| Iraqi invasion of Iran | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Iran–Iraq War | |||||||||
 Iranian soldiers fighting in the First Battle of Khorramshahr (September–November 1980) | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Iran |
 Iraq Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan[1][2][3] | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
|
Abolhassan Banisadr (1st President of Iran and Commander-in-Chief) Mostafa Chamran (WIA) (Minister of Defence) Valiollah Fallahi(Joint chief of military staff) Qasem-Ali Zahirnejad(Joint chief of military staff) Mohsen Rezaee(Revolutionary Guards Commander) |
Saddam Hussein (President of Iraq) Ali Hassan al-Majid(General and Iraqi Intelligence Service head) Taha Yassin Ramadan(General and Deputy Party Secretary) Adnan Khairallah(Minister of Defence) Saddam Kamel(Republican Guard Commander) | ||||||||
| Units involved | |||||||||
| National Defense Battalions | |||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
|
At the onset of the war:[5] 110,000–150,000 soldiers, 1,700–2,100 tanks,[6] (500 operable)[7] 1,000 armoured vehicles, 300 operable artillery pieces,[8] 485 fighter-bombers (205 fully operational),[9] 750 helicopters |
At the onset of the war:[10] 200,000 soldiers, 2,800 tanks, 4,000 APCs, 1,400 artillery pieces, 380 fighter-bombers, 350 helicopters | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
|
4,500 killed[11] 12,000 wounded |
4,000 killed[11] 10,000 wounded | ||||||||
| ||
|---|---|---|
|
Political offices
Rise to power Presidency Desposition Elections and referendums  .svg) |
||
The Iraqi invasion of Iran began on 22 September 1980, sparking the Iran–Iraq War, and lasted until 5 December 1980. Ba'athist Iraq believed that Iran would not respond effectively due to internal socio-political turmoil caused by the country's Islamic Revolution one year earlier. However, Iraqi troops faced fierce Iranian resistance, which stalled their advance into western Iran. In two months, the invasion came to a halt after Iraq occupied more than 25,900 square kilometres (10,000 sq mi) of Iranian territory.[4]
On 10 September 1980, Iraq, hoping to take advantage of a weakened Iran's consolidation of the Islamic Revolution, forcibly reclaimed territories in Zain al-Qaws and Saïf Saad; these had been promised to Iraq under the terms of the 1975 Algiers Agreement, but were never actually transferred. Both Iran and Iraq later declared the treaty as null and void, doing so on 14 September and 17 September, respectively. As a result, the only outstanding dispute along the Iran–Iraq border at the time of the Iraqi invasion on 22 September was the question of whether Iranian ships would fly Iraqi flags and pay navigation fees to Iraq while sailing through a stretch of the Shatt al-Arab[e] spanning several kilometres.[12][13] On 22 September, Iraqi aircraft pre-emptively bombarded ten Iranian airfields in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to gain aerial superiority on the battlefield. On the next day, Iraqi troops crossed the international border in strength and advanced into Iran in three simultaneous thrusts along a front of approximately 644 kilometres (400 mi). Of Iraq's six divisions that were invading by land, four were sent to Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan in order to cut off Iranian access to the Shatt al-Arab and establish a territorial security zone.[14]
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein presented the invasion as a strategically defensive measure to blunt the edge of Iranian politician Ruhollah Khomeini, who had risen to power as Iran's "Supreme Leader" and was attempting to export the Islamic Revolution to the Arab world. Saddam, as a secularist and an Arab nationalist, perceived Iran's Shia Islamism as an immediate and existential threat to his Ba'ath Party and thereby to Iraqi society as a whole.[15] The Iraqi government sought to take control of the entire Shatt al-Arab in a rapid and decisive military campaign, believing that Iraq's victory in the broader conflict would humiliate Iran and lead to Khomeini's downfall, or, at the very least, thwart the new Iranian government's attempts to spread Khomeinism throughout the Muslim world.[16][17][18][19] Saddam had also aspired to annex Khuzestan and saw the Islamic Revolution as an opportunity to do so, seeking to increase his country's prestige and power in the Arab world.[19][20] To this end, his administration hoped that Iraq, as an Arab-majority country, could successfully exploit Arab separatism in Khuzestan to undermine Iran from within. In practice, these objectives failed to materialize and the majority of Iranian Arabs were indifferent to the pan-Arabism espoused by Iraq's Ba'athists.[16]
- ^ Sloan, Stephen; Anderson, Sean K. (2009). Historical Dictionary of Terrorism. Scarecrow Press. pp. 145–146. ISBN 978-0-8108-6311-8.
- ^ "روایت تنها بازمانده "دژ" خرمشهر از سقوط تا آزادی". Farda News. 23 May 2016. Archived from the original on 26 May 2016. Retrieved 23 May 2016.
- ^ Murray, Williamson; Woods, Kevin M. (2014). The Iran–Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107062290.
- ^ a b Hiro, Dilip (2019). Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy. Oxford University Press. p. 97. ISBN 978-0-19-005022-1. Cite error: The named reference "Hiro 97" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ Pollack, p. 186
- ^ Farrokh, Kaveh, 305 (2011)
- ^ Pollack, p. 187
- ^ Farrokh, Kaveh, 304 (2011)
- ^ "The state of the air combat readiness of Iran ... • corporal_historian_23". Archived from the original on 2 October 2018. Retrieved 18 November 2018.
- ^ Pollack, p. 186
- ^ a b Razoux, Pierre (2015). The Iran–Iraq War. Harvard University Press. p. 147, 149. ISBN 978-0674915718.
- ^ Murray, Williamson; Woods, Kevin M. (2014). "A context of 'bitterness and anger'". The Iran–Iraq War, A Military and Strategic History. Cambridge University Press. pp. 62–63 (e-book, page numbers approximate). ISBN 9781107062290.
On 7 September 1980, Iraq accused Iran of shelling Iraqi villages in the territories of Zain al-Qaws and Saif Saad on 4 September 1980. Iraq demanded that the Iranian forces in those territories evacuate and return the villages to Iraq. Tehran gave no reply. Iraqi forces then moved to 'liberate' the villages, and on 10 September announced that its forces had done so in a short, sharp military engagement. ... On 14 September 1980, Iran announced it would no longer abide by the 1975 Algiers Agreement. Given the scene that was set, it was no surprise that on 17 September, five days before the invasion, Iraq declared the accords null and void. ... On 22 September, Iraqi units crossed the frontier.
- ^ Makiya, Kanan (1998). Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition. University of California Press. p. 270. ISBN 9780520921245.
There remains the issue of sovereignty over Shatt al-Arab. ... Granted that this might have been a genuine motive for abrogating the 1975 treaty, and reclaiming title to the whole Shatt, what was the point of the invasion on September 22? Iraq had taken back by unilateral action on September 10 the only strips of territory it still claimed under the treaty. There was no longer any 'territory' as such on the other side to conquer. The Ba'th had already followed the Shah's example of 1971 when he unilaterally took over the three islands in the Gulf.
- ^ Karsh, Efraim (2002). The Iran–Iraq War: 1980–1988. Osprey Publishing. p. 22. ISBN 978-1841763712.
- ^ Cruze, Gregory S. (Spring 1988). "Iran and Iraq: Perspectives in Conflict". Military Reports. Archived from the original on 1 January 2016. Retrieved 30 December 2015.
- ^ a b Cite error: The named reference
efraimkarshwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Malovany, Pesach (2017). Wars of Modern Babylon: A History of the Iraqi Army from 1921 to 2003. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 9780813169439.
- ^ Razoux, Pierre (2015). The Iran–Iraq War. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674088634.
- ^ a b Murray, Williamson; Woods, Kevin M. (2014). The Iran–Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History. Cambridge University Press. p. 98. ISBN 9781107062290.
- ^ Murray, Williamson; Woods, Kevin M. (2014). "A context of 'bitterness and anger'". The Iran–Iraq War, A Military and Strategic History. Cambridge University Press. pp. 61–62 (e-book, page numbers approximate). ISBN 9781107062290.
Certainly Saddam believed that the oil-rich areas of Arabistan (Khuzestan) were within his reach, a goal his intelligence services seemed delighted to further.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).