“Commando of the 1st Battalion” talks about the commandoes operation

Translated by M. B. Khoshnevisan

2019-1-15

Iranian Oral History website – “Commando of the 1^st Battalion: Memoirs of Captain Akbar Pirpour” is the title of the book which has been produced in the Art Center of Bushehr Province. The book has been written and compiled by Seyed Qassem Hosseini in 272 pages and published by the Office of Resistance Culture and Studies of the Provincial Centers of the Art Center and Sooreh Mehr Publications in 2018.

In the “Preface” and “Introduction, Work Report” sections, we are informed that Akbar Pirpour is a commando of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Army Navy and one of the commandoes who were present during the 34-day resistance in Khorramshahr before its fall. Hosseini in the introduction section of his book has written about the process of necessary interviews for it and how it was written and compiled.

“Commando of the 1^st Battalion” has ten chapters and a photo album and an index. Five chapters of the book include the account of the narrator from childhood to becoming a commando. The sixth and seventh chapters have been allocated to the years of the rising of the Islamic revolution’s struggles to the imposed war of Saddam’s army against Islamic Republic of Iran and the story of the narrator during these years. The eighth chapter has been considered for the narration of the narrator’s presence in Khorramshahr; a city which resists in order not to be seized by the Saddam’s army. The ninth and tenth chapters cover the story of the narrator since the fall of Khorramshahr in November 1980.

In the book’s special chapter about the resistance in Khorramshahr (eighth chapter: The Commandoes Operation), Captain Akbar Pirpour says, “For several weeks, our job was to wake up early in the morning around four or five AM … some ate breakfast and some did not and then we came out of our dormitory in Abadan, went to Khorramshahr and fought against the Iraqis in different parts of the city as much as we could. When the Iraqis retreated in the evening, we came back to Abadan and prepared ourselves for tomorrow’s fight. Sometimes, our ammunition was finished during the day and we had no way but to stop fighting.

We had no specific pre-planned war strategy for fighting. Wherever we received a report regarding the enemy’s infiltration, a group went there immediately and started fighting against the infiltrating forces of the enemy. However, the native or non-native volunteer youths accompanied us …

The Iraqis were afraid to stay at night in Khorramshahr. The commandoes and the guys from the city went around the night to hunt the tanks and strike a blow to them. Iraq thought that a division was based in Khorramshahr! Thus, they did not stay at nights in the city until the first two or three weeks because of this fear.

We slept in Abadan’s Oil Company houses at nights in Berim neighborhood. And Iraq fired at us from dawn to dusk. We were so tired and exhausted that even the sound of explosions did not wake us up…”