The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk

to come. Seven days after Khomeini’s 18 July acceptance of the UN resolution, the Mujahedin-e-Qalq’s ‘National Liberation Army’ swept across the Iranian border in Iraqi-supplied tanks and armour to overthrow the Khomeini regime. It was the ultimate treachery and the Iranians fought back against their invaders – who were, of course, themselves Iranians – with fury; across Iran, the government’s secret police began the wholesale liquidation of the Muhajedin’s supporters. The Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji, many of whom felt betrayed by the ending of the war, turned upon the Mujahedin, summarily hanging their captured militiamen in Bakhtaran, Kangavar and Islam Abad. Now thousands of Mujahedin militants and their supporters in jails all over Iran – many of whom had long ago been tried and sentenced to many years of imprisonment – were to be re-tried and hanged.

      ‘We ask the Leader to deal harshly with murderers and as soon as possible, rid the people of their presence,’ Resalat newspaper pleaded. Ayatollah Musavi Ardebili, the head of the supreme court, gave a Freisler-like speech at Friday prayers in Tehran. The monafeqin – the ‘hypocrites’ – he said, ‘don’t know that people see them as less than animals. People are so angry with them; the judiciary is under extreme pressure of public opinion … people say they should all be executed … We will judge them ten at a time, twenty at a time, bring a file, take away a file: I regret that they say a fifth have been destroyed. I wish they all were destroyed …’ ‘Hypocrites’ was a word that embraced the idea of heresy or apostasy rather than mere double standards. To be one of the monafeqin was a capital offence.

      Even before the war had ended, Iran’s prison population was re-interrogated and divided into those who still recognised the resistance to the Islamic Republic and those who had repented – the tavvab – and between those who prayed and those who refused to pray. At some point, Khomeini ordered that political prisoners should be liquidated en masse. Although this order was kept secret, we know that Ayatollah Montazeri, Khomeini’s chosen successor, protested vehemently against the massacres, an act that ensured his dismissal as the future Imam. ‘… As to your order to execute the hypocrites in prison,’ Montazeri wrote in a private letter to Khomeini, ‘the nation is prepared to accept the execution if those arrested [are] in relation to recent events [i.e. the Iraqi-backed Mujahedin invasion]… But the execution of those already in prison … would be interpreted as vindictiveness and revenge.’

      In some prisons, inmates were lined up on opposite sides of a corridor, one line to be returned to their cells after ‘repenting’, the other taken straight to a mass gallows. On 30 July, Revolutionary Guards at Evin began their executions with Mujahid women prisoners. The hangings went on for several days. Male communist prisoners were hanged at the mosque in Evin. ‘When [they] are taken to the Hosseinieh to be hanged,’ an ex-prisoner testified, ‘some [are] crying, some swearing and all shivering but hiding their shivering. Some smile hopelessly … a number of the guards vie with each other to do the hanging so as to score more piety. A few are upset by seeing so many corpses. Some prisoners fight and are savagely beaten. The execution is swift.’ The bodies of the hanging men were paraded in front of female prisoners to break their spirit. In Tehran alone, an Iran-based human rights group published the names of 1,345 victims of the ‘national disaster’.

      Exile magazines opposed to the regime would, years later, publish terrifying eyewitness accounts of the prison hangings. Up to 8,000 inmates may have been put to death in the summer of 1988, perhaps 10,000. Secret executions were followed by burials in secret graves. A former female prisoner