Word: basra
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...Meanwhile, Drozdiak was on his way back to Cairo from a four-day conference of Islamic ministers in Fez, Morocco, when the fighting erupted. He dashed to Rome to connect with an all-night flight to Kuwait, and by Friday he was surveying the bomb-shattered port town of Basra, Iraq. Middle East Bureau Chief William Stewart hastened back to Beirut to coordinate TIME's coverage of the war. He had been sipping tea in the royal palace at Amman, Jordan, waiting to interview King Hussein, when news of the Iraqi attack came. Stewart's audience with...
...Communist world's oil and is a cockpit of superpower rivalry. "Whether it has been declared or not," said Iraqi Defense Minister Adnan Khairallah early on, "it is in fact war." The struggle escalated quickly and as it did, spread to key oil facilities on both sides-Basra, Kirkuk and Mosul in Iraq, Abadan and Kharg island in Iran. With thick black smoke pluming from bombed tank farms and refineries, petroleum-consuming nations around the globe anxiously calculated and then recalculated the implications. Said one U.S. official in tallying up the damage: "Once oil installations became fair game...
...took a more ominous turn: it singled out oil, the mainstay of both countries' economies. Iranian naval vessels shelled oil terminals at Fao island, and the Phantoms returned to bomb and rocket Basra's vast new petrochemical complex. Twenty-nine people were killed in that raid, some of them Britons, Americans and other foreign workers among a labor force of thousands. The foreigners and their families fled in cars and buses to the Kuwait border 15 miles away. "It all happened so fast," said Briton Roger Elliott. "I was just sitting there getting my truck started when...
...principal commercial airport. The Iraqi objective was straight from the military textbooks: to knock out the Iranian air force before it could ever get off the ground. The effort failed. Scarcely two hours after the attack, U.S.-made Iranian Phantoms were streaking toward two Iraqi bases in the Basra area. Then, beginning at dawn on Tuesday, the Iranian air force launched strikes against at least 16 different targets in Iraq. A principal one was Baghdad, the capital, as well as the military garrisons in the sprawling city of 2.8 million people along the banks of the Tigris River. Iranian planes...
...Iranian-Iraqi border. Then, to the momentary alarm of capitals around the Middle East, an air battle erupted in the border area between Iraqi helicopter gunships and several Iranian Phantom jets and helicopters. There were also reports of increased military activity at Iraq's two main naval bases: Basra, on the Shatt al Arab, and Umm Qasr, at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf. Since more than 50% of the West's oil supplies originate in the gulf area, this confrontation was a new worry for the U.S. and its allies...