Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
collided in the desert near Tabas. For 444 days the siege of the US embassy dogged US
president, Jimmy Carter.
The Iran-Iraq War
In 1980, hoping to take advantage of Iran's domestic chaos, Iraq's President Saddam Hus-
sein made an opportunistic land grab on oil-rich Khuzestan province, claiming it was a
historic part of Iraq. It was a catastrophic miscalculation that resulted in eight years of
war.
Ironically, the invasion proved to be pivotal
in solidifying support for the shaky Islamic Re-
volution by providing an obvious enemy to
rally against and an opportunity to spread the
revolution by force of arms. Iraq was better
equipped and better supplied, but Iran could
draw on a larger population and a sense of
righteousness and religious fervor, fanned by its mullahs.
Fighting was fierce, with poison gas and trench warfare being seen for the first time
since WWI. Islamic volunteers (the
basijis
) as young as 13 chose to clear minefields by
walking through them, confident they would go to heaven as martyrs. By July 1982 Iran
had pushed the Iraqis back to the border, but rather than accept peace Iran adopted a new
agenda that included occupying Najaf and Karbala, important Shiite pilgrimage sites.
The war dragged on another six years. Mil-
lions of Iranians lost their homes and jobs, and
some 1.2 million fled the battle zone, many
moving permanently to far-away Mashhad. A
ceasefire was finally negotiated in mid-1988,
though prisoners were still being exchanged in
2003.
While war was raging, different factions
within Iran continued to jostle for supremacy. In June 1981 a bomb blast at the headquar-
ters of the Islamic Republican Party killed its founder Ayatollah Beheshti and 71 others,
including four cabinet ministers. A second bomb in August killed President Rajai and the
new prime minister. The Islamic People's Mojahedin, once co-revolutionaries but now bit-
ter enemies of the clerics, were blamed. Despite this, by 1983 all effective resistance to
Khomeini's ideas had been squashed.
Bashu, the Little Stranger,
Behram Beiza'i's 1986
film, tells the story of a little boy finding a new
mother in southern Iran. It was the first antiwar
film, made at the height of the Iran-Iraq War.
Iranians refer to the war as the 'Iraq-imposed war'
and it remains a huge influence on the country. Pic-
tures of martyrs can be seen in every city, and
barely a day passes without TV broadcasting inter-
views with veterans.
