The
Iran–Iraq War, also known as the Imposed
War (جنگ تحمیلی, Jang-e-tahmīlī) and Holy
Defense (دفاع مقدس, Defā'-e-moghaddas) in Iran,
and Saddām's Qādisiyyah
(قادسيّة صدّام, Qādisiyyat
Ṣaddām) in Iraq, was a war between the
armed forces of Iraq
and Iran
lasting from
September 1980 to August 1988.
The war began when Iraq invaded Iran on 22 September 1980 following
a long history of
border
disputes and fears of
Shia insurgency among
Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority influenced by the
Iranian Revolution. Although Iraq hoped
to take advantage of revolutionary chaos in Iran and attacked
without formal warning, they made only limited progress into Iran
and within several months were repelled by the Iranians who
regained virtually all lost territory by June, 1982. For the next
six years, Iran was on the offensive. Despite
calls
for a ceasefire by the
United Nations Security
Council, hostilities continued until 20 August, 1988. The last
prisoners of war were exchanged in
2003.
The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage - a half
a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers as well as civilians are
believed to have died in the war with many more injured and wounded
- but brought neither reparations nor change in borders. The
conflict is often compared to
World War
I, in that the tactics used closely mirrored those of the
1914-1918 war, including large scale
trench warfare, manned machine-gun posts,
bayonet charges, use of
barbed wire
across trenches and on
no-mans land,
human wave attacks and Iraq's
extensive use of
chemical weapons
(such as
mustard gas) against Iranian
troops and
civilians
as well as Iraqi
Kurds. At the time, the UN
Security Council issued statements that "chemical weapons had been
used in the war." However, in these UN statements Iraq was not
mentioned by name, so it has been said that "the international
community remained silent as Iraq used weapons of mass destruction
against Iranian as well as Iraqi Kurds" and it is believed that
United States prevented the UN from condemning Iraq.
Background
History of war's name
The war was commonly referred to as the
Gulf War
or
Persian Gulf War until the
Iraq-Kuwait conflict (
Operation Desert Storm Jan-Feb 1991),
and for a while thereafter as the
First Persian Gulf
War. The Iraq-Kuwait conflict, while originally known as
the Second Persian Gulf War, later became known simply as
"The Gulf War." The United States-led
invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the ongoing conflict
there has since been called the Second Persian Gulf War.
Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein
initially dubbed the conflict "The Whirlwind War".
After the Islamic Revolution
The
Pan-Islamism and revolutionary Shia
Islamism of Ayatollah Khomeini and the
Islamic Republic of Iran; and the Arab nationalism of Saddam
Hussein's Iraqi regime were central to the conflict.
Saddam Hussein was keenly interested in elevating Iraq to a strong
regional power. A successful invasion of Iran would enlarge Iraq's
oil reserves and make Iraq the dominant power in the Persian Gulf
region.
On several occasions Saddam
alluded to the
Islamic
conquest of Iran in propagating his position against Iran.
For
example, on 2 April 1980, half a year before the outbreak of the
war, in a visit by Saddam to al-Mustansiriyyah University in
Baghdad, drawing parallels with the 7th century defeat of Persia in
the Battle of
al-Qādisiyyah, he announced:
In your name, brothers, and on behalf of the Iraqis and
Arabs everywhere we tell those Persian cowards and dwarfs who try to avenge
Al-Qadisiyah that the spirit of Al-Qadisiyah as well as the blood
and honor of the people of Al-Qadisiyah who carried the message on
their spearheads are greater than their attempts."
In turn
the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini believed Muslims,
particularly the Shias in Iraq, Saudi Arabia
, and Kuwait
, whom he saw
as oppressed, could and should follow the Iranian example, rise up
against their governments to join a united Islamic republic.
Khomeini and Iran's Islamic revolutionaries despised Saddam's
secularist, Arab nationalist Ba'athist regime in particular as
un-Islamic and "a puppet of Satan," and called on Iraqis to
overthrow Saddam and his regime. Yet he viewed them and the Sunnis
to be victims of oppression by Western hegemony, not sectarianism (
which he was vehemently opposed to). At the same time severe
officer purges (including several executions ordered by
Sadegh Khalkhali, the post-revolution
sharia ruler), and spare parts
shortages for Iran's American-made equipment, had crippled Iran's
once mighty
military. The bulk of
the Iranian military was made up of poorly armed, though committed,
militias. Iran had minimal defenses in the
Shatt al-Arab river.
Iraq started the war believing that Sunnis of Iran would join the
opposing forces, failing to fully appreciate the power of Iranian
nationalism over historically clan-centered differences, and the
power of Iranian government control of the press.
Few of the ethnic
Arabs of Khuzestan
or Sunnis of Iran collaborated with
Iraqis.
Iran's
embassy in London was attacked by Iraqi-sponsored terrorist forces
a few months prior to the war in 1980, in what came to be known as
the Iranian Embassy
Siege
.
The
UN Secretary General report
dated 9 December 1991 (S/23273) explicitly cites "Iraq's aggression
against Iran" in starting the war and breaching International
security and peace.
War
Iraqi pretext for war and Iraqi war aims
Iraq's pretext was an alleged assassination attempt on
Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in southern Iraq, which Saddam Hussein
blamed on "Iranian agents", in one of his speeches.
"Relations deteriorated rapidly until in March 1980, Iran
unilaterally downgraded its diplomatic ties to the
charge d'affaires level, withdrew its
ambassador, and demanded that Iraq do the same. The tension
increased in April following the attempted assassination of Iraqi
Deputy Prime Minister
Tariq Aziz and,
three days later, the bombing of a funeral procession being held to
bury students who had died in an earlier attack. Iraq blamed Iran,
and in September, attacked.
On 17 September, in a statement addressed to the Iraqi parliament,
Saddam Hussein stated that "The frequent and blatant Iranian
violations of Iraqi sovereignty...have rendered the
1975 Algiers Agreement null and
void... This river...must have its Iraqi-Arab identity restored as
it was throughout history in name and in reality with all the
disposal rights emanating from full sovereignty over the
river.",
The objectives of Iraq's invasion of Iran were:
- Control over the Shatt al-Arab
waterway
- Acquisition of the three islands of Abu Musa
and the
Greater and
Lesser Tunbs
, on behalf of the UAE
.
- Annexation of Khuzestan to Iraq
- Prevent the spread of the Islamic
Revolution in the region
September 1980: Iraqi invasion
Iraq launched a
full-scale invasion of Iran on 22
September 1980.On 22 September 1980, the Iraqi air force
attacked Iran, attacking ten airfields inside Iran, but failed to
achieve their objective of destroying the Iranian air force on the
ground. The next day Iraq initiated a ground invasion of Iran along
a front measuring 644 kilometres, in three simultaneous thrusts.
The purpose of the invasion, according to Saddam Hussein, was to
blunt the edge of Khomeini's movement and to thwart his attempt to
export his Islamic revolution
to Iraq and the Persian Gulf states."
Of the six Iraqi
divisions that were invading, four were sent against the Iranian
province of Khuzestan, which was located near the southern end of the
border, to cut off the Shatt al-Arab from the rest of Iran, and to establish a
territorial security zone. The other two divisions invaded
through the northern and central part of the border, to prevent an
Iranian counter-attack into Iraq.
Two of the four Iraqi divisions operating
near the southern end, one mechanized and one armored, began a
siege of the strategically important towns of Abadan
and Khorramshahr
. The other two, both armoured, secured the
territory bounded by the line Khorramshahr-Ahvaz-Susangerd-Musian,
due to an enveloping movement.
On the central front, the Iraqis occupied
Mehran
, advanced towards the foothills of the Zagros
Mountains
; and were able to block the traditional
Tehran–Baghdad invasion route by securing some territory forward of
Qasr-e-Shirin. On the northern
front, the Iraqis attempted to establish a strong defensive
position opposite Suleimaniya
to protect the Iraqi Kirkuk oil
complex.
Since the Iranian regular military and the
Pasdaran
conducted their operations separately, the Iraqi invading forces
did not face co-ordinated resistance.
On 24 September,
though, the Iranian
navy
attacked Basra
and, on the
way, had destroyed two oil terminals near the Iraqi port of
Fao, which reduced Iraq's ability to export
oil. The Iranian air force also began air strikes in
September against strategically important Iraqi targets, including
oil facilities, dams, petrochemical plants, and a nuclear reactor
near Baghdad. Baghdad was subjected to eight air raids by 1
October. In response to these air attacks, Iraq launched a number
of aerial strikes against Iranian targets. The Pasdaran fought
against the Iraqi invasion with "great fervour and tenacity", and
bore the brunt of the invasion.
On 24 October, Khorramshahr was captured and by November Saddam ordered his
forces to advance towards Dezful
and Ahvaz
, but they
were not successful in occupying these two
settlements.
Iraq had mobilized 21 divisions for the invasion, while Iran
countered with only 13 regular army divisions and one brigade. Of
these divisions, only seven were deployed to the border.
The
surprise offensive advanced quickly
against the still disorganized Iranian
forces, advancing on a wide front into Iranian territory along
the Mehran–Khorramabad
axis in central Iran and towards Ahvaz in the
oil-rich southern province of Khuzestan.
The invasion stalls
The Iraqi invasion soon encountered unexpected resistance, however,
and around March 1981 it stalled. The preemptive strike executed by
the
Iraqi Air Force on the first day
of the war successfully destroyed parts of Iran's airbase
infrastructure, but failed to destroy a significant number of
aircraft. The
IQAF was only able to
strike in depth with a few
MiG-23BN,
Tu-22 and
Su-20 aircraft,
ineffective in a country as large as Iran. When three MiG-23BN's
flew over Tehran, they attacked its airport but damaged only a few
aircraft.
Over the next day, 140
Iranian aircraft attacked Iraqi targets, and in a few days the
IRIAF gained air superiority over IQAF,
allowing them to conduct ground attack missions with
fighter-bombers and helicopters.
Also, rather than turning against the Ayatollah's government as
exiles had promised, the people of Iran rallied around their
country and mounted a stiff resistance. An estimated 200,000
additional troops arrived at the front by November, many of them
"ideologically committed" volunteers. The Iraqis soon found the
Iranian military was not nearly as depleted as they had
thought.
For about a year after the Iraqi offensive stalled in March 1981
there was little change in the front, but in mid-March 1982 Iran
took the offensive and the Iraqi military was forced to retreat. By
June 1982, an Iranian counter-offensive had recovered the areas
lost to Iraq earlier in the war. An especially significant battle
of this counter-offensive in the Khuzestan province was the
liberation of
Khorramshahr from the Iraqis on 24 May 1982.
Iraq retreats but the war continues
Saddam decided to withdraw his armed forces completely from Iran,
deploying them along the international border between Iraq and
Iran.
Efraim Karsh states that Saddam
made this choice because the Iraqi leader believed that his army
was now too demoralised and damaged to hold onto any territory in
Iran, and that Iran could be successfully resisted through a line
of defence on Iraqi land near the border. Using the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon on 6 June 1982
as a pretext for a withdrawal, Saddam suggested to Iran that it
should stop fighting and send its troops to assist the Palestinians
fighting in Lebanon, an offer which was refused. The withdrawal
began on 20 June, and was completed by 30 June. Karsh describes
Saddam's decision to withdraw his forces from Iran as "one of his
wisest strategic moves during the war".
A Saudi Arabia-backed plan to end the war agreed to by Iraq
included $70 billion in war reparations to be paid by Arabian
states of the Persian Gulf on behalf of Iraq, and complete the
Iraqi evacuation from Iranian territory - an offer called by some
critics of Iranian government as "extraordinarily favorable to
Iran."Iran rejected Iraq's offer, demanding the removal of the
Saddam Hussein regime, the repatriation of 100,000 Shi'ites
expelled from Iraq before the war, and $150 billion in war
reparations.
On 21
June, Khomeini indicated that Iran would invade Iraq shortly, and
on 22 June, the Iranian Chief-of-Staff Shirazi declared to "continue the war until Saddam
Hussein is overthrown so that we can pray at Karbala
and Jerusalem
". This matched a comment made by Khomeini on
the issue of a truce with Iraq: "There are no conditions. The only
condition is that the regime in Baghdad must fall and must be
replaced by an Islamic Republic."
Iranian offensive, blunders, and hardening of Iraqi
resolve
Under the slogans "War, War until Victory," and "The Road to
Jerusalem Goes through Karbala," Iran advanced. A tactic used in
this advance noted throughout the world was the encouragment of
heroism among young Iranian
basij volunteers
who sought martyrdom in human wave attacks on Iraqi positions. The
volunteers were inspired before battle by tales of
Ashura, the
Battle of
Karbala, and the supreme glory of
martyrdom, and sometimes by an actor (usually a
more mature soldier), playing the part of
Imam Hossein himself riding a white horse,
galloping along the lines, providing the inexperienced soldiers a
vision of "the hero who would lead them into their fateful battle
before they met their God."
On 13
July, the Iranian units crossed the border in force, aiming towards
the city of Basra, the second
most important city in Iraq. However the enemy they
encountered had entrenched itself in formidable defenses. Unlike
the hastily improvised defenses that the Iraqis had manned in Iran
during the 1980–1981 occupation of the conquered territories, the
border defenses were, by necessity, well developed even before the
war; and the Iraqis were able to utilize a highly-developed network
of bunkers and artillery fire-bases. Saddam had also more than
doubled the size of the Iraqi army from 1981's 500,000 soldiers (26
divisions and 3 independent brigades) to 1985's 1,050,000 (55
divisions and nine brigades).
Saddam's efforts bore fruit. Iran had been using combined-arms
operations to great effect when it was attacking the Iraqi troops
in its country, and had launched the iconic human-wave attacks with
great support from artillery, aircraft, and tanks. However, lack of
ammunition meant that the Iranians were now launching human-wave
assaults with no support from other branches of the military. The
superior defenses of the Iraqis meant that tens of thousands of
Iranian soldiers were lost in most operations after 1982, and the
Iraqi defenses would continue to hold in most sectors.
In the Basra offensive, or
Operation
Ramadan, five human-wave attacks were met with withering fire
from the Iraqis. The boy-soldiers of Iran were particularly
hard-hit, especially since they volunteered to run into minefields,
in order to clear the way for the Iranian soldiers behind them. The
Iranians were also hard-hit by the employment of chemical weapons
and mustard gas by the Iraqis.
1983–1985: Further Iranian offensives fail to break strategic
stalemate
Furthest ground gains
After the failure of their 1982 summer offensives, Iran believed
that a major effort along the entire breadth of the front would
yield the victory that they desired. Iranian numerical superiority
might have achieved a break-through if they had attacked across all
parts of the front at the same time, but they still lacked the
organization for that type of assault.
Iran was getting
supplies from countries such as North Korea
, Libya
, and
China. The Iraqis had more suppliers such as the
USSR
, the NATO
nations,
France
, United
Kingdom
, Brazil
, Yugoslavia, Spain, Italy, Egypt
, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.
During the course of 1983, the Iranians launched five major
assaults along the front. None met with substantial success.
Khomeini's position on a truce remained unchanged.
In February 1984, Saddam ordered aerial and missile attacks against
the eleven cities that he had designated. The bombardment ceased on
22 February 1984. Iran soon retaliated against urban centers, and
these exchanges become known as the first "war of the cities".
There would be five throughout the course of the war.
The attacks on the Iranian cities did not destroy the Iranian
government's resolve to fight. On 15 February, the Iranians
launched a major attack against the central section of the front
where the Second Iraqi Army Corps was deployed. 250,000 Iranians
faced 250,000 Iraqis.
From 15 to 22 February, in
Operation
Dawn 5, and 22 to 24 February, in
Operation Dawn 6, the Iranians attempted to
capture the vital town of Kut al-Amara and to cut the key highway
linking Baghdad and Basra. Capture of this road would have made it
extremely difficult for the Iraqis to supply and co-ordinate the
defenses, but the Iranian forces only came within of the
highway.
However,
Operation Khaibar met
with much greater success.
Involving a number of thrusts towards the
key Iraqi city of Basra, the
operation started on the 24 February and lasted until 19
March. The Iraqi defenses, under continuous strain since 15
February, seemed close to breaking conclusively. The Iraqis
successfully stabilized the front but not before the Iranians
captured part of the
Majnun Islands.
Despite a heavy Iraqi counterattack coupled with the use of
mustard gas and
sarin nerve gas, the Iranians
held their gains and would continue to hold them almost until the
end of the war.
January 1985 - February 1986: Abortive offensives by Iran and
Iraq
With his
armed forces now benefiting from financial support from Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and other Persian Gulf states, and substantial arms
purchases from the Soviet
Union
, China and France (among others), Saddam went on the offensive on 28 January 1985, for
the first time since early 1980. This offensive, however,
did not produce any significant gains, and the Iranians responded
in kind with their own offensive directed against Basra, codenamed
Operation Badr, on 11 March 1985. The
Imam Khomeini urged Iranians on saying, "It is our belief that
Saddam wishes to return Islam to blasphemy and polytheism. ... if
America becomes victorious ... and grants victory to Saddam, Islam
will receive such a blow that it will not be able to raise its head
for a long time ... The issue is one of Islam versus blasphemy, and
not of Iran versus Iraq."
By this time, the failure of the unsupported human wave attacks
during 1984 meant that Iran was trying to develop a better working
relationship between the army and the Pasdaran. The Iranian
government also worked on molding the Pasdaran units into a much
more conventional fighting force. The attack did succeed in
capturing a part of the Baghdad-Basra highway that had proven
elusive during
Operation Dawn 5 and
Operation Dawn 6.
Saddam responded to
this strategic emergency by launching chemical attacks against the
Iranian positions along the highway and by initiating the second
'war of the cities' with a massive air and missile campaign against
twenty Iranian towns, including Tehran
.
The Tanker War and U.S. support for Iraq
The
Tanker War started when Iraq attacked Iranian tankers and the oil
terminal at Kharg
island in
1984. Iran struck back by attacking tankers carrying Iraqi
oil from Kuwait and then any tanker of the Persian Gulf states
supporting Iraq.
The air and small boat attacks did very
little damage to Persian Gulf state economies and Iran just moved
its shipping port to Larak
Island
in the Strait of Hormuz
.
In 1982 with Iranian success on the battlefield, the U.S. made its
backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying it with intelligence,
economic aid, normalizing relations with the government (broken
during the 1967
Six-Day War), and also
supplying "dual-use" equipment and vehicles. Dual use items are
civilian items such as heavy trucks, armored ambulances and
communications gear as well as industrial technology that can have
a military application. President Ronald Reagan decided that the
United States "could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to
Iran", and that the United States "would do whatever was necessary
to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran." President Reagan
formalized this policy by issuing a National Security Decision
Directive ("NSDD") to this effect in June, 1982.
Attacks on shipping
Lloyd's of
London
, a British insurance
market, estimated that the Tanker War damaged
546 commercial vessels and killed about 430 civilian
mariners. The largest portion of the attacks were directed
by Iran against Kuwaiti vessels, and on 1 November 1986, Kuwait
formally petitioned foreign powers to protect its shipping.
The
Soviet
Union agreed to charter tankers starting in 1987, and the
United States offered to provide protection for tankers flying the U.S. flag on 7 March 1987
(Operation Earnest Will and
Operation Prime
Chance). Under
international law, an attack on such ships
would be treated as an attack on the United States, allowing the
U.S. Navy to retaliate. This support would protect neutral ships
headed to Iraqi ports, effectively guaranteeing Iraq's revenue
stream for the duration of the war.
Iraqi attack on US warship
On 17 May 1987, an Iraqi
Mirage
F1 attack aircraft launched two
Exocet
missiles at the
USS
Stark , a
Perry class frigate. The first struck the port side of the ship
and failed to explode, though it left burning propellant in its
wake; the second struck moments later in approximately the same
place and penetrated through to crew quarters, where it exploded.
The detonation killed 37 crewmembers and left 21 injured. The
attack remains the only successful anti-ship missile strike on an
American warship.
US military actions toward Iran
However, U.S. attention was focused on isolating Iran as well as
freedom of navigation,
criticizing Iran's mining of international waters, and sponsored
UN
Security Council Resolution 598, which passed unanimously on 20
July, under which it skirmished with Iranian forces.
During the Operation
Nimble Archer
in October 1987, the U.S. attacked Iranian oil
platforms in retaliation for an Iranian attack on the U.S.-flagged
Kuwaiti tanker Sea
Isle City
.
On 14 April 1988, the frigate
USS Samuel B.
Roberts was
badly damaged by an Iranian mine, suffering 10 wounded but no dead.
U.S. forces responded with
Operation Praying Mantis on 18
April, the
United States Navy's
largest engagement of surface warships since
World War II. Two Iranian oil platforms, two
Iranian ships and six Iranian gunboats were destroyed. An American
helicopter also crashed.
US shoots down civilian airliner
In the course of these escorts by the U.S.
Navy, the cruiser
USS Vincennes shot
down Iran Air
Flight 655
with the loss of all 290 passengers and crew on 3
July 1988. The
American government
claimed that the airliner had been mistaken for an Iranian
F-14 Tomcat, and that the Vincennes was
operating in international waters at the time and feared that it
was under attack, which later appeared to be untrue. The Iranians,
however, maintain that the Vincennes was in fact in Iranian
territorial waters, and that the Iranian passenger jet was turning
away and increasing altitude after take-off. U.S. Admiral
William J. Crowe also admitted on
Nightline that the Vincennes was
inside Iranian territorial waters when it launched the missiles. At
the time, the captain of the Vincennes claimed that the Iranian
plane did not identify itself and sent no response to warning
signals from the Vincennes. Apart from Iran, other independent
sources, for example the airport of Dubai, have confirmed that the
plane did indeed identify itself to the American naval ship and
also confirmed that "the civilian aircraft was ascending and
therefore could not have posed a threat," agreeing with Iranian
officials.S. M. Gieling,
Iran-Iraq War, in
Encyclopaedia
Iranica, 2006.
According
to an investigation conducted by ABC News' Nightline,
decoys were set during the war by the US Navy inside the Persian Gulf
to lure out the Iranian gunboats and destroy them,
and at the time USS Vincennes shot down the Iranian
airliner, it was performing such an operation.
In 1996 the U.S. expressed regret only for the loss of innocent
life, and did not make a specific apology to the Iranian
government.
The shooting down of a civilian Iranian passenger plane
Iran
Air Flight 655 by the American cruiser
USS Vincennes,
was cited by an Iranian scholar as apparently giving
Ruhollah Khomeini reason to withdraw from
the conflict:
"War of the Cities"
Toward the end of the war, the land conflict regressed into
stalemate largely because neither side had
enough self-propelled artillery or air power to support ground
advances.
The relatively professional Iraqi armed forces could not make
headway against the far more numerous Iranian
infantry. The Iranians were outmatched in towed and
self-propelled
artillery, which left their
tanks and troops vulnerable. What followed was the Iranians
substituting infantry for artillery.
Iraq's
air force soon began strategic
bombing against Iranian cities, chiefly Tehran, in
1985. To minimize losses from the superior Iranian Air
Force, Iraq rapidly switched to
Scud and
Al-Hussein improved Scud
launches.
In retaliation, Iran fired Scud missiles acquired from Libya and Syria against
Baghdad
. In all, Iraq launched 520 Scuds and
Al-Husseins against Iran and received only 177 in exchange.
In
October 1986, Iraqi aircraft attacked civilian passenger trains and
aircraft, including an Iran Air Boeing 737
unloading passengers at Shiraz International Airport
.
In retaliation for the Iranian
Operation Karbala-5, an early 1987
attempt to capture Basra, Iraq attacked 65 cities in 226 sorties
over 42 days, bombing civilian neighborhoods. Eight Iranian cities
came under attack from Iraqi missiles.
The bombings killed
65 children in an elementary school in Borujerd
alone. The Iranians also responded with Scud
missile attacks on Baghdad and struck a primary school there. These
events became known as "the war of the cities".
Towards a ceasefire
1987 saw a renewed wave of Iranian offensives against targets in
both the north and south of Iraq.
Iranian troops were stopped by Iraqi
prepared defenses in the south in a month-and-a-half long battle
for Basra (Operation Karbala-5),
but met with more success later in the year in the north as
Operations Nasr 4 and Karbala-10 threatened to capture the
oil-rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk
and other
northern oilfields. However, the Iranian forces were unable
to consolidate their gains and continue their advance, and so 1987
saw little land change hands. On 20 July, the Security Council of
the United Nations passed the US-sponsored Resolution 598, which
called for an end to fighting and a return to pre-war boundaries.
Iraq, which had lost important pieces of land over the course of
the war, accepted the resolution. Iran, however, was loath to
surrender its gains when total victory seemed close at hand, and so
the fighting continued.
By April 1988, however, the Iraqi forces had regrouped sufficiently
to begin a new series of devastating attacks on the Iranians, and
in quick succession recaptured the strategic al-Faw peninsula (lost
in 1986 in
Operation Dawn-8)
through the extensive use of chemical weaponry, and territory
around Basra and also struck deep into the Iranian north, capturing
much matériel. In July 1988 Iraqi airplanes dropped chemical
cyanide bombs on the Iranian Kurdish village of Zardan (as they had
done four months earlier at their own Kurdish village of Halabja).
Hundreds were killed at once, and the survivors are still suffering
from a variety of physical and mental disorders. The enraged
Iranians considered a huge rearming and nuclear weapons, but
decided that this was beyond their means. Following these major
setbacks, Iran accepted the terms of U.N. Security Council
Resolution 598 and on 20 August 1988 peace was restored.
The
People's Mujahedin of
Iran started their ten-day operation after the Iranian
government accepted UN Resolution 598.
While Iraqi forces
attacked Khuzestan, the Mujahedin attacked western Iran and battled
the Pasdaran for Kermanshah. Close air support from the
Iraqis contributed to whatever gains the Mojahedin made. However,
under heavy international pressure for ending the war, Saddam
Hussein withdrew his fighter aircraft and the sky opened for the
Iranian airborne forces to be
deployed
behind Mojahedin lines. The operation ended in a defeat for the
Mojahedin. Casualty figures range from 2,000 to as high as
10,000.
Comparison of Iraqi and Iranian military strength
At the commencement of hostilities, Iraq held a clear advantage in
armour, while both nations were roughly at parity with artillery.
The gap only widened as the war went on. Iran started with a
stronger air force, but over time, the balance of power flipped
towards favoring Iraq. By the end of the war, Iraq enjoyed an
immense numerical superiority over Iran's forces in every category.
The Economist estimates for
1980 and 1987 were:
Foreign support to Iraq and Iran
During
the war, Iraq was regarded by the West
(and specifically the United States) as a counterbalance to
post-revolutionary Iran. The
support of Iraq took the form of technological aid, intelligence, the sale of dual-use and military
equipment and satellite intelligence to Iraq. While there was
direct combat between Iran and the United States, it is not
universally agreed that the fighting between the U.S. and Iran was
specifically to benefit Iraq, or for separate, although occurring
at the same time, issues between the U.S. and Iran. American
ambiguity towards which side to support was summed up by Henry Kissinger when the American statesman
remarked that "it's a pity they [Iran and Iraq] both can't
lose."More than 30 countries provided support to Iraq, Iran, or
both. Iraq, in particular, had a complex clandestine procurement
network to obtain munitions and critical materials, which, in some
transactions, involved 6-10 countries.
Iraq
Among major powers, the United States' policy was to "tilt" toward
Iraq by reopening diplomatic channels, lifting restrictions on the
export of dual-use technology, overseeing the transfer of third
party military hardware, and providing operational intelligence on
the battlefield.
As will be seen in some of the country-specific sub-articles of
this page, Iraq made extensive use of front companies, middlemen,
secret ownership of all or part of companies all over the world,
forged end user certificates
and other methods to hide what it was acquiring. At this time, the
country-level sub-articles emphasize the country in which the
procurement started, but also illustrate how procurement
infrastructure was established in different countries. Some
transactions may have involved people, shipping, and manufacturing
in as many as 10 countries.
In their
documentary Saddam Hussein-The
Trial You Will Never See, made for European audience,
Barry Lando and Michel Despratx reveal that United States
secretary of state Alexander
Meigs Haig Jr. wrote in a secret memo to President Ronald Reagan, about United States previous
president Jimmy Carter's green light to
Saddam Hussein for launching a war
against Iran using Saudi
Arabia delivering the go ahead message to Iraqis.
Furthermore it has been reported, United States support for
Saddam Hussein during his war with
Iran, was to gain access to oil fields in the region.British
support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war especially
illustrated the ways by which Iraq would circumvent export
controls. Iraq bought at least one British company with operations
in the U.K. and the U.S.
Iraq had
a complex relationship with France and the Soviet Union, its major suppliers of actual weapons, to some
extent having the two nations compete for its
business.
Singapore
support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war discusses land mines
assembled there, as well as chemical warfare precursors shipped
from Singapore, possibly by an Iraqi front company.
Another country that had an important role in arming Iraq was
Italy, whose greatest impact was financial, through the U.S. branch
of the state-owned largest bank in Italy. The Italian article is
one example of how Iraq circumvented a national embargo, by, as one
example, moving land and sea mine production to Singapore.
Additional country details will be added as the articles become
available, in some cases in stub format for individual yet
significant support, such as providing the largest amount of
precursor chemicals from which chemical weapons were
produced.
Although the United
Nations Security Council called for a cease-fire after a week
of fighting and renewed the call on later occasions, the initial
call was made while Iraq occupied Iranian territory. Moreover, the
UN refused to come to Iran's aid to repel the Iraqi invasion. The
Iranians thus interpreted the UN as subtly biased in favor of
Iraq.
Iran
While the United States directly fought Iran, citing freedom of navigation as a major
casus belli, as part of a
complex and partially illegal program (see Iran-Contra Affair), it also indirectly
supplied weapons to Iran.
North Korea was a major
arms supplier to Iran . DPRK support included
domestically manufactured arms and Eastern-bloc weapons for which
the major powers wanted deniability
.
Both countries
Besides the US and the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia also sold weapons to both countries
for the entire duration of the conflict. Likewise, Portugal
helped both countries: it was not unusual seeing
Iranian and Iraqi flagged ships moored
side-by-side at the port town of Sines
.
From 1980
to 1987 Spain
sold €458
million in weapons to Iran and €172 million in weapons to
Iraq. Spain sold to Iraq 4x4 vehicles, BO-105 Helicopters, explosives and ammunition. A
research party discovered that an unexploded chemical Iraqi warhead
in Iran was manufactured in Spain.
Financial support
Iraq's
main financial backers were the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, most notably Saudi Arabia ($30.9 billion), Kuwait ($8.2
billion) and the United Arab Emirates
($8 billion).
The
Iraqgate scandal revealed that an Atlanta
branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro,
relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5
billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. In August 1989, when
FBI
agents finally raided the Atlanta branch of BNL,
the branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, was charged with making
unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to Iraq — some of
which, according to his indictment, were used to purchase arms and
weapons technology.
The New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times, and
ABC's Ted Koppel, covered the Iraq-gate story, and the
investigation by the U.S. Congress. This scandal is covered in Alan
Friedman's book The Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the
White House Illegally Armed Iraq.
Beginning in September 1989, the Financial Times laid out the first
charges that BNL, relying heavily on U.S. government-guaranteed
loans, was funding Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons work. For the
next two and a half years, the Financial Times provided
the only continuous newspaper reportage (over 300 articles) on the
subject. Among the companies shipping militarily
useful technology to Iraq under the eye of the U.S. government,
according to the Financial Times, were Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, and Matrix
Churchill, through its Ohio
branch.
In all, Iraq received $35 billion in loans from the West and
between $30 and $40 billion from the Persian Gulf states during the
1980s.
Use of chemical weapons
With more
than 100,000 Iranian victims of Iraq's chemical weapons during the
eight-year war, Iran is one of
the countries most severely afflicted by "weapons of mass
destruction".
The official estimate does not include the civilian population
contaminated in bordering towns or the children and relatives of
veterans, many of whom have developed blood, lung and skin
complications, according to the Organization for Veterans of Iran.
According to a 2002 article in the Star-Ledger:
- "Nerve gas killed about 20,000 Iranian soldiers immediately,
according to official reports. Of the 90,000 survivors, some 5,000
seek medical treatment regularly and about 1,000 are still
hospitalized with severe, chronic conditions."
Iraq also used chemical weapons on Iranian civilians, killing many
in villages and hospitals. Many civilians suffered severe burns and
health problems, and still suffer from them.Furthermore, 308 Iraqi
missiles were launched at population centers inside Iranian cities
between 1980 and 1988 resulting in 12, 931 casualties.
On 21 March 1986, the United Nations Security Council made a
declaration stating that "members are profoundly concerned by the
unanimous conclusion of the specialists that chemical weapons on
many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian
troops and the members of the Council strongly condemn this
continued use of chemical weapons in clear violation of the Geneva
Protocol of 1925 which prohibits the use in war of chemical
weapons." The United States was the only member who voted against
the issuance of this statement.
According to retired Colonel Walter Lang, senior defense
intelligence officer for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency at
the time, "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not
a matter of deep strategic concern" to Reagan and his aides,
because they "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose."
He claimed that the Defense Intelligence Agency "would have never
accepted the use of chemical weapons against civilians, but the use
against military objectives was seen as inevitable in the Iraqi
struggle for survival", The Reagan administration did not stop
aiding Iraq after receiving reports of the use of poison gas on
Kurdish civilians. There is great resentment in Iran that the
international community helped Iraq develop its chemical weapons
arsenal and armed forces, and also that the world did nothing to
punish Saddam's Ba'athist regime for its use of chemical weapons
against Iran throughout the war — particularly since the US and
other western powers soon felt obliged to oppose the Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait and
eventually invade Iraq itself to remove Saddam
Hussein.
The U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency also accused Iran of using chemical
weapons. These allegations however, have been disputed. Joost Hiltermann, who was the principal
researcher for Human Rights Watch
between 1992–1994, conducted a two year study, including a field
investigation in Iraq, capturing Iraqi government documents in the
process. According to Hiltermann, the literature on the Iran–Iraq
War reflects a number of allegations of chemical weapons use by
Iran, but these are "marred by a lack of specificity as to time and
place, and the failure to provide any sort of evidence".
In an edited volume by Gary Sick and Laurence Potter, Hiltermann
calls the allegations that Iran too, and not only Iraq, used
chemical weapons "mere assertions" and states: "no persuasive
evidence of the claim that Iran was the primary culprit [of using
chemical weapons] was ever presented". Policy consultant and author
Joseph Tragert also states: "Iran did
not retaliate with chemical weapons, probably because it did not
possess any at the time".
At his trial in December 2006, Saddam Hussein said he would take
responsibility "with honour" for any attacks on Iran using
conventional or chemical weapons during the 1980–1988 war but he
took issue with charges he ordered attacks on Iraqis. A medical
analysis of the effects of Iraqi mustard
gas is described in a U.S. military textbook, and contrasted,
resulting in slightly different effects in the First World
War.
Distinctions and Peculiarity
Iran attacked and
partially damaged the Osirak nuclear reactor on September 30, 1980 with
two F-4 Phantoms, shortly after the
outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War. This
was the first attack on a nuclear
reactor and only the third on a nuclear facility in history of
the world. It was also the first instance of a pre-emptive attack on a nuclear reactor to
forestall the development of a nuclear
weapon, though it did not achieve its objective as France repaired the
reactor after the Iranian attack. It took a second
pre-emptive strike by the Israeli Airforce to disable the reactor, in
the process killing a French engineer and causing France to pull out
of Osirak. The decommissioning of
Osirak has been cited as causing a
substantial delay to Iraqi acquisition of nuclear weapons, which Saddam announced an intention to develop in response
to the Iranian revolution.
The Iran-Iraq War was also the first and only conflict in the
history of warfare in which both forces used ballistic missiles against each
other.
This war also saw the only confirmed air-to-air helicopter battles
in history of warfare with the Iraqi Mi-25s
flying against Iranian AH-1
SuperCobra on numerous occasions. The first instance of these
helicopter "dogfights" happened when on
the starting day of the war (22 September 1980), two Iranian
SuperCobras crept up on two Mi-25s and hit them with TOW wire-guided antitank missiles. One Mi-25 went down
immediately, the other was badly damaged and crashed before
reaching base. The Iranians pulled off a repeat performance on 24
April 1981, destroying two Mi-25s without incurring losses to
themselves. According to some unclassified documents, Iranian
pilots achieved a 10 to 1 kill ratio over the Iraqi helicopter
pilots during these engagements and even engaged Iraqi fixed wing
aircraft.
Aftermath
Iranian Martyr Cemetery in Yazd
The Iran–Iraq War was extremely costly in lives and material, one
of the deadliest wars since World War
II. Both countries were devastated by the effect of the war. It
cost Iran an estimated 1 million casualties, killed or wounded, and
Iranians continue to suffer and die as a consequence of Iraq's use
of chemical weapons. Iraqi casualties are estimated at
250,000-500,000 killed or wounded. Thousands of civilians died on
both sides in air raids and ballistic missile attacks.
The financial loss was also enormous, at the time exceeding US$600
billion for each country (US$1.2 trillion in total). But shortly
after the war it turned out that the economic cost of war is more
profound and long-lasting than the estimates right after the war
suggested. Economic development was stalled and oil exports
disrupted. These economic woes were of a more serious
nature for Iraq that had to
incur huge debts during the war as compared to the very small debt
of Iran, as Iranians
had used more bloody but less financially costing tactics during
the war, in effect substituting soldiers lives for lack of
financial funding during their defense. This left Saddam still at rivalry with Iran, in a very
difficult situation with his allies during the war, as by then Iraq
was under more than $130 billion of international debt, excluding
the interest in an after war economy with a retarded GDP growth. A large portion of this debt was loaned by
Paris Club amounting to $21 billion, 85%
of which had originated from seven countries of Japan
, Russia
, France, Germany
, United
States
, Italy
and
United
Kingdom. But the largest portion of $130 billion debt
was to Iraq's former Arab backers of the war including the US$67
billion loaned by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar
, UAE and Jordan
, a debt
which contributed to Saddam's 1990 decision to invade Kuwait and threaten Saudi Arabia. But not only the invasion of Kuwait did not help
with Iraq's financial situation, but it also made it much worse as
United Nations
Compensation Commission awarded reparations amounting more than
$200 billion dollars to victims of the invasion including Kuwait, United States, individuals and companies among others, to be paid
by Iraq in oil commodity as well as putting Iraq under a complete
international embargo. This put further strain on Iraqi
economy pushing its external debt and international liabilities to
private and public sectors including the interests on them by the
end of Saddam's rule, to more than $500
billion which combined with negative economic growth of Iraq after
the prolonged international sanctions produced a Debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 1,000% (10
Years), making Iraq the most indebted poor country in the world.
This unsustainable economic situation compelled the new Iraqi
government formed after the fall of Saddam to
request the forgiveness of a considerable portion of loans incurred
during Iran Iraq war.
Much of the oil industry in both countries was damaged in air raids. Iran's production capacity has yet to
fully recover from the damages of the war. 10 million shells had
landed in Iraq's oil fields at Basra, seriously damaging Iraq's oil
production. Prisoners taken by both sides were not released until
more than 10 years after the end of the conflict. Cities on both
sides had also been considerably damaged.Not all saw the war in
negative terms. The Islamic Revolution of Iran was strengthened and
radicalized. The Iranian government-owned Etelaat
newspaper wrote:
"There is not a single school or town that is excluded
from the happiness of "holy defence" of the nation, from drinking
the exquisite elixir of martyrdom, or from the sweet death of the
martyr, who dies in order to live forever in
paradise."
The Iraqi
government commemorated the war with various monuments, including
the Hands of
Victory
and the Al-Shaheed Monument
, both in Baghdad.
The war left the borders unchanged. Two years
later, as war with the western powers loomed, Saddam recognized
Iranian rights over the eastern half of the Shatt al-Arab, a
reversion to the status quo ante bellum that he had
repudiated a decade earlier.
Declassified US intelligence available has explored both the
domestic and foreign implications of Iran's apparent (in 1982)
victory over Iraq in their then two-year old war.
On 9 December 1991, the UN Secretary-General reported the following
to the UN Security Council:
"That Iraq's explanations do not appear sufficient or acceptable to
the international community is a fact. Accordingly, the outstanding
event under the violations referred to is the attack of 22
September 1980, against Iran, which cannot be justified under the
charter of the United Nations, any recognized rules and principles
of international law or any principles of international morality
and entails the responsibility for conflict."
"Even if before the outbreak of the conflict there had been some
encroachment by Iran on Iraqi territory, such encroachment did not
justify Iraq's aggression against Iran—which was followed by Iraq's
continuous occupation of Iranian territory during the conflict—in
violation of the prohibition of the use of force, which is regarded
as one of the rules of jus cogens."
"On one occasion I had to note with deep regret the experts'
conclusion that "chemical weapons had been used against Iranian
civilians in an area adjacent to an urban center lacking any
protection against that kind of attack" (s/20134, annex). The
Council expressed its dismay on the matter and its condemnation in
resolution 620 (1988), adopted on 26 August 1988."
See also
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