Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...body lying in a marsh outside the Iraqi village of Al Beida was badly decomposed, but the swollen face appeared to be that of a youth. The Iranian soldier had apparently died of a head wound suffered in the battle to keep Al Beida, now little more than a ghost town of rubble, from slipping back into Iraqi hands. He would have remained an unknown casualty of an equally unknown skirmish in the Persian Gulf war, if the Iraqi information officer who was leading foreign journalists on a tour of the front had not stopped to pick...
...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...
None of these outcomes are expected if Iraq "wins." A victory for the Iraqi regime at this point would merely mean an armistice at the old boundaries. Iraq is far smaller than Iran, does not enjoy Iran's strategic position near the Straits, and does not consider the West to be a collectivity of "Great Satans...
Until Washington weighed in, the Iraqis had been stoutly maintaining that they had not used poison gas and that the charges had been concocted by the Iranians to excuse their battlefield defeats. The Iraqis continued to deny the charge, though they did not rule out the possible use of chemical warfare in the future. Said Major General Sabah al Fakhri, commander of Iraqi forces east of the Tigris River: "If a superpower threatened the U.S., what would it do? We too have our dignity and honor. We are not going to meet the invader with flowers and perfume...
When they learned of the U.S. charges, the Iraqis were annoyed. "What did the Americans have to say about the slaughter of Iraqi prisoners by the Iranians?" demanded Defense Minister Adnan Khairallah. He pointed out that the U.S. had been "the only state to use nuclear weapons" and had done so on the "pretext of limiting the period of war." He accused the U.S. of trying to curry favor with Iran and blamed the whole controversy on "some Zionist adviser" in Washington who was trying to incite "anti-Iraqi or anti-Arab sentiments." Saddam Hussein also accused...