Word: basra
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Halfway around the globe, the largest armies since World War II have inflicted enormous upon each other. The Iranians have amussed estimated 400,000 troops in a front covering Basra. Iraq's second largest city, and the disputed Shatt al Arab waterway. Already, three times as many Iranian soldiers have died in the 43 month conflict that did Americans in the much longer Vietnam...
Iraqi aircraft attacked Iranian forces, which clung tenaciously to Majnoon oilfield. At week's end military officials in Baghdad claimed that Iraqi forces had also destroyed four oil tankers and commercial ships near Kharg Island, the major terminal for Iran's oil exports. Along the border near Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, troops loyal to the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini massed for yet another offensive. Iraq appeared to have lost a bit of its much vaunted technological edge with the news that one of the five Super Etendard fighter-bombers it had bought from France had been...
...have our dignity and honor. We are not going to meet the invader with flowers and perfume. We are going to use all available means at our disposal to defend the nation." Major General Maher Abed al Rashid, whose Iraqi Third Corps is fighting in the area around Basra, insisted that there were no such weapons within his command. He pointed out that poison gas would be extremely difficult to use in a close-combat situation. But he added, "If you gave me some insecticide that I could squirt at this swarm of mosquitoes, I would use it so that...
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...
...Iranian offensive, the fourth launched by Tehran since last July, was apparently aimed at the Iraqi city of Al Amarah. Seizure of the town would enable Iran to intercept supply and troop movements between Baghdad, the capital, and the southern port city of Basra. By midweek, Tehran Radio was claiming that advancing forces had "liberated" 120 sq. mi. of Iranian territory from Iraqi forces since the attack began. An Iraqi military spokesman was contending that the attackers did not gain "one inch of Iraqi territory...