IRAN-IRAQ WAR

Also known as the first Gulf War, a long, extremely costly, and inconclusive conflict fought from 1980 to 1988. In 1980 Iran was in an isolated and weakened condition as a result of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Its leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, had proclaimed a policy of exporting its Shi?ite Islamic ideology, an implicit threat to the Ba?thist state in Iraq, a secular, Sunni-dominated regime that kept itself in power partly by suppressing its Shi?a majority.

The war began as a dispute over territory that was to have been returned to Iraq under the terms of a 1975 border treaty between the two countries. On 10 September 1980, Iraq took control of the disputed territory, and on 17 September renounced the 1975 treaty and claimed Iraqi sovereignty over the entire Shatt al-Arab, the estuary at the head of the Persian Gulf. On 22 September Iraq launched a fullscale invasion of Iran, including an aerial bombing campaign against military and economic targets. By November Iraq occupied some 10,000 square miles of Iran, including the city of Khorramshahr. Iraq offered to negotiate but Iran refused as long as Iraq occupied any of its territory. There was a stalemate until March 1982; between then and June 1982, the Iranians rallied and pushed the Iraqi forces back to their own borders. Again Iraq offered to negotiate, but this time Khomeini refused until Saddam Hussein was removed from office. In July 1982 Iranian forces began a series of offensives into Iraqi territory, including an unsuccessful attempt to take Basra. Over the next several years fighting moved back and forth and evolved into a World War I–style war of attrition, of defensive trench warfare, and of massive assaults of "human waves" that produced huge casualties. Both sides bombed civilians, and there is evidence that both sides used chemical weapons, although only Iraq did so on a large scale. Each side also attacked oil tankers in the Gulf carrying oil from the other's ports. Air attacks continued throughout the war, although by the later stages Iran's air force was seriously degraded.

Throughout the war, Iraq had the support of most Arab states, the Gulf states in particular (to which it became seriously indebted, a factor in the origin of the Gulf War of 1991), the Soviet Union, and the United States, which in the later stages of the war supplied it with weapons and intelligence, and which actually carried out naval strikes on its behalf in the Persian Gulf. The Iranians were supported by Syria, Libya, North Korea, and China (and received covert weapons shipments from the United States as well). In August 1988, after years of stalemate, with little territory gained by either side, both sides accepted a UN-sponsored truce. Estimates of the dead vary from 500,000 to 1,500,000, roughly two-thirds of them Iranian. In August 1990, at the same time that his armies were occupying Kuwait, Saddam Hussein agreed to honor the international boundary negotiated in 1975. Prisoner exchanges were still being negotiated as late as 2003.

SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991).