Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988: Saddam Hussein's War against Iran

The Iran-Iraq War was fought from 22 September 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, until a UN-brokered ceasefire on 20 August 1988. Saddam Hussein expected a quick victory over a country weakened by revolution, but the conflict became one of the longest and deadliest conventional wars of the 20th century, marked by trench warfare, mass infantry assaults, chemical weapons and attacks on shipping in the Gulf. It ended with no change of borders and at least half a million dead.

Background and causes

Iran and Iraq had long disputed their border, especially the Shatt al-Arab, the waterway formed by the Tigris and Euphrates that is Iraq’s only outlet to the sea. Under the 1975 Algiers Agreement, Iraq accepted a border along the middle of the channel in return for the Shah ending his support for a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 changed the balance. Ayatollah Khomeini’s government called on Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime, and Iraq’s leaders feared unrest among the country’s Shiite majority. Border clashes and assassination attempts multiplied in 1980.

Saddam, who had become president in July 1979, also saw opportunity. Purges had gutted Iran’s officer corps, the country was isolated after the seizure of the US embassy, and its American-made weapons lacked spare parts. Iraq hoped to win back the whole Shatt al-Arab, perhaps seize the oil-rich, partly Arab-populated province of Khuzestan, and become the dominant power in the Gulf. On 17 September 1980 Saddam declared the Algiers Agreement void.

The Iraqi invasion, 1980-1982

On 22 September 1980 Iraqi aircraft struck Iranian airfields, and the next day Iraqi divisions crossed the border along a broad front. They made early gains in Khuzestan and besieged the port city of Abadan. After weeks of bitter street fighting, Iraqi forces captured Khorramshahr in late October 1980.

The invasion did not cause Iran’s collapse. Instead it rallied Iranians around the new regime. Regular army units fought alongside the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, a volunteer militia, and Iraqi momentum stalled by the end of 1980.

In 1981 and 1982 Iran counter-attacked. It broke the siege of Abadan in September 1981 and, in the spring of 1982, launched large offensives that recaptured much of the lost territory. On 24 May 1982 Iranian forces retook Khorramshahr, taking thousands of Iraqi prisoners. In June Saddam announced a withdrawal to the international border and offered a ceasefire.

Iran on the offensive and chemical warfare, 1982-1987

Iran rejected the offer and demanded Saddam’s removal and reparations. In July 1982 it invaded Iraq, aiming at Basra, the country’s second city. The war settled into a grinding struggle reminiscent of the Western Front in the First World War, with trenches, minefields, artillery barrages and frontal assaults.

Iran relied on numbers and religious zeal, often sending waves of lightly armed volunteers, including teenagers, against fortified Iraqi lines. Iraq, with more tanks, aircraft and artillery, fought defensively and built huge earthworks and water barriers in the southern marshes. In Iran, the cult of martyrdom became central to wartime culture, with murals and cemeteries such as Behesht-e Zahra in Tehran filling with the graves of young volunteers.

Iranian offensives captured the Majnoon Islands, with their oil fields, in 1984 and the Faw peninsula, at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab, in February 1986. Repeated assaults on Basra, especially in early 1987, came close to breaking Iraqi lines but cost tens of thousands of lives without achieving a breakthrough.

From 1983 Iraq used chemical weapons on a growing scale, first mustard gas and then, from 1984, the nerve agent tabun, the first battlefield use of a nerve agent in history. Sarin followed later. United Nations specialists confirmed Iraqi chemical attacks in 1984 and in later investigations, but international reaction was muted.

The weapons were also turned on Iraq’s own Kurdish population. During the Anfal campaign of 1986-1989, Iraqi forces destroyed thousands of villages, and in the chemical attack on Halabja on 16 March 1988 an estimated 3,000-5,000 civilians were killed.

The tanker war and the war of the cities

To strike at Iran’s oil exports, Iraq began attacking tankers and the Kharg Island oil terminal in 1984. Iran retaliated against ships serving Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which were financing Iraq. Hundreds of merchant ships were hit during the war.

In 1987 Kuwait asked for protection, and the United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers and escorted them through the Gulf in Operation Earnest Will. On 17 May 1987 an Iraqi aircraft mistakenly hit the frigate USS Stark with missiles, killing 37 sailors. After a US warship struck an Iranian mine, the US Navy destroyed Iranian oil platforms and warships in Operation Praying Mantis on 18 April 1988.

On 3 July 1988 the cruiser USS Vincennes, engaged in a clash with Iranian gunboats, shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian Airbus, killing all 290 people on board. The United States called it a tragic mistake; Iran saw it as deliberate.

Both sides also fired missiles and bombs at each other’s cities in several “wars of the cities”. The most intense phase, in February-April 1988, saw Iraq launch extended-range Scud missiles at Tehran, prompting many residents to flee the capital.

Foreign involvement

Most outside powers backed Iraq, fearing the spread of Iran’s revolution. The Soviet Union and France were Iraq’s main arms suppliers, and Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, lent it tens of billions of dollars. The United States restored diplomatic relations with Baghdad in 1984 and shared intelligence on Iranian forces.

Iran, under an international arms embargo, bought weapons from Syria, Libya, North Korea and China, and on the black market. It also received secret American missile shipments in 1985-1986, revealed in the Iran-Contra affair, as well as arms sold through Israel.

The end of the war

On 20 July 1987 the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 598, demanding a ceasefire and withdrawal to international borders. Iraq accepted; Iran at first did not.

In 1988 the tide turned against Iran. Iraq, now better equipped and using chemical weapons heavily, recaptured the Faw peninsula in April and drove Iranian forces back across the front in the following months. Iran’s economy was exhausted and its people war-weary. On 18 July 1988 Iran accepted Resolution 598. Khomeini said publicly that accepting it was more deadly for him than drinking poison.

The ceasefire, negotiated with UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, came into force on 20 August 1988 and was monitored by UN observers. Just before it, the Iraqi-backed People’s Mojahedin launched a failed incursion into western Iran, and the Iranian authorities then executed thousands of political prisoners in the summer and autumn of 1988.

Key people

Saddam Hussein (1937-2006), president of Iraq from 1979, started the war and directed it closely, surviving repeated crises. He was executed in 2006 for crimes against Iraqi civilians.

Ruhollah Khomeini (c. 1902-1989), Iran’s Supreme Leader, refused peace for six years in the hope of overthrowing Saddam and accepted the ceasefire only in 1988. He died the following year.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1934-2017), speaker of Iran’s parliament, was appointed acting commander-in-chief in June 1988 and was one of those who urged Khomeini to end the war.

Consequences

The war changed no borders. Iraq emerged with a large, battle-hardened army but debts estimated at around 80 billion dollars or more, much of it owed to Gulf neighbours. Disputes with Kuwait over debt and oil led directly to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Gulf War. In August 1990 Saddam even accepted the 1975 border with Iran again to secure his eastern flank.

In Iran, the war strengthened the Islamic Republic’s institutions, especially the Revolutionary Guards, and became central to its national memory as the “Sacred Defence”. Its cities, oil industry and border regions needed years of reconstruction, and survivors of chemical attacks still suffer long-term illness.

Tens of thousands of prisoners of war remained in captivity long after the guns fell silent. Large exchanges took place in 1990, but the last groups were not repatriated until the early 2000s.

The war is sometimes remembered in the West simply as a contest between two dictatorships, or as a religious war between Sunnis and Shiites. Both views oversimplify it. Iraq’s army was largely made up of Shiite conscripts, who mostly stayed loyal, and Arabs in Iran’s Khuzestan did not rise in support of the invaders as Saddam had hoped. National identity proved stronger than sectarian or ethnic ties on both sides.

The human and material cost was enormous, although many figures remain estimates:

Timeline

• 1980, 17 September: Saddam Hussein renounces the 1975 Algiers Agreement.
• 1980, 22 September: Iraq launches air strikes and invades Iran.
• 1980, late October: Iraqi forces capture Khorramshahr.
• 1982, 24 May: Iran recaptures Khorramshahr.
• 1982, July: Iran invades Iraq, aiming at Basra.
• 1984: Iraq begins large-scale nerve agent use; the tanker war starts.
• 1986, February: Iran captures the Faw peninsula.
• 1987, 20 July: The UN Security Council passes Resolution 598.
• 1988, 16 March: Chemical attack on Halabja.
• 1988, 20 August: The ceasefire comes into force.

Why it matters

The Iran-Iraq War devastated two nations, normalised the use of chemical weapons on a scale unseen since the First World War and drew the superpowers into the Gulf. It entrenched the Islamic Republic, left Iraq indebted and militarised, and set the stage for the Gulf War and the conflicts that have shaped the Middle East ever since.