A Hot and Holy War

By Patricia Blake

Iran stages a surprising comeback in its bloody struggle with Iraq

Iranian military intelligence units patrolling the hills northwest of the border town of Bostan flashed a warning: the Iraqis were about to attack Tang-e-Chazzabeh, a narrow mountain pass straddling the frontier. Two dozen Iranian crews manning field guns and Soviet Katyusha rocket launchers were awaiting the signal from their commanding officer. Sure enough, an Iranian forward observer spotted the columns of Iraqi armor and infantry on the move. He called "Now!" into his walkie-talkie. The commanding officer yelled "Fire!" The guns roared and the missiles blasted off toward the attacking Iraqi units.

Then, without waiting for orders, 500 Iranian Islamic Guards and militiamen leaped out of their trenches swinging West German G3 and Soviet Kalashnikov rifles and Soviet antitank rocket launchers. Screaming "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great), they charged the advancing Iraqis and were quickly locked in savage hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile, the Iranian regular army commander, startled by the untimely appearance of his fanatic countrymen directly in his line of fire, was obliged to redirect his guns to the rear of the enemy formations in order to avoid killing fellow Iranians.

Even so, the Islamic Guards and militiamen suffered more than 100 casualties in the fighting. The Iraqis sustained far fewer losses, but the frenzied Iranian charge evidently confused them. Within an hour of their initial attack, the Iraqis fell back. Surveying the carnage, a frustrated Iranian army captain said, "This madness was unnecessary. We could have blown the Iraqis to bits with our fire power alone."

That bizarre border battle two weeks ago was characteristic of the brand of bloody warfare the Iranians have been waging, with growing success, in an 18-month-old holy war against their Iraqi invaders. By combining conventional infantry and artillery tactics with suicidal attacks by fanatic Islamic Guards and irregulars, the Iranians have recaptured a considerable part of the territory they lost to the Iraqis immediately after the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980, the beginning of the war.

Iran's surprising military recovery has, however, been won at an appalling economic and human cost. Drained of foreign reserves by the mounting cost of the war ($100 billion so far), Tehran has had to ban all imports except food, medicines and war materiel. About 25,000 Iranians have been killed, 50,000 wounded and 1.5 million driven from their homes by the fighting.

For Iran's Middle Eastern neighbors the conflict has served to intensify longstanding divisions within the Arab world. Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich gulf states have supported Iraq in the contest, while Syria and Libya have stood by Iran. If the war should spread, it could conceivably destabilize the entire gulf region. For the Soviet Union, which has 25 military divisions on its border with Iran, the prolonged and debilitating fighting offers a host of opportunities to exploit weaknesses on both sides.

Iran's inch-by-inch recovery of its territory began last September, when it broke the grip of the Iraqi army around the key oil refinery city of Abadan. The Iranians also launched a series of successful attacks on Iraqi positions along the southern segment of the border between the two countries. In addition, the Iranians have recovered a total of about 155 sq. mi. of land at different points along the 625-mile front.

Meanwhile, the Tehran government has continued to throw tens of thousands of ill-trained but fanatically loyal Islamic Guards and volunteers against the beleaguered Iraqi forces. Evidently helpless to reverse the course of an unpopular war, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has indicated his readiness to negotiate withdrawal of his troops from the 800 sq. mi. of Iranian territory still occupied by his troops. Nonetheless, Saddam is clearly not prepared to accept terms so humiliating that they would precipitate his fall from power.

But Iran has proved obdurate. Knowing that any decisive advance over Iraqi forces is unlikely in the immediate future, the revolutionary government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has discovered that a protracted war has its benefits as well as its penalties. The Iraqi invasion has served to unify Iran in the midst of revolutionary turmoil, rallying disparate and even dissident elements behind a patriotic cause. Says one Arab diplomat who has had extensive dealings with Tehran: "The Iranians now believe that the longer the war goes on the more they are in control. With every week that passes they feel they are placing added pressure on Saddam to resign."

To compound Saddam's problems, Iran has set unrealistic conditions for a ceasefire: Baghdad's unconditional withdrawal, payment of massive reparations and unqualified United Nations condemnation of Iraq as the aggressor. In effect, they are a demand for Saddam's political suicide. Efforts to mediate a cease-fire by the U.N. and a council of Islamic states in recent months have met with stubborn opposition in Iran.

Reaffirming his country's intransigent position, Khomeini told troops last week that the war would continue until Saddam Hussein fell. "We shall not compromise," he vowed. "Islam will not allow compromise with a criminal. Saddam is desperate. He is appealing to everyone for help, but he is doomed."

Iran's continuing military advances have caused increasing concern in the U.S. and in neighboring Arab states. Any significant redistribution of power in this geopolitically sensitive area could bring disruption in the flow of oil supplies from the Persian Gulf. It could also offer the Soviet Union greater scope for extending its influence in the region.

Even more threatening, from the point of view of such conservative gulf states as Saudi Arabia, are Iran's stepped-up efforts to export its particular brand of Islamic revolution. There is abundant evidence that Tehran believes that the war with Iraq offers a unique opportunity for fomenting fundamentalist coups d'etat in other Muslim states. A recent appeal for volunteers issued by the Islamic Guards called on Iranians to help enable "the Islamic revolution to open the gates of freedom to the oppressed peoples of the region." Last December police in the tiny, prosperous gulf state of Bahrain arrested 80 terrorists trained and armed by Iran for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Sheik Isa Al-Khalifa.

Fear of Iranian subversion in the region is one reason a group of four gulf states headed by Saudi Arabia has decided to contribute more than $20 billion in interest-free loans and billions more in grants to Iraq. The gulf states are also mapping a regional defense plan. The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council has decided to create a joint armed forces command and a military strike force designed to intervene if any of the member states is threatened. So far, however, only Jordan has actively participated in the Iran-Iraq war. A 2,000-man Jordanian force has been formed to fight on the Iraqi side, and Jordan's King Hussein has even offered to lead his men into battle.

The U.S., which long regarded Iraq as an ally of the Soviet Union, is edging toward a rapprochement. The Reagan Administration last month lifted a number of stringent trade restrictions that had been levied against Iraq for supporting international terrorism. Though the U.S. has no intention of selling arms to Iraq, it can now be more flexible in dealing with that nation. In any case, Iraq has had no trouble purchasing arms from France and other Western European countries to supplement the vast stock of weapons it obtained from its closest ally in the 1970s, the Soviet Union.

Iran's principal supporters in the Middle East, Libya and Syria, have been able to fill only part of the country's arms needs. Tehran has thus had to turn for help to a strange assortment of suppliers. A significant portion of the arms shipments going to Iran comes from the Soviet Union, East Germany and North Korea. Israel, which regards Iraq as its most implacable enemy among the Muslim states, has sold Iran Israeli-made weapons such as sea-to-sea and air-to-air missiles, as well as some parts for the U.S.-made materiel the Ayatullah's regime inherited when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was deposed in 1979. Still, most of the $1 billion in weaponry that Iran has bought has come from an international network of arms dealers or directly from Western European sources.

Moscow's aid to Iran, overt and otherwise, has increased markedly since 1980. In addition to the vast stores of Soviet Katyusha rocket launchers, mortars, antitank rocket launchers and Kalashnikov rifles that make their way to Iran, Soviet technicians and KGB experts have come to train the Islamic Guards and the intelligence services. "For Russia, Iran is the prize," says the Rand Corporation's Steven J. Rosen. "The Soviets are playing all sides of the street: supplying arms to Iraq through Jordan and arms to Iran through North Korea. The Soviets are trying to maintain good relations with conservative mullahs while backing the Iranian Communist Party."

So far, however, Iran appears to have been playing the old and perilous game of exploiting the Soviet Union's help while pursuing what it regards as a holy war against its neighbor and historic enemy, Iraq. Buying arms wherever it can find them, throwing masses of young Muslim zealots against enemy guns, Iran has achieved a remarkable military comeback. In spite of its pariah status among former gulf allies, its uninterrupted revolutionary turmoil and domestic violence, its bankrupt economy and shattered oil industry, Ayatullah Khomeini's Iran may be emerging as a power for the world to ponder.

--By Patricia Blake. Reported by Raji Samghabadi/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Raji Samghabadi

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