Word: basra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...desperate battle for the once thriving port of Basra, Iraq's second largest city, has become the longest and most crucial campaign in the 6 1/2- year Iran-Iraq war. More than 20,000 Iranian troops and 10,000 Iraqis have died since Jan. 9, when Iranian Revolutionary Guards attacked Iraqi defenses along the Shatt al Arab, a broad waterway that forms the southern frontier of the warring nations, and advanced on Basra some ten miles away. The stakes in the fighting, which has settled into a ferocious standoff a few miles outside the city, could not be higher...
...their homes by day. If the attacks are aimed at swelling the tide of refugees who have already poured from the city, which has dwindled from more than 1 million residents in 1980 to about 175,000 today, they are amply fulfilling Iran's expectations. Says a Western diplomat: "Basra is basically inoperable...
...Iranians are clearly trying to break the city's will. Nearly every building along the section of the Shatt al Arab that flows past Basra has been damaged or destroyed. The beige facade of the deserted four-story Sheraton Basra is pockmarked with shrapnel and shell holes. During the intense bombardment in January and February, thousands of panicked residents abandoned their middle-class brick homes near the water...
...asserted American officials, not altogether convincingly, the primary + reason for the unusually large concentration of naval power off Lebanon was the unpredictable course of the Iran-Iraq war, some 700 miles to the east. In that war, Iran is waging a continuing campaign against the southern Iraqi city of Basra and thereby posing an implicit threat to Iraq's gulf allies, most notably Kuwait. "We talk about our strategic interests in the context of the Iran-Iraq war," a senior Administration official insisted...
Marines guarding the presidential palace fire on protesting farmers, and talks with Communist rebels collapse. -- In Beirut more Americans are taken hostage in a dramatic mass kidnaping following the arrest of a suspected terrorist in West Germany. -- Thousands flee north as Iranian shellfire turns the Iraqi port city of Basra into a pockmarked wasteland...