Iran–Iraq War

Based on Wikipedia: Iran–Iraq War

In the autumn of 1980, two ancient civilizations—heirs to Persia and Mesopotamia—plunged into a war that would kill half a million people, bankrupt both nations, and change absolutely nothing about their borders. The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight brutal years, featured trenches and poison gas reminiscent of World War I, and ended in a stalemate that left both countries financially ruined. Combined losses exceeded one trillion dollars. Neither side gained territory. Neither paid reparations.

It remains one of the bloodiest and most pointless conflicts of the twentieth century.

The Revolution That Changed Everything

To understand why Iraq invaded Iran, you need to understand what happened in Iran in 1979. The Shah—Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—had ruled Iran as an absolute monarch with American backing. His military was formidable, ranked by international experts as the fifth most powerful in the world. Iran was wealthy from oil, armed with American and British weapons, and closely allied with both the United States and Israel.

Then came Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Khomeini was a Shia Muslim cleric who had been living in exile, most recently in Iraq. He led a revolution that toppled the Shah and transformed Iran into an Islamic theocracy—a government explicitly based on religious principles. The new regime executed generals, purged the military of experienced officers, and declared its intention to export Islamic revolution across the Middle East.

This terrified Saddam Hussein.

Saddam ruled Iraq through the Baath Party, which was officially secular—meaning it separated religion from government. But there was a deeper problem. Iraq's population was majority Shia Muslim, while Saddam and his inner circle were Sunni Muslims. The split between Sunni and Shia Islam goes back to the seventh century, to a dispute over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad. It has shaped Middle Eastern politics ever since.

Khomeini was openly calling for Iraq's Shia majority to rise up against Saddam. In April 1980, an Iraqi Islamist group with ties to Iran tried to assassinate Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's top officials. The attempt failed but killed several civilians. Iraq executed a prominent Shia cleric in response.

The two countries were hurtling toward war.

Why Saddam Thought He Would Win

Saddam Hussein was not a reckless gambler. He calculated, correctly, that Iran's once-mighty military had been gutted by the revolution.

Between February and September 1979, the new Iranian government had executed eighty-five senior generals. Most major-generals and brigadier-generals were forced into early retirement. By the time Iraq invaded, some twelve thousand officers at all levels had been purged from the Iranian army. The desertion rate hit sixty percent. The most skilled pilots and soldiers had fled, been imprisoned, or been shot.

Iranian ships stopped paying tolls to Iraq when using the Shatt al-Arab waterway, a river that forms part of the border between the two countries. "Shatt al-Arab" is Arabic for "River of the Arabs." Most of the ships using it were Iranian, and Iran argued the old treaties governing the waterway were unfair. When Iran sent a tanker escorted by warships down the river in 1969, Iraq—then the weaker military power—did nothing.

But by 1980, the situation had reversed. Iraq had been building its military for years, buying tanks from the Soviet Union and aircraft from France. Saddam now commanded 242,000 soldiers, 2,350 tanks, and 340 combat aircraft. His intelligence services reported that Iran had "no power to launch wide offensive operations" and appeared to be in "a more defensive mode."

Saddam saw his chance. He wanted to tear up the 1975 Algiers Agreement, which had forced Iraq to share control of the Shatt al-Arab with Iran. He wanted to establish Iraq as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. And he wanted to prevent Khomeini's revolutionary ideology from spreading to Iraq's Shia population.

There may have been an even grander ambition. Some historians believe Saddam aimed to annex Khuzestan, an oil-rich Iranian province with a significant Arab population. He publicly denied this, but the circumstantial evidence is strong.

The Invasion That Stalled

On September 22, 1980, Iraqi forces crossed into Iran.

Saddam expected a quick victory. He got three months of progress, then nothing.

By December 1980, the Iraqi offensive had ground to a halt. The Iranians, despite their decimated officer corps and broken supply chains, fought back with unexpected ferocity. When the invasion began, Iran released pilots and officers from prison, commuting death sentences in exchange for combat service. The Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force—despite purges, despite missing spare parts for its American-made equipment—proved far more capable than Iraqi intelligence had predicted.

The Iranians began pushing back. By June 1982, they had regained all the territory Iraq had seized.

This was the moment when the war might have ended. The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 514, calling for a ceasefire. Iran rejected it.

Instead, Iran invaded Iraq.

The Long Grind

What followed was five years of Iranian offensive operations inside Iraqi territory—and one of the most gruesome conflicts since World War I.

Both sides dug trenches. They strung barbed wire across fortified defensive lines. Soldiers huddled behind machine-gun posts and fixed bayonets for charges across no-man's-land. Iraq, unable to match Iran's manpower, turned to chemical weapons—poison gas that blistered skin, destroyed lungs, and killed indiscriminately.

The international community did remarkably little about this. Iraq used chemical weapons on both soldiers and civilians, and the world largely looked away.

Iran, meanwhile, developed its own grim tactic: the human wave attack.

These attacks have been widely misunderstood. The popular image is of mindless masses charging machine guns. The reality was more organized—and perhaps more disturbing for it. Iran's mosques each recruited twenty-two volunteers into squads. Each squad received a specific objective. When the signal came, they surged forward in coordinated waves, overwhelming Iraqi positions through sheer numbers.

The soldiers in these waves came from the Basij, a paramilitary militia that accepted volunteers as young as twelve and as old as seventy. They were poorly armed. Many were motivated by religious fervor and the promise of martyrdom. Shia Islam has a particular theology of martyrdom, rooted in the death of Imam Hussein at Karbala in 680 CE, and the new Iranian government invoked this tradition constantly.

The Basij worked alongside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as the IRGC or simply the Revolutionary Guards. This organization had been created specifically to protect the new revolutionary government and to counterbalance the regular army, which the clerics distrusted. At first, the Guards refused to coordinate with the army at all. It took until 1982 for the two forces to begin joint operations.

A War of Proxies and Patrons

Neither Iran nor Iraq fought alone.

Iraq received extraordinary international support. The United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Yugoslavia all provided financial, political, or military assistance. The Arab states of the Persian Gulf, terrified of Iranian revolutionary expansion, poured money into Saddam's war chest.

Iran was comparatively isolated, but it had its own allies. Syria, Libya, and North Korea provided significant aid. So did China, Pakistan, and Cuba. And in one of history's stranger partnerships, so did Israel.

Why would Israel help Iran? Because Israel considered Iraq the more immediate threat. The enemy of my enemy, as the ancient proverb goes, is my friend—at least temporarily.

Both countries also armed proxy forces within each other's borders. Iraq supported Arab separatists in Iran's Khuzestan province. Iran allied with Kurdish groups in northern Iraq—the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan—who had been fighting Baghdad for autonomy for decades.

This Kurdish dimension would have terrible consequences. During the war, Saddam launched the Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurdistan, killing tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians. These deaths are often counted separately from the half-million killed in the main conflict, but they were part of the same catastrophe.

The River at the Center

At the heart of the conflict lay a body of water: the Shatt al-Arab.

This river forms where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, near the Iraqi city of Basra. It flows southeast for about 120 miles before emptying into the Persian Gulf. For much of its length, it marks the border between Iran and Iraq.

Rivers make natural boundaries, but they create problems too. Who controls the water? Who dredges the channel? Who collects tolls from passing ships?

Historically, most river boundaries run along the thalweg—the deepest part of the channel, roughly the middle. But a 1937 treaty had given Iraq control of almost the entire river, with Iran's border running along the eastern bank. This meant Iranian ships had to pay Iraq to reach their own ports.

The 1975 Algiers Agreement moved the border to the thalweg, splitting control of the river. Saddam, who was then second-in-command in Iraq, signed the agreement reluctantly because Iran was supporting a Kurdish rebellion and Iraq needed peace.

He never forgot the humiliation. Five years later, he tore up the treaty and sent his army across the border.

The End That Changed Nothing

By 1988, both countries were exhausted.

Iran had borne the larger share of casualties. The economy was shattered. The military, despite years of rebuilding, could not break the stalemate. And tensions with the United States were mounting—the American Navy had begun directly engaging Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf.

In mid-1988, Iraq finally regained the initiative. A series of major counteroffensives pushed Iranian forces back. The Iranians, worn down by eight years of war, economic devastation, and international isolation, accepted a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations.

Resolution 598 took effect in August 1988.

The border returned to where it had been in 1980. No territory changed hands. No reparations were paid. A million casualties—dead and wounded on both sides—and a trillion dollars spent, and the two countries ended up exactly where they started.

The Ironies of History

There is a bitter footnote to this story.

Before the revolution, when the Shah still ruled Iran, Iraq and Iran had a brief moment of reconciliation. In 1978, Iranian intelligence discovered plans for a Soviet-backed coup against Saddam. Iran warned him. Saddam executed dozens of his own army officers and, as a gesture of gratitude, expelled Khomeini from Iraq.

Khomeini went to France. From there, he organized the revolution that overthrew the Shah, created the Islamic Republic, and turned Iran into Iraq's mortal enemy.

Had Iraq not expelled him, the revolution might never have happened. Saddam's gesture of thanks to the Shah helped create the very threat he went to war to destroy.

The war also revealed the limits of revolutionary fervor. Iran's government believed that religious conviction could substitute for military training and equipment. The human wave attacks were brave, perhaps heroically so, but they were also slaughter. Young men armed with faith died in waves against machine guns and poison gas.

Meanwhile, Saddam survived the war he started. He would remain in power until 2003, when a different war—this one led by the United States—finally toppled him. But the Iran-Iraq War planted seeds that would grow for decades. The IRGC, born as a revolutionary militia, became one of the most powerful institutions in Iran. The sectarian tensions that Saddam feared in 1980 only deepened with time. And the Middle East learned that the world would tolerate chemical weapons if the politics were convenient.

The war that changed nothing changed everything about what came after.