Iran-Iraq War

Iran-Iraq War
Date 22 September 1980 to 20 August 1988 Location Southwestern Asia Result Status quo antebellum
Belligerents
Iraq	Iran
Commanders and leaders
Saddam Hussein	Ruhollah Khomeini

The Iran–Iraq War (Persian: جنگ ایران و عراق‎; Arabic: حرب الخليج الأولى‎ “First Gulf War”) began on 22 September 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran, and ended on 20 August 1988, when Iran accepted the UN-brokered ceasefire. Iraq wanted to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state, and was worried the 1979 Iranian Revolution would lead Iraq's Shia majority to rebel against the Ba'athist government. The war also followed a long history of border disputes, and Iraq planned to annex the oil-rich Khuzestan Province and the east bank of the Shatt al-Arab (Arvand Rud).

Although Iraq hoped to take advantage of Iran's post-revolutionary chaos, it made limited progress and was quickly repelled; Iran regained virtually all lost territory by June 1982. For the next five years, Iran was on the offensive until Iraq took back the initiative in 1988, and whose major offensives led to the final conclusion of the war. There were a number of proxy forces—most notably the People's Mujahedin of Iran siding with Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdish militias of the KDP and PUK siding with Iran. The United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, and most Arab countries provided political and logistic support for Iraq, while Iran was largely isolated. An estimated 500,000 Iraqi and Iranian soldiers died, in addition to a smaller number of civilians. The end of the war resulted in status quo ante bellum.

The conflict has been compared to World War I in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across fortified defensive lines, manned machine gun posts, bayonet charges, Iranian human wave attacks, extensive use of chemical weapons by Iraq, and, later, deliberate attacks on civilian targets. A special feature of the war can be seen in the Iranian cult of the martyr which had been developed in the years before the revolution. The discourses on martyrdom formulated in the Iranian Shia context led to the tactics of "human wave attacks" and thus had a lasting impact on the dynamics of the war.

Iran-Iraq War in State of Jefferson

In 1980, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. Iran's sudden wish not to antagonize the United States led to the end of captivity for a number of American hostages who were held in Tehran, including Mark Gordon.

See also

• Iraq-Persia Wars (Through Darkest Europe), for a fictional analog of this war.