Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...endless border war between Iran and Iraq. Yet throughout the 41-month-long struggle that has claimed more than 130,000 lives, vital Western interests have been in jeopardy. That point was driven home again last week as the war entered a new cycle of bloodletting. While thousands of Iraqi and Iranian troops clashed in major battles, the widening conflict reawakened the U.S. and other oil-consuming nations to the threat of a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway through which 20% of the oil supplies of the non-Communist world passes...
...Egyptians have also strengthened their position in the Persian Gulf. They are selling $800 million a year in war materiel to Iraq, and there are said to be at least 25,000 Egyptian volunteers fighting on the Iraqi side against Iran. The Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has condemned such acts by moderate Arabs, but, even with his bursts of Iranian-inspired Shi'ite terrorism, he has not stopped them. In Kuwait last week, the government announced that 25 people, including 17 Iraqis, would go on trial beginning Feb. 11 on charges of carrying out bombings against the American and French...
According to Kuwaiti newspapers, the terrorist who drove into the U.S. compound was an Iraqi member of the banned Al Dawa party, a fundamentalist Muslim group with ties to Iran. For years, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has branded the U.S. as "the Great Satan." He is also angry with France for selling military equipment to Iraq and with Kuwait for supporting and underwriting Iraq in its three-year-old war against Iran. The Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein immediately ordered missiles fired at five Iranian cities in retaliation...
Syria's ties with renegade non-Arab Iran, on the other hand, have been highly profitable for Damascus. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out in 1980, Assad, who has long been bitterly opposed to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, rushed to support the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Aside from giving Damascus an estimated $600 million in cheap oil, the Ayatullah has bestowed his blessing on Assad's minority Alawites, a sect that most Sunnis consider heretical. In return, Damascus has shut down the Iraqi oil pipeline that slices across Syria to the Mediterranean, thereby slowing the flow of petrodollars...
...Iraqi threats were clearly an attempt to keep the war high on the international diplomatic agenda in hopes that public pressure might bring the Iranians to the peace table. The Netherlands last week was lobbying for a cease-fire resolution, believed to have been drafted by France, to be put before the United Nations Security Council. To help placate Iran, the resolution also condemns Iraqi bombing of civilian targets in Iran. Yet the Iranians, who are angry at France for selling Iraq five Super Etendard fighter-bombers as well as Exocet air-to-surface missiles, were not impressed. Tehran still...