the body of a
martyr smells like?' I shook my head. 'Like leaves in the rain.'

'And now?'

'Oh, God,' he said ruminatively, 'Oh, Ali . . . I'm tired. I just want
to go. I want him to let me sleep.'

A couple of days later, I visited the Foundation for the Dispossessed
and War Disabled. An official explained to me that the war-wounded are
examined and assigned a figure, a percentage, which rises in proportion
to the gravity of their disabilities; the benefits they receive reflect
this percentage. The official had never come across a figure higher than
70: that was for paraplegics, and the victims of severe gas poisoning.
As we talked, supplicants came and went. A healthy looking man (10 per
cent) pleaded with the official to intercede on his behalf. A state bank
had refused to advance him a loan for rebuilding his house, which had
been destroyed by fire. Next came a middle-aged woman; her husband (60
per cent) wanted to know why the foreign car he had been promised hadn't
turned up. The official replied that hundreds of veterans were asking
the same question: the cars hadn't cleared customs.

The official took me to see the people at internal security. In the
corridor, we came across a man who was staggering and shouting. The
official asked me if I would like to visit an institution for mentally
deranged veterans. I said I'd prefer to meet victims of the gas and
their families. The official asked whether I had any preference,
percentage-wise.

Internal security detailed someone to take me to see Mr Karimi. He was
70 per cent, and had the tremulous voice I had come to associate with
people who'd been gassed. One of his two sons had a distended head. His
wife wore a chador adorned with wild flowers, and served us sherbet. Mr
Karimi had spent the war driving men and munitions around. He'd been
gassed in 1982, shortly after Khorramshahr, and before the Iraqis
started producing poison gas on an industrial scale. (In autumn 1983,
Saddam's West German-built 'insecticide' factory at Samarra started
making mustard gas. Later on, this and a second plant, also made by West
German companies, began to produce large quantities of nerve agents,
such as sarin and tabun. Competently blended, Iraq's poison gases
produced high mortality rates.)

Mr Karimi was gassed during an offensive called Moharram, which
followed the liberation of Khorramshahr, and was meant to open the way
for a deep penetration into Iraq. He had been ordered to watch over an
abandoned Iraqi motorbike to make sure it wasn't stripped for parts. An
Iraqi plane dropped its bombs fifty yards away. Instead of a loud bang
and flying shrapnel, there was white smoke, in the midst of which were
glowing shapes, the size of tennis balls - perhaps ten of them -
drifting towards him. It was before masks, before awareness, but Mr
Karimi ran away. He tripped and fell over, and breathed in a gulp of gas
as he got to his feet. Running made him sweaty, too; the gas entered his
body under his armpits and around his groin. There was a smell, like
garlic. He went to a field clinic, but the medics had no drugs to help
him. Mr Karimi was finding it hard to breathe. Before long, blisters
grew over his eyes, and he couldn't open them. He felt nauseous. Then
his sides started to hurt intensely. He started coughing uncontrollably,
which increased the pain. The nurses applied pomades, to ease the pain
of his blisters. It was four days before he could open his eyes again.
He'd been poisoned by a blend of mustard gas and nerve agents. There was
no antidote.

A military doctor I spoke to thought there were about eight thousand
survivors of gas poisoning in Isfahan alone: there must be tens of
thousands around the country, but official figures are hard to come by.
(Those who were very severely gassed had died in short order, from
internal blistering or congestion of the lungs.) With modern drugs and
tracheotomies, he said, the effects could be mitigated, but not for all
that long. Now the eight thousand were starting to die.

'You'll take tea,' said Mrs Karimi. She was carrying a tray with tea
and poolak, discs of caramelised sugar that melt on the tongue. Mr
Karimi did not take tea. He rolled up his sleeve and injected himself
with a drug to help him breathe more easily.

Amid the courtesies I received from the Karimis, there was a current of
recrimination: they considered the West to be as responsible as Saddam
Hussein for Mr Karimi's attenuated martyrdom. He showed me his pirated
translation of Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq by Kenneth
Timmerman. I had the English-language original, which claims some
Western Governments covertly approved their entrepreneurs' efforts to
sell Saddam an arsenal of horrendous weapons. Like Timmerman, Mr Karimi
found it hard to believe that the West German Government had, as it
maintained, not known that its companies were helping Saddam produce
poisonous gas and nerve agents. (It wasn't until 1991 that the German
police finally made arrests in connection with this.) I said that
America now seemed determined to unseat Saddam. Mr Karimi replied: 'The
West didn't care what he did to us. Now they're terrified of him,
because he threatens them, and they know what they gave him.'
Mr Karimi had seen Donald Rumsfeld on television a few days before,
demonising Saddam. 'It was different in 1983,' he said. 'That was when
Rumsfeld went to Baghdad and told Saddam that President Reagan wanted to
strengthen military, technical and commercial ties.' Later on, back at
my hotel, I looked up Rumsfeld in Timmerman's index. There was one
entry; Mr Karimi had memorised it.

In 1984, in the light of an investigation ordered by Javier Pérez de
Cuéllar, then the UN Secretary-General, Iraq was exposed as a
violator of the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawing the use of poisonous gas.
But the Security Council was dominated by countries that supported Iraq,
and they would only allow the Council President to condemn the use of
chemical weapons, without naming Iraq. Saddam Hussein subsequently
gassed tens of thousands of Iranian servicemen, and launched a chemical
weapons offensive against his own rebellious Kurds. The USSR was by now
arming and supporting Iraq, as were Nato and Arab countries.

Mr Karimi had the chance to go with other gas victims to Germany, for
treatment at the Iranian Government's expense. German doctors had
developed a laser treatment, and were good at tracheotomies. 'When it
comes to chemicals,' Mr Karimi said, 'they're the best. They're the best
at producing, and the best at treating.' He refused to go. He worked as
a taxi driver until 1995. Then his lungs got worse; every few weeks, he
would have to go to hospital and be put on a respirator. When he was at
home, he read the papers, and listened to the news, to see what would
happen to Saddam. He asked me if I wanted to put some questions to his
wife. Mrs Karimi had been a young girl during the war. She and some
schoolfriends had vowed to marry men who had been badly wounded. It was
their way of doing their bit.

On my last evening in Isfahan, I went to the Rose Garden of the
Martyrs, to see a veteran called Mr Amini. I had met him already, but he
hadn't liked me. In the past few years, one or two Iranian journalists
had called the war into question, suggesting that it had been needlessly
prolonged at an unacceptable human cost. Mr Amini may have associated me
with them. He'd reluctantly agreed to meet me a second time, but I only
half expected him to turn up. The Rose Garden is the resting place of
many of Isfahan's war dead. It's dominated by the Division of Imam
Hossein. There are about seven thousand graves, each marked by a metal
frame containing a photo of the man in the grave. The martyrs have been
buried according to the action in which they died. This classification
is unintentionally candid. It clearly shows that Iran sustained the
great majority of its casualties not in defence of the homeland, but
during offensives on Iraqi soil.

The attacks that Iran launched after the liberation of Khorramshahr
were designed to threaten the Iraqi port of Basra and, to a lesser
extent, Baghdad, and to support Iraq's Kurds, who had risen against
Saddam. (Throughout the war, both sides used each other's Kurds as
proxies, to the Kurds' enduring disadvantage.) Iran's 'final offensives'
of 1986 and 1987 had similar aims. Iran's infantry had to penetrate
minefields strewn with barbed wire and booby-traps. Dummy markers led
them into 'fire zones' that were covered by artillery, mortar and
machine-guns. There was an area of massive berms, defended by tanks and
cannon. Iran's diplomatic isolation meant it could not buy or maintain
the artillery pieces, aircraft and tanks it needed to pierce these
defences. The IRGC relied on headlong advances by young men and children
- boys of 12 were joining the Basij. The Iraqis were impressed by their
bravery, and mowed them down.

On my return to Tehran, I came across Khomeini's Forgotten Sons: The
Story of Iran's Boy Soldiers, written shortly after the end of the war
by a Briton, Ian Brown. I was struck by one account, a basiji's
recollection of his baptism of fire, at the age of 13.

After only a month's training at a camp near Khorramshahr I was sent to
the front. When we arrived we all assembled in a field where there must
have been thousands of us, young boys, some younger than me, and old men
as well. The commander told us we were going to attack an Iraqi position
north-east of Basra which guarded the road to Qurna to try and capture
the road.

The following morning we set off at 4 a.m. in army trucks, and I had
been given a gun and two hand grenades . . . The sun was beginning to
come up as we started walking towards the Iraqi lines . . . When we got
to the top of a hill, we started running down the other side towards the
enemy position. I wasn't afraid any more. We shouted 'Allah-u-Akbar' as
we ran, and I could see the soldiers in front of us - a line of helmets
- then they started firing. People dropped all around me, but I kept
running and shouting, kept going while many were being killed. By the
time I reached the trenches, I'd thrown my grenades and somehow had lost
my gun, but I don't remember how. Then I was hit in the leg and fell
over and lay for a long time right in front of the lines.

During Operation Kheibar, in 1984, Iran tried to seize the southern
stretch of the road from Baghdad to Basra by launching a surprise
offensive across a marsh. The operation began on the evening of 22
February, when the northernmost of Iran's two big amphibious forces
crossed the marsh and established a bridgehead on the Iraqi side.
Thousands of men having been disembarked, military wisdom required that
the Iranians fortify the bridgehead with heavy weapons in preparation
for the inevitable counterattack. But they had no such weapons. They dug
in and waited.

'The following morning,' one of the participants told me, 'the ground
started trembling. The Iraqi tanks were coming towards us. They were
taking out the earthworks we had built, and they were supported by
aircraft. We had grenades and assault rifles. We took some of them out,
but they just kept coming.' The basijis were crushed in their foxholes
or gassed. Iraqi helicopter gunships attacked the tiny marsh channels,
which were full of small craft. They electrocuted fleeing Iranians by
diverting power into the marsh. Further south, a second Iranian force
was stuck on exposed salt flats. For more than a week, wave after wave
of basijis advanced, but the Iraqis held firm. By 2 March, the attack
had been exhausted. Hossein Kharrazi was one of the last to cross a
pontoon that had been thrown back across the marsh. As he went, his
right arm was shot to bits. He shouted at the men ahead of him: 'Go on!
Don't come back for me!' At least twelve thousand Iranians were killed
during Kheibar - the number may have been as high as twenty thousand. A
third, smaller offensive gained Iran a strategically unimportant group
of islands. In Tehran, victory was duly proclaimed.

After Kheibar, some commanders, Hossein among them, advocated better
training and weapons for the IRGC and Basij, and combined arms
offensives rather than infantry charges. But this ran counter to the
prevailing theory, which held that zeal, divine intervention and weight
of numbers must prevail. It ran counter, also, to Iran's aggressive
approach to foreign relations, which had provoked the distrust of most
arms-producing countries. As rumours spread of disagreements among
military and civilian leaders - the distinction had always been slim -
the war stopped being sacred. Small hurts accumulated. Men on leave from
the front found that certain goods were scarce; bazaar traders were
hoarding, waiting for prices to rise before they released these
commodities onto the market. Volunteer levels went down; young men were
no longer thrilled by official proclamations of a 'massive mobilisation'
that would lead to 'final victory'. The fiasco of the Iran-Contra
Affair, when it was revealed that Iran and America had done secret arms
deals, taught Iranians what Americans already knew: every government,
even one sanctioned by God, lies. In Isfahan, I met a former field
doctor who recalled feeling physically sick when he read in a newspaper
at the front that the previous day there had been a concert of classical
music in Tehran.

At the beginning of 1988, Iraq's superior equipment and morale allowed
Saddam to launch a series of major offensives. Iran tamely gave up Iraqi
territory it had spent months and thousands of lives winning. Iraq
stepped up its missile attacks on Iranian cities; fearing gas, hundreds
of thousands of people fled Tehran. Everyone remembers where he or she
was on the summer day in 1988 when Iran announced that it had accepted a
ceasefire whose terms it had rejected six years before. (There was panic
in Tehran's bazaar: the hoarders had lost millions.) At the front, some
thought that stopping the war was an insult to the martyrs. Others asked
why it hadn't been stopped much earlier. Everyone agreed on one thing:
it shouldn't have ended like this. The final toll is hard to ascertain,
since both sides presented absurdly low casualty figures for themselves,
and wildly exaggerated losses on the other side. According to two
military historians, Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, Iranian
deaths were between 450,000 and 730,000, and Iraqi deaths between
150,000 and 340,000. They estimate that the war cost Iran $69 billion,
and Iraq $159 billion. 'Few wars in modern history,' they conclude, 'did
less to further the ambitions of the leaders that started them, at so
high a cost to their peoples.'

IIt was nearly six. The temperature had cooled, and people had entered
the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, to clean graves, lay flowers, and pay
someone to sing an episode from the martyrdom of Imam Hossein over their
dead sons. Women wept, while children ran around playing, and men and
boys distributed cold drinks as an act of pious charity. I saw Mr Amini
at the entrance. His face didn't seem to fit his head. They could have
come from different kits. His forehead was a collage of metal and bone.
A mutual friend had told me that he had around sixty bits of shrapnel
inside him.

He was standing still, but his lips were moving; he was greeting the
martyrs. I put my hand up, but he didn't see me. He entered a baldachin
that contained an important tomb. I sat down on a bench and took a
newspaper out. On the front page was a photograph of Ayatollah Taheri,
who had co-ordinated Isfahan's war effort. His son had been martyred
while fighting for Hossein Kharrazi. Taheri was critical of the
conservative clerics who were preventing the reformist government from
making Iran more democratic. Now, he'd gone a step further and issued an
open letter, explaining why he was resigning as Isfahan's Friday prayer
leader. The people, he said, had shed 'pure blood' to 'establish the
just government of Ali', but things had turned out differently. The
regime that Taheri depicted was corrupt, opportunistic and thuggish. His
letter was one of the most sensational critiques a member of the regime
had made since the Revolution.

I looked up; Mr Amini was by my side. We shook hands, and he sat down.
I showed him the newspaper, and asked: 'What do you think?' I had hoped
to talk to him about several operations in which the Division of Imam
Hossein had taken part. I had hoped to learn how he felt about the
changes that had taken place in Iran since the end of the war. But for
the moment, Mr Amini had decided not to talk; he still didn't trust me.
Most of the veterans I had met in Isfahan would agree with Taheri; they
knew today's Iran was a parody of the Iran that Khomeini had promised
them. But how could they support reform? The reformists under President
Muhammad Khatami had been in power for five years, and Iran had never
known such moral corruption. Pre-marital sex, divorce, drug addiction
and prostitution had reached levels you'd associate with a degenerate
Western country.

After the war, Mr Rafi'i had bought a small piece of land and gone back
to farming. Mr Karimi had his wife, and Timmerman. I'd met a veteran who
was pursuing a mystically intense relationship with God; he made it
sound like a balm. I wondered what Mr Amini had in the way of solace. I
knew he met his friends one or two evenings a week, to smoke the hookah;
they were all veterans, most them crocked. They understood each other.
I said: 'I recently read a novel that's set in London after World War
One' - and went on to describe the guilt and distress felt by Septimus
Warren Smith on his return home from the war.

Mr Amini said: 'What happens to him?'

'He jumps out of a window.'

'Islam doesn't countenance suicide,' he said with satisfaction.

I said: 'Did you take part in Karbala Four?'

'Why do you ask questions like that?'

In the last days of 1986, the top brass told Hossein Kharrazi to lead
an amphibious attack on a point south of Basra. Hossein's spies told him
that the Iraqis had heavily fortified the area; the Iranian force, they
predicted, would be wiped out. Hossein passed this intelligence on to
the top brass, but they paid no attention. He pleaded for the attack to
be cancelled. The top brass repeated: the attack must go ahead. It was
the fourth offensive in a series that had been named Karbala. Karbala
was where Imam Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet, and his followers
had been massacred. Karbala Four was Iran's Charge of the Light Brigade.
Afterwards, Hossein Kharrazi's opposition to the attack was not
forgotten. He returned to Isfahan for a few days, but the authorities
refused to supply him with a car to get back to the front. He took a
bus.

'Let's say hello to Hossein,' Amini said.

We walked through the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. Mr Amini started to
talk.

'A few weeks after Karbala Four, Hossein's in a trench at the front and
he's hungry and he says: "Boys, what have we got to eat?" And one of the
boys says: "We've got chicken from last night, I'll heat it up for you
on the stove." As it's warming up, Hossein sticks his head out of the
trench and sees a water tanker take a wrong turn. It's heading off
towards the enemy lines. Any other commander would have sent someone to
stop the water tanker but Hossein doesn't think; he gets up himself and
runs off towards the tanker, shouting: "Stop!" The tanker stops and the
driver sees it's Hossein, and he's thrilled. He gets out to kiss his
cheeks and they're standing there and a shell lands and cuts Hossein in
pieces. The boys rush out of the trench and see Hossein in pieces and
they send him to the clinic, but it's too late; Hossein's gone. They go
back to the trench and Hossein's chicken's still on the stove, cooking.

It starts burning, and everyone's sitting there. So, they sit there
while Hossein's chicken burns, and the walls of the trench go black with
the smoke, and they carry on sitting there until the stove runs out of
kerosene.'

Mr Amini was sucking in, making a rasping sound. It's the sound badly
gassed men make when they're trying to hold their emotions in check.
We'd reached Hossein Kharrazi's grave. Mr Amini touched the top of it,
and said a prayer in Arabic. Break of Day in the Trenches - 

Isaac Rosenberg;

The darkness crumbles away. 
It is the same old druid time as ever, 
Only a live thing leaps my hand, 
A queer sardonic rat, 
As I pull the parapet's poppy 
To stick behind my ear. 
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew 
Your cosmopolitan sympathies. 
Now you have touched this English hand 
You will do the same to a German 
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure 
To cross the sleeping green between. 
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass 
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes 
Less chanced than you for life, 
Bonds to the whims of murder, 
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, 
The torn fields of France. 
What do you see in our eyes 
At the shrieking iron and flame 
Hurled through still heavens? 
What quaver - what heart aghast? 
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins 
Drop, and are ever dropping; 
But mine in my ear is safe, 
Just a little white with the dust
 
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