The idea of creating the Basij was a divine prophecy [delivered] to the Imam [Khomeini] and can be seen as a wondrous miracle. —Guards deputy commander Hossein Salami, November 2016
On November 25, 1979, Khomeini called for the creation of, in his words, a “twenty-million-man army.” In response, the People’s Militia, later known as the Basij, was established in April 1980. Initially a separate service from the Guards, the Basij fought in the war against Iraq, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. Survival in the trenches would help define a generation of Iranian leaders. The newly formed Basij’s mettle was tested early and often during the war, as the organization provided human fodder for combat. Nearly an entire generation of young men and boys served and suffered in the war.
By the conflict’s end, Iran’s economy had absorbed an estimated trillion dollars in direct and indirect losses. The war convinced Tehran that a robust, capable missile force is critical to the country’s security, as long-range missiles pummeled cities in both countries, forcing more than a quarter of Tehran’s population to flee during the so-called War of the Cities. In these trying circumstances, the Basij offered an endless stream of youthful volunteers, ready to cross minefields and face Iraqi fire to clear paths for regular Iranian troops. Children served as shock troops. Many fought bravely, though they were poorly equipped and often led by adolescents no more experienced in combat than they were. The Iranian regime deployed at least 550,000 youths under eighteen during the war. The Basij itself suffered an estimated 190,000 fatalities, a casualty rate that overshadowed those of the Guards and the army.
Great Wars
The Iran-Iraq war bore some similarities to World War I, which gave rise to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Like the battles of the Great War, clashes in the Iran-Iraq war occurred episodically. Lines of combat were often static, with long periods of boredom punctuated by flurries of slaughter. Most dreaded were the frontal assaults, which involved crossing minefields and dodging artillery fire to plow into the teeth of entrenched defensive positions. Iranian boys, with small metal or plastic keys dangling from their necks and promises of immediate entry to heaven if they died, formed human waves that shielded more-experienced soldiers in the onslaught. Many of the older boys saw the plastic keys as symbols of their impending sacrifice. Some of the younger ones thought they were literally their personal keys to unlock the doors of heaven. Many of these boys, aged twelve to seventeen, also wore red headbands with the words “Sar Allah,” or Warriors of God.9 Western observers decried the use of such young children as a war crime.
As in World War I, the combatants in the Iran-Iraq conflict used poison gas extensively. Iraq used Sarin and Tabun, which killed quickly, causing paralysis, convulsions, and vomiting in the minutes before death. Many soldiers and Guards were disabled for life. One survivor described his lifelong injuries: “I can’t breathe well, I can’t walk well, I can’t walk upstairs or up hills, I feel tired all the time.”
Also, much like the slaughter pens of World War I, the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war produced a culture of martyrdom. Song, prose, and verse appealed to God and patriotism. In his letters about the Great War, the British commander General Douglas Haig quoted the Muslim emperor Baber, who, before sending his troops into battle in 1527, said, “If we fall in the field, we die the death of martyrs; if we survive, we rise victorious the avengers of the cause of God.” This was the milieu and mindset of the early Guards and Basij, and successive Iranian leaders kept these images alive to teach and inspire the youth. Today, Iranian students travel on excursions to the battlefields where their fathers fought and sometimes fell. The trips are called “Travelers to the Light.”
The poppies of Flanders Fields became symbols of the slaughter of the Great War; similarly, the red tulip came to represent Iranian martyrdom generations later. Said a mother, "Tulips are the color of blood.” Today, the names of the dead adorn libraries, streets, bridges, and town halls. Murals depicting bloody battles ornament urban landscapes. To memorialize the fallen, mullahs built a Martyrs’ Cemetery twenty miles south of Tehran, with a fountain spurting red-tinted water to symbolize the bloodshed for the defense of Iran. Today, the fountain’s red water still flows, and mothers dip their hands into it as they weep over memories of their sons, many of whom were Guards and Basij who were cut down in combat. Though the war is long over, life in Iran is filled with death. Iran has some of the world’s highest levels of executions, suicide, traffic fatalities, and cancer growth rate.
Sketching the Wars: Art in “Hell”
Both World War I and the Iran-Iraq War produced antiwar art, some of it stark, some subtle. This art derided militarism, challenged authoritarianism, and mocked nationalism. After four years in the trenches, the German Otto Dix produced a series of etchings called Hell in 1919. His art depicted a wasteland of barbed wire, skulls, and clumps of flesh. The artist George Grosz, a contemporary of Dix, was also traumatized by the war and became a communist. He left for America in 1933, where he lashed out at Hitler and his regime.
The Soviet Union had no place for pacifism, antimilitarism, or nonconformity.
In 1923, the painter and book illustrator Marc Chagall left the Soviet Union for the artistic freedom of Paris. Later, he escaped German-occupied France and, like Grosz, found refuge in America. As in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Iran seeks to control, imprison, or expel dissident artists. Basij and MOIS operatives hound them. Like frontline artists before him in wars around the world, Reza, an Iranian, put the war he saw and lived through onto canvas. His gritty, expressive paintings reflect the trauma of his boyhood spent as a conscript on the front lines. At fourteen, he was deployed to combat, and two years later he commanded thirty or forty soldiers, most of them teenagers.
He drew and painted the suffering he witnessed. A few memories still haunt him. In his dreams, he revisits the site of a rotting female Iraqi soldier's corpse. Like the artists who escaped Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin, Reza sought refuge in the West to practice his art without fear of imprisonment or death. Grosz feared the Gestapo, and Reza feared the Guards. Those artists who remained in Iran are ever mindful, like those in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, of harassment and imprisonment by security services, notably the Basij.
