Word: iraqis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sadoun Hamadi, Iraqi minister of state forforeign affairs, earlier yesterday repeated hiscountry's insistence on direct talks before atruce during an appearance on state television inBaghdad...
...Most authorities blame Iraq for staging the first direct attack, in September 1980, though many concede that Baghdad was mightily provoked by persistent Iranian efforts to stir trouble within Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim minority. After fighting more than three years to recapture its enemy-held land, Iran invaded Iraqi territory in 1984. Eventually, it squeezed off the Shatt al Arab waterway in southern Iraq, the country's only entrance to the gulf. At one point in the conflict, Iran held large areas of territory, notably in southeastern Iraq, and tried to establish an Islamic Republic of Iraq that would...
During the past three months, however, Iran has suffered one military reversal after another. The turning point may have been its failure to seize the strategic southern port city of Basra during the winter offensive of 1986-87. Despite Iranian human-wave assaults, Iraqi defenders managed to hold on to it. Iran's confidence was further shaken by two Iraqi tactics early this year. One was extending the range of Iraq's Soviet-made Scud-B ground-to- ground missiles so they could reach Iranian cities. Between February and April, in the so-called war of the cities, Iraq launched...
More recently Iraq has been on an offensive in which its forces have reclaimed virtually all Iraqi territory still in Iranian hands, including the Fao peninsula, staging areas east of Basra, and the oil-rich Majnoun islands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Khomeini desperately searched for ways to turn the tide, handing over command of the country's armed forces in June to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and relatively pragmatic speaker of parliament...
...Israel, which has long taken great comfort from the thought that two of its avowed enemies were busy fighting each other, there was a sense of foreboding. The prospect of the battle-tested Iraqi army turning its attention to the Jewish state is unsettling to Israelis. "It seems the way the war is ending is with an Iraqi sense of victory, and this is bad for Israel," said Aharon Levran, of Tel Aviv University's Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies. Even so, few Israeli strategists believe that after eight years of bloodletting, Baghdad wants another war right away. Said Israeli...