Word: baghdad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Despite their appalling losses, the Iranians continued to hammer away at the strategically important highway that links Basra, Iraq's second largest city and a key center of the country's oil industry, to Baghdad, the capital. With 300,000 to 400,000 more soldiers massed along a ragged 370-mile section of the border, Iran appeared in no mood to give...
Each side, curiously, feels that the odds favor its opponent. Iran is apparently convinced that Iraq now has the edge in military equipment. Both the Soviet Union and France are keeping Baghdad well supplied, while the Khomeini government cannot replace or repair the U.S. equipment it inherited from the Shah. Many of Iran's naval vessels have either been lost or are out of service because of a shortage of spare parts. According to Washington analysts, Iran now has only 25 working F-4 fighter-bombers out of a prewar total of 190; just 30 operable F-5 fighters...
Iran retaliated by shelling six Iraqi border settlements and launching an air attack on the town of Baquba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. That, however, turned out to be only the prelude to an offensive by elements of an Iranian force of 300,000 troops massed near the border. After eleven hours of heavy fighting, the Iranians claimed to have broken through Iraqi lines 100 miles west of Baghdad. Iraq conceded that an attack had occurred but said that the Iranians had been "crushed" by a counteroffensive and were in retreat...
Until the latest attacks, both sides had generally refrained from attacking civilians. But last year, Iranian terrorists struck in Baghdad, using nail bombs to kill scores of people at a crowded bus stop. Meanwhile, Iranian doctors have reported that Iraq has introduced chemical warfare into the conflict. While treating injured civilians in the north, they have observed symptoms of mustard-gas exposure, including skin lesions and lung hemorrhaging...
...million in cheap oil, the Ayatullah has bestowed his blessing on Assad's minority Alawites, a sect that most Sunnis consider heretical. In return, Damascus has shut down the Iraqi oil pipeline that slices across Syria to the Mediterranean, thereby slowing the flow of petrodollars to the financially strapped Baghdad government...