Word: basij
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even the number of Iranian war victims reflects the country's political divisions. Iranian troops are split among the regular military, the fanatical Revolutionary Guards and the often ragtag volunteer corps known as the basij. During Iran's moderate phase in the mid-1980s, Tehran reduced the death toll by relying on trained professional soldiers for most of the fighting. Rafsanjani announced in 1985 that Iran intended "to achieve victory with as few casualties as possible." But last year champions of the zealous Guards gained a stronger voice in ruling circles. The Guards have scant concern for casualties and favor...
...smoke rises from the trees below. Young Iranian soldiers smile and wave from open trucks snaking up Kurdistan's dusty mountain roads toward the Iraqi front. "Down with Israel!" they chant. "Down with Russia! Down with America!" Some are not old enough to shave, but no matter. They are basij, the volunteers to whom the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has promised eternal bliss should they fall in battle. They beam at the soft thud as an Iranian artillery shell is fired toward Iraqi forces in the village of Mawat, just over a nearby ridge. But then they ignore the incoming Iraqi...
Many of these basij will end up at Beheshteh Zahra, the sprawling martyrs' cemetery south of Tehran, where red water symbolizing martyrs' blood flows from a fountain. Every day bulldozers work at the cemetery, carving out new rectangular plots the size of Olympic swimming pools for those slain in battle. Gravediggers say they fill one with bodies in two weeks. The dead arrive so rapidly that pieces of cardboard, usually stapled with photographs of the fallen, mark burial sites until marble slabs can be put in place. Wives and mothers in chadors, the flowing black robes, move silently through...
...remained virtually closed to Americans since 1979, a TIME reporter found that the Ayatullah's regime has managed, for the moment, to weather these challenges with surprising agility. It has settled nearly all its international debts, signed up a steady stream of volunteers to the suicide-running Basij corps and, on paper at least, silenced most of its opposition. "It's really quite amazing," says an American who does business with Iran, "that they are doing as well as they...
...that Iraq's President Saddam Hussein launched in 1980 to topple Khomeini has so far only consolidated his hold. Some 45% of Iran's 42.5 million people are under 14, and many seem fired by a passionate loyalty to the Ayatullah. Perhaps 50% of the suicide-driven Basij corps are teenagers; eight-year-old zealots who stay at home may serve the regime by informing on their parents, sometimes sending them to the firing squads. "Considering our opposition to the regime," says a U.S. analyst, "we'd like to see cracks in the foundation...