In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

We entered the square, and I looked at Mr Rafi’i. In the half-light of the mosque, my attention had been drawn by his thick torso and neck – not a taut musculature but a ragged peasant virility. His face was red, bulging. He wore a check shirt and dusty baggy black trousers.

‘I just got in from my fields,’ he said, guiding me across the square. ‘Next week, we’re going to start harvesting. But it’s a busy time of year; I have to teach at the same time.’

Mr Rafi’i’s subject was the sayings, sermons and letters of the Imam All. For Shi’as, 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 of the two to his servant. His judges were so independent, one found against him in a case.

As my ears got used to Mr Rafi’i’s rural accent, my eyes were drawn to his forehead. Many Shi’as have a purplish blotch there, from the baked tablet of earth they press down upon as they pray Mr Rafi’i’s blotch had gained a crust, with small features of its own. It seemed to laugh whenever he did – a wizened sprite, living in his head.

‘Here’s my horse, said Mr Rafi’i, pointing to an old motorbike with a hempen packsaddle that might have been designed for a donkey. ‘Get on.’

We went hoarsely down the little streets, into a main road that carried us, by way of one of the newer bridges, across the river. We strained up the hill on the other side, towards a shelf of mountains. We turned well before the mountains, continued for a couple of hundred metres and stopped at the gate of the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. We dismounted and Mr Rafi’i mouthed a greeting to the martyrs.

There are some seven thousand of them and each grave is surmounted by a metal frame that contains a photograph of the man in the grave. The graves are bunched, like copses, one copse for each major engagement. They represent a fraction of the martyrs from the province of Isfahan – I’ve heard of villages with a population of two or three hundred, and a score of graves in the War cemetery. The martyr’s families would come each week, Mr Rafi’i explained, usually on Thursday evenings. He said: ‘Come and meet my friends.’

He’d been their ally, their chaplain. He remembered the occupants of many graves; there was barely one whose name meant nothing to him. The photographs were formal, taken in a studio to commemorate earthly achievement – a school diploma, an engagement to be married. Perhaps a mother had sensed the coming martyrdom and requested a memorial pose.

‘These boys were nothing like the boys you see on the streets today. Nothing! They were clean! And they were fighting for God. They were fighting for the government of Ali; they longed for his caliphate.’

He pointed. The photograph depicted a very young boy with the beginnings of a beard. ‘He and his cousin died on the same day, coming back across the marsh. He was a good boy. They didn’t find his body.’

‘His grave’s empty?’

‘No, no … Listen! His parents tracked down some survivors from the operation, and got conflicting reports. One said he’d seen their boy being crushed by a tank. Another said he was electrocuted when the enemy diverted power into the marsh …’

Mr Rafi’i paused; he’d seen someone he knew, a bald man holding a watering can over a grave.

Mr Rafi’i called out: ‘Salaam Aleikum!’ The bald man smiled and beckoned us over. Mr Rafi’i introduced him: ‘This is Mr Mousavi, and that’s the grave of his nephew who died on the last day of the War. The great Creator saw fit to draw him to his breast …’

‘Thanks be to God,’ interrupted Mr Mousavi dutifully.

‘I was explaining to Mr Duplex here,’ said Mr Rafi’i, ‘the reason why these boys went.’ He turned back to me. ‘Boys like Mr Mousavi’s nephew – Amin, wasn’t it? – were in love with justice and God. Right, Mr Mousavi?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Mousavi. ‘The last time I saw him, he said – it was the end of the War, we thought he’d been spared … he said he was sorry that God hadn’t judged him worthy of martyrdom …’

‘Mr Duplex,’ Mr Rarf’i said, ‘you must know it’s an honour to be martyred; not everyone gets called.’

Mr Mousavi went on: ‘God heard him and took him on the last day of the War.’ His expression went dead. He was awed by the severity of God’s kindness. I looked at the photograph of Mr Mousavi’s nephew. A normal kid, with 1970s bouffant hair and a beard and a spiky shirt collar. I looked along the line of photographs, at his neighbours. They had the same confidence; God wouldn’t let them lose.

Mr Rafi’i and I went back to the grave of the boy whose body hadn’t been found. ‘At the end of the War,’ he said, ‘some of the old soldiers volunteered to go back to the battlefields and try and find the bodies of the missing lads. They even crossed the border, into Iraq. They used their knowledge of the sites, and their memories of the battles, to find the bodies. Then they dug them out and brought them back to their families.’

‘So they found him?’ I asked, gesturing at the grave.

He nodded. ‘Five years after he died, they found him – his father told me. His trench had taken a direct hit. The strange thing is, his face was preserved, perfect. There was no smell, either. You know, the body decomposes and produces a smell. There was none of that …’ He looked at me closely. ‘Do you believe what I am saying?’

I wanted to believe him. Perhaps. It was fantastic, no? I nodded vaguely.

He started to cough, weakly, like a kitten. His face had got redder. A sort of yellow scum had accumulated at the corners of his mouth.

I said: ‘Shall we sit down?’

We walked towards the trees. Mr Rafi’i laid his packsaddle on a grave. As we sat down, I said: ‘Among Christians, it would be considered offensive to sit on a grave or walk over someone’s grave.’

Mr Rafi’i was breathing a little easier. He grinned. ‘The soul cannot be sat on.’

Something made him remember a young seminarian, Hamid, during the War. ‘He was sixteen years old. He was a good boy: pure! They were all pure, back then.

‘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, 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. We were twenty-two of us, in a column. As we set out, Hamid kissed me on both cheeks. He smelt of 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 seconds 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 looked up at the sky, to the bending tops of the cypresses and pines. ‘You have to be clean, to be a martyr.’

Anticipating my next question, he said: ‘God didn’t want a grizzly old sinner like me.’ The sprite laughed with us.

I asked: ‘What did the men do, before they went off to battle? Did they pray? Were they silent? Did they chatter to try and settle their nerves?’

‘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 mucking 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 myself 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 alive now.’

He got out a bottle of water from his pack and took a swig, making sure his lips didn’t touch it. Then he handed it to me. He said: ‘So, you’ve come to Isfahan to learn about the War?’

I said, ‘I hope to come to Isfahan several times.’

‘You should meet Hossein Kharrazi.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘He’s over there.’ He gestured behind him. ‘I’d take you myself, but I need to have my injection. With your permission, I’ll be on my way. Just go over there, and ask where Kharrazi is. Everyone knows.’

‘Does he work here?’

Mr Rafi’i smiled gently.

After he’d gone, I went over to the area he had pointed to. I started walking up and down the lines of graves, reading the inscriptions and trying to find Kharrazi. After a while, I came across a group of people standing in front of a grave. It was identical to the other ones, but had more flowers. Flowers from a shop, some wild flowers and some plastic ones, too.

Shortly after the Revolution, Iran’s mainly Sunni ethnic minorities started to demand administrative, religious and cultural autonomy – even, in some cases, independence. In the north-east, the Turkmens of Turkmensara; the Arabs of the south-western province of Khuzistan; the Baluchs on the border with Pakistan; Kurds living adjacent to Turkey and Iraq; all tried, using violent and diplomatic means, to persuade Khomeini to dismantle the centralized bureaucracy that the Shah had bequeathed him. Before the Revolution, Khomeini had promised freedom for all. That was before.

The worst violence was the Kurdish violence. The Kurds had welcomed the Revolution because they hoped to influence its course; the Shah’s departure would not serve them unless the new regime recognized their historic separateness. The Kurds have more ethnic and cultural affinity to the Persians than they have to the Arabs and the Turks, their other hosts in an ancestral home the size of France, but they have been taught by history to distrust them all. The Kurdish imagination is littered with memories of betrayal and misery, much of it self-inflicted.

There’s no reason to suppose that Khomeini rejected the regional stereo-type of Kurds as murderous and untrustworthy. A fear of separatism, as much as his hostility to left-wingers and liberals, had persuaded him, shortly after the Revolution, to set up the Revolutionary Guard. When the Kurdish violence broke, Bazargan and some of his allies favoured conciliation; Khomeini and the clerical hardliners wanted to send in the Revolutionary Guard. Hossein Kharrazi, along with some fifty friends and acquaintances, got ready to fight.

Kharrazi was the third son of a junior civil servant in Isfahan, and his father couldn’t pay for him to take up the university place he’d won before the Revolution. As a conscript in the Shah’s army, he’d spent part of his military service in the tiny sultanate of Oman, across the Strait of Hormuz from the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. Iran had kept a military presence there since the mid-1970s, when the Shah’s troops had helped the Sultan suppress a guerilla uprising. Kharrazi went AWOL when, the day after the Shah’s flight, Khomeini called for a mass desertion from the imperial army. Compared to many of his friends, whose military experience amounted to lobbing Molotov cocktails at the former regime’s police stations, he was a seasoned soldier.

To Kharrazi and his friends, putting down the Kurdish rebels was a religious duty. He and most of the other lads had joined the Revolutionary Guard. (In time, the Guard would grow, allowing Khomeini to reduce his dependence on the regular army; he suspected it of remembering the Shah with fondness.) By a process of informal election, Kharrazi and another local boy, Rahim Safavi, became leaders of the group.

At twenty-two, Kharrazi was older than most of the others; being bright and fervent, he was able to articulate their ideals. America, the mortal enemy of the new Islamic Republic, was trying to turn Kurdistan into another Israel. Saddam Hussein, who feared the new Islamic Republic, was helping. As Shi’as and Iranians, it was their duty to fight. If they were killed – as long as they had not actively sought death, but rather the glory of Islam – they would be martyrs and go to heaven. (The Qoran and the sayings of the Prophet made that clear.) If they stayed alive, and won, they would recreate the Imam Ali’s perfect caliphate.

To the boys in Isfahan, and across the country, that seemed like a terrific deal. The new warriors were mostly poor boys; similar boys in other countries, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, would have been drawn to extremist politics. 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 lads had a penury of both. Now, wealth was being measured in ways that favoured them. You were rich if you enjoyed the favour of God and the Imam, if you were going off to Kurdistan 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!’

There was a jackpot up for grabs: martyrdom.

A minority of the boys – the more thoughtful ones – conceived of heaven abstractly. It was a state of grace, God’s mingling with the soul. (By contrast, hell was regret, a longing for divine favour that throbbed into eternity.) Most of the lads, however, thought of heaven as a mild spring day, where the heavenly facilities could be smelt or touched.

Kharrazi, Safavi and the lads took a bus to Kermanshah, more than one hundred kilometres south of the war zone. They commandeered a helicopter and went to Sanandaj, the capital of the province of Kurdistan. As they touched down, the airport was being mortared. According to Muhammad – Reza Abu Shahab, who went on to become one of Kharrazi’s aides, ‘We had no knowledge of military operations, or military theory. God was helpful and gave us false confidence; we thought we’d beat them easily.’

The Kurds made insulting, overweening demands. (They were showing that they didn’t understand the Revolution, and put their own petty nationalism above the rule of God.) They boycotted the referendum on the new constitution. Meanwhile, some misguided or treasonous elements inside the government continued to promote a peaceful settlement. They came to the region for peace talks, bartering with the Islamic Republic, when they should have been killing and dying for it.

Kharrazi and the others hated the army and mocked its daintiness. (The army was known to balk at orders to bombard Kurdish villages.) But the army was essential to the struggle to put down the Kurds; the Revolutionary Guard were too few, inexperienced and ill disciplined to win on their own.[*]

Kharrazi’s men carried cumbersome old automatic rifles. These had been supplied – with great reluctance – by the regular army. If they wanted heavier weapons, they were told, they would have to steal them from the enemy. Gradually, as they killed more Kurds, they picked up their Kalashnikovs and Uzis.

There were cakes, presented to the Revolutionary Guard by local girls, which exploded once the girl was out of view. There was the beheading of a convalescing Revolutionary Guardsman in a hospital ward. There was the rape and disembowelling of boys whose fathers supported the government. There were government sentries found with their genitals stuffed in their mouths. There was the fear of fighting in tall valleys far from home, of depending on Kurdish guides who might be leading you into a trap. No one said the Kurds fought like gentlemen.

I don’t know whether Kharrazi’s group perpetrated what I, or you, might deem an atrocity. A bullet in the head for a Kurdish Sunni – punishment for refusing an invitation to join the Shi’a faith? A bastinado for a shepherd who failed to disclose the whereabouts of an enemy patrol? A shelling for a village whose inhabitants had given the rebels bread? Abu Shahab and others deny that such things happened. But the government’s campaign was famous for its savagery. Kharrazi and his lads were fighting the enemies of God, and nowhere in Islam does God prescribe for them a gentle rehabilitation.

That was perfectly understood by Khalkhali, scourge of Hoveida and destroyer of the Pahlavi tomb. For a while, he was in the rearguard of the advancing government forces, dispensing justice. His trials would last ten minutes or so. Verdicts depended on his whim. There was no appeal.

A magnificent society was being created. The unit was its microcosm. Men addressed each other as ‘brother’. Kharrazi and his aides were obeyed because their authority, everyone assumed, came from God. When there was a shortage of food, Kharrazi would pretend he wasn’t hungry and give his share to the younger lads. He took guard duty like everyone else, and went on dangerous reconnaissance missions. ‘No one missed the cities,’ one of his men told me, ‘because they were still full of sin; here, in the fields, we were fighting alongside God.’

Kharrazi taught them:

No drop of liquid is more popular with God than the drop of blood that is 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.

They didn’t realize it at the time, but it was all a preparation, a rehearsal for a grander struggle.

Even before the Revolution brought Iran’s Shi’a clerics to power, Iraq’s Baathist state had been suppressing its own discontented Shi’as. Although they constitute a majority of Iraqis, Shi’as had been underrepresented in the dictatorship that Saddam helped set up in 1968. They had been alienated by its espousal, variously, of secularism and Sunni nationalism. Saddam, who had been vice-president since 1968, but overshadowed the president in influence, regarded the new Iranian regime as a challenge – one that he might be able to turn to his advantage.

Before the Revolution, Iran and Iraq had been rivals, but the Shah had enjoyed the advantage. Being Arab nationalists, the Baathists had been furious when Iran, supported diplomatically by Britain and America, occupied three islands in the Persian Gulf in 1971. In response, Iraq expelled some seventy-five thousand Shi’as of Iranian origin and allied itself to the Soviet Union. But the Iraqis and Russians never built up the kind of intimate relationship that the Shah enjoyed with the US. In case of war, Iraq’s elderly Soviet kit would be no match for Iran’s expanding arsenal of sophisticated American weaponry. Access to US armaments was Iran’s reward for being the ‘third pillar’ – the other two pillars being Israel and Saudi Arabia – of America’s anti-Soviet policy in the Middle East.

In 1974, with American support, Iran intervened to help the Kurds of northern Iraq revive their intermittent insurgency against the government in Baghdad. As the likelihood of a destabilizing war between Iran and Iraq increased, so did international efforts to broker a lasting peace between the neighbours. In 1975, in Algiers, the Shah and Saddam signed an accord that required their respective governments to stop interfering in each other’s domestic affairs, and which ostensibly settled outstanding border disputes. Iraq conceded to Iran part ownership of the strategic southern reaches of their fluvial border, the Arab River. The Shah, and the Americans, ended their support for the Kurdish revolt.

Four months before the Revolution, the Iraqis complied with the Shah’s request that they expel Khomeini, who had been living in exile since 1965 in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf. He went to Paris, which turned out to be a far better place from which to organize a revolution. On his return to Iran, he made it clear that he wanted political Islam to spread. In Iraq, thousands of Shi’a clerics, who remembered Khomeini from his period of exile, agreed. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, the most prominent of them, sent Khomeini a telegram in which he predicted that ‘other tyrants’ would also meet their reckoning. The Baathists put him under house arrest.

In June 1979, Saddam seized absolute power. He stepped up repression of militant Shi’a groups that Iran was arming and training. As the revolt in Iranian Kurdistan intensified, he took a leaf out of the Shah’s book, providing the insurgents with cash and arms. (The Islamic regime started supporting the remnants of the Iraqi Kurdish group whose rebellion had been crushed in the wake of the 1975 Algiers Accord.) Saddam also armed secessionist groups in the Iranian province of Khuzistan, which sits on most of Iran’s on-shore oil and gas.

In the first half of 1980, hostilities became overt. An Iran-backed Shi’a group made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister. Iraq bombed an Iranian border town and expelled more Shi’as of Iranian descent. When he learned that al-Sadr was planning to visit Tehran, Saddam had him executed. The following month, Iran foiled a coup attempt sponsored by exiled monarchists. The death of the deposed Shah deprived the monarchists of their figurehead. If the Baathists wanted to bring about Khomeini’s fall, it was clear that they would have to push him themselves.

In 1979, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had become the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel, earning the gratitude of the US and the opprobrium of millions of Muslims. With that deal, Egypt was deposed as unofficial leader of the Arab world. A show of force and determination, Saddam calculated, would make the position his. He wanted to suck Khuzistan into his sphere of influence, and to have a say in the composition of a post-Khomeini government in Iran, a government that would be friendly to Iraq. Iraq’s state television was to describe the Iranians as ‘flies’; the hatred, amply requited, of Arabs for Persians may have facilitated his decision to attack.

For the first time since the Baathists assumed power in 1968, it seemed as though Iraq could win a war against Iran. The revolutionary regime was split between moderates and hardliners. Although the ethnic rebellions, with the exception of the Kurdish one, had been put down, other armed groups, some of them leaning to the left, seemed to be preparing to come into conflict with the new clerical establishment. The Iraqis, Saddam was advised, would be welcomed as liberators by the Arabs of Khuzistan. In the event of determined aggression, Khomeini’s republic would collapse.

Assessment of the two countries’ respective military capabilities suggested that Iraq had closed the gap on its neighbour. Executions, desertions, purges and reassignments had cut Iran’s army by 40 per cent. The US Embassy hostage crisis, along with Iran’s hostility to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had isolated the new regime from the world’s biggest arms producers. On the eve of war, about 30 per cent of Iran’s land force equipment, and more than half its aircraft, were not operational. Iraq’s armed forces, on the other hand, kept on growing.

On 22 September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran. The land offensive, launched at four points along a seven hundred-kilometre border, was strikingly similar to an exercise that had been devised forty years before by British instructors at the Baghdad War Academy. An inefficient command structure, excessive caution and unfamiliarity with combined arms operations slowed the advance. After four days it came to a temporary halt.

For the first two days of the War, the advancing Iraqis were not met by any large unit. Iran’s mobilization, when it finally got underway, was calamitously managed. It took one division six weeks to get from a base in eastern Iran to the theatre in the west. Many volunteers who went to the front were armed with Molotov cocktails. A plan, predating the Revolution, for the Americans to computerise Iran’s spare parts inventories, had not been completed. The Iranians didn’t know what they had in their stores.