The Road to Khorramshahr

Iraqi military authorities suddenly limited the war zone to visiting journalists last week. Though there was no official explanation, the motive seemed obvious: in the space of little more than a week, an apparently unstoppable Iraqi advance had, in fact, been halted and transformed into a stalemate in which the Iranians were more than holding their own. Before the ban, TIME Correspondent William Drozdiak was able to catch the change in the war firsthand in repeated visits to Basra, and near Khorramshahr in occupied Iran. His report:

Despite the shrill peal of air-raid sirens regularly echoing throughout the port of Basra early last week, the absence of air strikes for four days had nurtured a languid mood among the Iraqi soldiers and civilians in the town. Troops from the front lines recounted boastful tales of Iranians fleeing before their artillery barrages, while the television pumped out scenes of Iraqi attacks to martial music and announced the claim that Ahwaz, 45 miles into Iran, had just been captured. "Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day," boasted Captain Abu Rashid, beaming proudly in his black beret and crisp green fatigues. "But victory will be ours."

That serene facade was shattered moments later. At precisely 12 noon, the windowpanes in the Shatt al Arab Hotel were blasted by a concussive boom. As explosion after explosion followed, everyone in the lobby dived to the floor or huddled next to pillars for protection from the surprise raid by two Iranian Phantoms skimming 100 yds. above the port. In less than a minute it was over. We poured outside and crossed a rickety wooden bridge to view the damage: just 300 yds. away on Sinbad Island, bright orange flames and thick black smoke curled from a coastal dredging vessel that had been nearly cut in half by a direct hit. Fire engines raced to the scene and sprayed water and foam to prevent the flames from spreading to nearby military craft.

That bold Iranian air strike served as a sobering harbinger of Iraq's shifting fortunes in the war. We saw a number of subsequent attacks by the Phantoms on oil installations around Basra. Swooping in low to avoid radar detection, they dodged Iraqi efforts to bring them down with Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMS) that invariably fizzled off in erratic curves and exploded aimlessly in the desert dust. Soon there was evidence that the ground war was also beginning to go less well than the Iraqis had anticipated. Iraqi ground forces had staked early claims to victory in their advance toward Khorramshahr; along with four other Western correspondents, I went to see how, in fact, the week-old campaign was faring.

The journey began with a brief ferry trip across the Shatt waterway, then a hired taxi to Khorramshahr. Crossing a flat, dusty plain, laden with mud-camouflaged military vehicles, our party reached the Iraq-Iran border post of Shalamche. There, eight miles from Khorramshahr, dozens of 130mm artillery guns were hunkered down in a vast arc, pelting the Iranian-held port with booming shells.

A solicitous Iraqi lieutenant offered tea, grapes and bread while taking down our names, blood types and the publications we represented. Amid the rubble of the customs office destroyed in the early days of the Iraqi advance, the soldiers displayed their war booty. One favorite item was a poster of Khomeini's stern visage inscribed with the quotation: VIET NAM HAS DISGRACED THE UNITED STATES, THE GREAT SATAN. His face had been slashed by bayonets.

The Iraqis pointed out a baggage-inspection room filled with crates of ammunition abandoned by fleeing Iranians; a nearby ditch was filled with Iranian rifle cartridges and grenades. Iraqi privates offered gifts of captured Iranian coins, scarves and Khomeini posters as souvenirs. A burly captain called attention to the wisps of smoke above Khorramshahr and predicted that in a day or so we would be able to return to report its final capture. He waved farewell and called in halting English: "See you in Tehran."

Three days later, we crammed into camouflaged vans for what we thought would be that ride into captured Khorramshahr. But at the same Shalamche border post little of the earlier cockiness remained. A grimy, obviously exhausted major just returned from door-to-door fighting admitted: "We had very few casualties until we went into the streets today. But this morning we took heavy losses." Iraqi troops had encircled the town and were shelling the center, but pockets of Iranian revolutionary guards were holding out with martyr-like zeal.

Clearly visible from the Shalamche frontier were ominous puffs of dust kicked up by incoming Iranian fire a mile away. After some consultations, Iraqi officers agreed to let our three-van entourage enter the Khorramshahr area with a military escort leading the way. As we sped down the road to the embattled town, past several hulks of bombed military vehicles smoking in the ditches, artillery fire hit close by.

No more than a thousand yards into Iran, our escort truck was struck, burst into flames and overturned. Artillery shells exploded on both sides of the road as we clambered out of the vans and hit the dirt. At the same time, the Iraqi drivers furiously swung their vehicles around to head back. Shells hissed past us as we darted to the vans, whose drivers were so stricken with terror that they were accelerating to get out of range even before everyone could climb into the vehicles. As the diminished convoy raced back to the border, the raining shells receded in the distance. Clearly, the Iraqis did not yet own the road to Khorramshahr, and the Iranians had every intention of keeping it that way.

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