On the fifth anniversary of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the ‘operation’ part is still far from over. When the Iraqi military was neutralized in the first few weeks of the war it was hard to imagine that, five years later, the battle for Iraq would still be raging. Saddam Hussein had two bitter enemies: Iran, Iraq’s historic rival, and Sunni fundamentalists. Now that the old guard is gone, US forces are left fighting against the same people Saddam Hussein was bent on destroying: al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
Twenty years ago this month, I was standing on the frontlines of a war that has been compared in brutality to the trench warfare in Europe during World War I. Iran and Iraq were in the last stages of a conflict that had lasted eight years and claimed over a million lives. Chemical and biological weapons, which had been banned under the Geneva Convention after WWI, were once again in play and so too were the use of children ‘volunteers’ who ran ahead of soldiers to clear mine fields. Such was the devastation inflicted on both sides that when a truce was finally brokered in the summer of 1988, reconciliation between the two warring nations was impossible to achieve. Relations between the two enemies were at such a low that it took over 10 years to repatriate prisoners of war.
The animosity between these two nations is nothing new and goes back to 636 A.D. when a few thousand ill-equipped Arabs defeated a well organized Persian army in four days at the battle of Qadissiya. There are many accounts as to why the Persian army was defeated, but to many Arabs the victory over the Sassanid Empire is still a source of pride. For Iranians, the defeat is still a bitter pill to swallow. It has even been said that the eight-year war with Iran was Saddam Hussein’s modern-day Battle of Qadissiya.
With the war over and neither side able to claim victory, Saddam Hussein turned to his Arab neighbors for support. But instead of getting a pat on the back for containing Iran, he was asked to repay billions of dollars in debts he had incurred to finance the war. The sacrifices made by Iraq were too numerous to hide. Besides the casualties, the country was in shambles. Iraq’s infrastructure, which had been on par with the other Gulf Arab states before the war, was in ruins. So too was Iraq’s third largest city, Basra, which had taken the brunt of the bombardments. There were few buildings still standing and the port and oil exporting facilities were largely destroyed. I toured Basra, the port area, and the Shatt al-Arab water passage shortly after the war ended and found hundreds of derelict ships either stranded at the port or partly submerged in the water. Because there were so many sunken ships and other obstacles left behind by the fighting, the Shatt al-Arab, Iraq’s most important outlet to the sea, was not navigable.
Inside Iraq, pressure was exacerbated when tens of thousands of unemployed soldiers hit the streets looking for work. In rural areas clashes broke out when returning soldiers found their farms occupied by Egyptians and other Arabs who were brought in during the war to help cultivate the land. After body bags turned up at Cairo’s airport, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was forced to intervene in order to get compensation from the Iraqi government for the loss of life.
Desperate to be reckoned with and re-equipped with new weapons, Saddam Hussein began making demands. Because the Shatt al-Arab was unusable, he wanted to use two Kuwaiti controlled islands in the Gulf. But when Kuwait refused, he only became more frustrated. The crisis reached its boiling point at the beginning of 1990 when Saddam Hussein accused both Kuwait and the UAE of overstepping oil production quotas. At the Arab Summit in May 1990 he pointed out that every dollar drop in a barrel of oil resulted in an annual loss of billions of dollars for Iraq. He then accused Kuwait of stealing oil from the Rumaila oil fields which straddle the border area. With no concessions going his way, Saddam Hussein ultimately turned to his military and invaded Kuwait.
Until that point, Iraq had played a central role in the region. Not only was it home to Babylon, the cradle of the ancient civilization, but it was also the battle-hardened eastern flank of the Arab World. With the fall of the shah and the rise to power of an Islamic revolutionary regime in Iran, Iraq suddenly had become the front line of defense against the spread of this new type of revolution. Even though the US remained officially neutral during the Iran-Iraq war, it was no secret where its sympathies lay. Not only was Saddam Hussein able to get support from its trusted ally, the Soviet Union, but was also able to secure loans from Arab neighbors and European and US banks to buy weapons.
After almost a decade of war, the world was about to change and alliances were about to shift. Soon after the war ended, Iraq’s one time ally the USSR began to crumble. With tensions on the rise with his Arab neighbors, Saddam Hussein turned to the West hoping to get financial assistance to rebuild his war-ravaged country. The Americans kept a channel open to hear his grievances but first they wanted to see a halt to his biological, chemical, and nuclear program.
The irony is that part of the American policy had actually worked and when the day of reckoning came there were no weapons of mass destruction. Instead, what happened by removing Saddam Hussein, the Americans left the door wide open for Iraq’s arch enemies, Iran and al-Qaeda.
Norbert Schiller is a Dubai-based photo-journalist and writer.
