I, Who Did Not Die Read online

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  ZAHED

  TWO

  NAJAH

  THREE

  CHILD SOLDIER

  FOUR

  THE MAGNIFICENT ONE

  FIVE

  THE MEDIC

  SIX

  THE PATIENT

  SEVEN

  SAVING NAJAH

  EIGHT

  THE KISS

  NINE

  MINA

  TEN

  DUNGEON

  ELEVEN

  YADOLLAH’S RAM

  TWELVE

  SPECIAL PRISON

  THIRTEEN

  CAPTIVITY

  FOURTEEN

  RADIO

  FIFTEEN

  GRAVESTONE

  SIXTEEN

  RELEASE

  SEVENTEEN

  MARYAM

  EIGHTEEN

  REFUGEE

  NINETEEN

  MAN OVERBOARD

  TWENTY

  ANGELS

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  For Alyaa, Amjad, Mina, Daryoosh, and all those who did not survive the Iran-Iraq War to tell their stories

  “Be certain that in the religion of Love there are no believers and unbelievers. Love embraces all.”

  —Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi

  For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

  I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

  I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

  My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

  “How do you know if you are going to die?”

  I begged my mother.

  We had been traveling for days.

  With strange confidence she answered,

  “When you can no longer make a fist.”

  Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes.

  I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand.

  —Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist,” 1952

  FOREWORD

  by Pierre Razoux

  The Iran-Iraq War was the longest and most brutal conventional war of the twentieth century, yet remarkably, many American and European history classrooms are silent on the subject. Firsthand accounts and books about this pivotal war are few, yet this eight-year conflict is the matrix of the geopolitical situation that prevails in the Persian Gulf today.

  Only now, with witness testimonies like that of Zahed Haftlang and Najah Aboud, are we beginning to get a glimpse of this “forgotten war,” and to start to understand what lies behind the current firefights ravaging Aleppo, Mosul, and Raqqa.

  The Iran-Iraq War, from 1980–1988, relied on national and religious ideology to sway civilians and soldiers alike, and its military strategy condensed the most violent tactics of previous wars. Like World War I, it was marked by large-scale trench combat and bayonet charges, and extensive use of chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, against Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians. It combined the massive use of armored vehicles and fighter jets common to World War II, and missiles and aerial duels over the desert like those of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Troops also fought in swampy marshes similar to what soldiers faced in Vietnam, and engaged in arid and snowy mountain battles in Kurdistan reminiscent of wars in Algeria and Afghanistan.

  The death and destruction left in the wake of this ruthless war were colossal, with soldiers buried in mass battlefield graves and entire villages reduced to dust. No one was unscathed. Nearly 40 percent of the adult male population in the two countries was swept up in the fighting. Up to 700,000 lives were lost, among them 80,000 Iranian child soldiers who fought on the front lines. These boys were members of the volunteer Basij youth militia, which recruited from local mosques, schools, and workplaces. Most child soldiers joined the war at age twelve or thirteen, and some were used as human minesweepers to clear the fields in advance of the armed Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Another two million people were wounded or mutilated, and victims are still dying today from the long-term effects of poison gas attacks. Another one million were uprooted during the course of the bombings, which destroyed some 1,800 border villages and towns, most notably Khorramshahr and Adaban, where the world’s largest oil refinery was severely damaged. In Iraq, Basra was decimated.

  The overall cost of the war is estimated at $1.1 trillion in 1988 dollars with Iran accounting for about 60 percent of the loss. Material damages added another combined $350 billion. Together, the belligerents lost 5,000 tanks and 500 combat aircraft. In the aftermath, the economies of both countries were plunged into multimillion dollar debt, economic development came to a standstill, and much of the oil industry throughout the region was decimated by air raids.

  In the end, nothing changed. Both sides eventually wore down and agreed to a ceasefire that included no reparations or boundary changes. And, unlike any conflict before it, prisoners-of-war were held indefinitely by both sides; more than 115,000 broken and forgotten men slowly released over a ten-year period after the war.

  But the permanent cost was a deepening of the complex power struggles, historical hatreds, and persistent fears that stem directly from this unforgiving war. These same complex forces persist today, fueling the ranks of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and animosities between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States.

  The Iran-Iraq War ultimately was a battle of wills between Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini, the latest chapter in an ancient rivalry between neighboring countries that dates back to the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Persian Empire of the 1500s. Then, as in the 1980s, the longtime enemies argued over religion, politics, and borders, in particular, a section of waterway where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers join and flow into the Persian Gulf. Control of that section of waterway meant power—and control of the tanker ships that exported oil through the area.

  But the Iran-Iraq War was not just about territory—it was a violent manifestation of two opposing worldviews. Hussein believed Arab nationalism tied all the different religious sects together—Sunni and Shia, Christian and Muslim, Kurd and Arab. He positioned himself as the undisputed leader of a secular, pan-Arab empire that would replace Iran as the most powerful Persian Gulf state.

  This ran contradictory to the religious ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was swept into power during the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah. Backed by a large Shia following, Khomeini vowed to eradicate state nationalism, insisting there should be no division between religion and politics, because the highest unifying entity was Islam. He positioned himself as the leader of a borderless, Islamic empire that would encompass the entire Middle East.

  Khomeini began radio broadcasts in Iraq aimed at the country’s long-suppressed Shia majority, encouraging the overthrow of Hussein’s regime and the takeover of Iraq’s holy Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf.

  Hussein, whose Baathist Party was comprised of minority Sunnis, feared the Islamic Revolution would spill over into Iraq and encourage widespread Shia riots, a revival of the armed Kurdish secessionist movement, and ultimately civil war. He abruptly deported thousands of Iraqi Shia citizens. Then he attacked the source of Shia inspiration—the Khomeini regime.

  Iraqi troops invaded Iran in September 1980. Hussein anticipated a quick fight, assuming his armies would meet little resistance from a disbanded and disorganized Iranian army that Khomeini had yet to rebuild after the Islamic Revolution. And it appear
ed that way at the outset, as Iraq quickly captured several border cities, including Khorramshahr. But, although Iraq had more firepower, Iranian troops had more patriotic fervor. While Hussein was fighting for power, Khomeini positioned Iran as fighting for Allah, and a holy war easily coalesced around a common enemy. Young Iranian men and boys were told not to fear death because as martyrs they would join the prophets in heaven, and their families would be given compensation, food rations, and access to better schools and jobs.

  What the outside world saw was religious fanaticism taken to the extreme. Disturbing images of child soldiers thrown into frontline battle, bloodied trenches, refineries aflame, gassed corpses, and humiliated prisoners. Why would anyone join this war?

  Najah and Zahed allow us to understand the reasons are more nuanced than they appear. Their stories show us that, contrary to popular prejudice that mixes all Muslims—Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Kurds, and Persians—into one extremist and violent religion, most Iraqi and Iranian soldiers did not form hordes of fanatic zombies, but battalions of poor citizens courageously carrying arms because they simply had no other choice. Desertion would have immediately earned them the firing squad. Like so many of his fellow Basij child soldiers who volunteered to serve as cannon fodder for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, Zahed’s reasons have nothing to do with religious fervor, ideological indoctrination, or adoration of Ayatollah Khomeini. They are more prosaic: the taste for adventure, the will to escape the ferocity of a violent father and to assert himself as a man in the eyes of the family, the seduction of a girlfriend, and a kid’s ingrained attraction to weapons. And above all, a prevailing sense of duty to country and family—some of the very same reasons young people of all origins are joining the ranks of ISIS today.

  Iraq and Iran gained nothing after eight years of bloodshed besides exhaustion and ruin. To this day, no peace treaty has ever been signed. And with each year that passes, there are fewer witnesses to tell the world what really happened.

  Here are two.

  PIERRE RAZOUX is Research Director at IRSEM (Institute for Strategic Research) in Paris and author of The Iran-Iraq War (Harvard University Press/Belknap), which was awarded as the Best Book of the Year by the Military History Society in 2016.

  PROLOGUE

  KHORRAMSHAHR, IRAN, MAY 1982—Crawling on my belly in the sand, I felt it before it happened: a low rumble like the moment before an earthquake, or maybe it was Satan himself howling from below. Then a massive boom and I was airborne. Grains of sand needled into my pores, and for the briefest moment, I was suspended above the battlefield. All sound stopped, all the shelling, all the screaming for Allah, all of it was silenced, and the orange flashes of mortar fire looked almost pretty in the darkness. Like candles flickering above the desert.

  When I crashed back to earth, I had no more faith in anything. I didn’t believe in God, in humanity, or in Saddam’s war. There was no time for such devotions, as blood seeped from my forehead and chest, and all around me men were being executed as they begged for their lives. There was only one truth left: I was going to rot in a mass grave with hundreds of other forgotten Iraqi soldiers.

  It’s true what they say about your whole life flashing by as you wait for death to come sit next to you. It happens fast, like Kodachrome slides snapping into view—all these images of yourself in moments of pure joy. I closed my eyes and saw my brothers and me climbing trees to pick dates. I felt my fingers close around the fur of our big German shepherd as we wrestled in the family courtyard, and heard my mother’s voice singing from the kitchen. I tasted the falafel my sister and I fried in our restaurant, and I saw my fiancée’s abaya fluttering in the wind as she held our newborn son. The last thing I saw was my family together, celebrating the thirtieth birthday I would never have.

  Then I felt a presence near me. I opened my eyes and saw a child soldier pointing a rifle at my temple. He was so small that he had to roll up the sleeves and pant legs of his uniform. This Persian boy had been brainwashed to hate me. I spoke as softly as I could.

  “Please,” I said, “I’m a Muslim, just like you.”

  He backed up a step and cocked the rifle. He either couldn’t understand Arabic or he didn’t care to chat before pulling the trigger.

  “Muslim! Muslim!” I pleaded.

  The boy took aim.

  I reached into my jacket pocket to show him my Koran, and the boy lunged, grabbing it from me. He rustled through the pages, stopping when he discovered the photo of my fiancée holding our baby. He studied the image, as if he recognized them. He glanced at me and back to the photo again. I think I saw him gently touch her face with his finger.

  He snapped the book shut and turned toward me with an expression of utter blankness. I silently said good-bye to everyone I loved. Then the boy slid the Koran back into my pocket. He knelt down and gave me water from his canteen. Then he leaned in close and put his finger to his lips.

  “Shhhhhh.”

  ONE

  ZAHED

  Most kids in Masjed Soleyman had bicycles, even the slum kids who lived on the ugly side of town inside crumbling mud houses all stacked on top of each other. But we lived in a real brick house with a corrugated tin roof built for the oil company workers, so I should have had a bicycle, at least. Your own set of wheels meant you always had a way to escape the kind of heat that sinks down into your bones. You could pedal away from the dusty roads to the relief of the Karun River, say, or up a red dirt path in the Zagros Mountains and look over practically all of western Iran to clear your head from the clang of too many neighbors stirring up trouble in everybody else’s business.

  But Baba said I didn’t deserve a bicycle. I was not sure why, other than I sometimes got in trouble at school for shoving the boys or chasing the girls, but I thought it had to do with my ten brothers and sisters. My father could easily have bought one bike because he had money from his mechanic job at the British Petroleum company. But I suppose if Baba had bought me a bicycle, he’d have had to buy ten more, and he for sure couldn’t afford that. He always reminded us how much it cost to put food in eleven mouths—twelve, if you counted Maman. Liquor made him more likely to demonstrate how bad our money problems were by shoving the person closest to him. So on the days he stopped for a drink on his way home from work, we all rushed to the dinner table in the courtyard; no one wanted to be last and have to sit next to him.

  Money troubles were the reason why, in our family, playing was a sin. As soon as my brothers and sisters and I could walk, Baba put a rag in our hands and gave us jobs in his garage. That’s where he worked on cars for extra cash. It wasn’t a real auto shop with a lift or anything, and he barely had any tools besides what anyone else would have in their house—pliers and scissors and screwdrivers and a hammer. But he managed with salvaged parts from junked cars and by borrowing a real tool when he could, so neighbors came to him because he charged less than real shops and he could get the work done fast because of his free labor force.

  One day my job was to grind the valves on an eight-cylinder carburetor head. Baba handed me a stiff wire and a piece of thin plastic, and told me to cover the wire tip with the plastic and scrape the valves clean with it. Normally, this is done with a power tool, but we did everything by hand. Before me was a pile of thirty-two valves crusted with who knows how many years of calcium crud. Of all us kids I was the only one who really did want to be a mechanic, so before I was even old enough to work, I used to watch and memorize Baba’s movements around a car. He taught me that when the valves get dirty, they don’t form a tight seal in the carburetor, so the engine will leak.

  “The customer is coming for his car this evening, so every valve needs to be smooth by the time I get home,” he said.

  The heat inside the garage was like a snake charmer, coaxing vapor out of the oil spills on the floor. The sweet smell of grease hung in the air and sweat trickled between my shoulder blades as I stared out the door at the neighborhood kids on their bicycles. I didn’t need a thermome
ter to know it was the hottest day of the year so far; all I had to do was squint my eyes to see waves ripple up from the earth, making my friends look like they were pedaling underwater.

  The gunk on the valve stems was stubborn, and I couldn’t get all of it off. I turned the tubes over and over, working each one, and in no time I had the hands of an old person, full of cramps. I could tell by the sun that half the afternoon was already gone and there was no way I would be able to finish by the time Baba returned. My only option was to use what little money I had from customer tips to hire some of the kids outside to help me. For the price of a gaz nougat candy each, I hired three helpers, but they were useless, wandering off when their hands started to ache. By the time Baba’s shadow stretched from the doorway over to me, I had only cleaned half of the valves.

  His dark eyes turned to pinpoints, and I could hear the breath coming out of his nose.

  “This? This is it?”

  “My hands hurt, Baba. And it’s too hard with just this wire. I need a real tool.”

  He turned away from me and grabbed a grooved radiator belt from a peg in the wall.

  “How about this tool?” he said, lifting it over his head.

  At first I didn’t understand what he meant. You can’t clean a valve with a strip of rubber. Then he brought his arm down and the belt made a ripping noise through the air. When it laced across my back, it sounded like a wet fish slapping on the table. I inhaled sharply and for the first few seconds felt absolutely nothing, as if time had frozen in place. Then the pain, like a wolf scratching its claws across my back, woke my body, and a scream tore from my throat.