Word: iraqis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Winter is the killing season in the swamps around the Persian Gulf. It is then that Iran, knowing the heavy rains will blunt the firepower of Iraq's tanks and air force, can most effectively launch its "human wave" assaults against the Iraqi marshlands. For months now, as it has for several winters past, the government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has been threatening to launch a "final offensive" against the Iraqis before the beginning of the Persian new year on March...
That offensive seemed at hand two weeks ago, when an estimated 35,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards swarmed across the line dividing Iranian and Iraqi troops, some 20 miles to the east of Basra, Iraq's second largest city. Shouting "Allah akbar!" (God is great), they stormed over the barbed wire that crowned the embankments along a flooded artificial barrier called Fish Lake, inflicting heavy casualties on the dug-in Iraqi troops...
...Tehran, Iranian television showed pictures of slaughtered Iraqi soldiers lying face down in the muddy trenches. In Baghdad, Iraqi TV offered the same macabre programming, except that the corpses piled along barbed-wire fences were those of young Iranian soldiers. Once again the battlefront was, in the words of an Iraqi journalist, a "horrible massacre zone...
...past year the strategic positions of the two sides have remained relatively static. In last week's battle, however, the Iranians managed not only to hold their newly won pocket of territory but even to launch a second assault in the central sector to the east of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. On Christmas Day the Iraqis turned back an Iranian assault in the southern region, killing an estimated 15,000 Iranians but losing perhaps 5,000 of their own soldiers in the process. This time the Iraqis seemed to be having trouble holding back the invading forces...
That meeting could conceivably provide Saddam with another opportunity to seek a negotiated settlement for a war that the Iraqi President started in 1980 and has long since come to regret. But given Khomeini's capacity for wreaking vengeance upon his bitterest enemy, it may be that peacemaking is something he will reserve for the Ayatullah's eventual successor...