Word: kharg
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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...
...From today, the siege of Kharg Island will begin...
...pressure on the cost of insurance for tankers. Then Iran declared that no attack had taken place, and U.S. reconnaissance photographs appeared to back up the denial. In a startling communiqué at week's end, the Iraqi military command admitted that it had not struck Kharg Island after all. But, it said, it had hit tankers and other ships in the area. Most diplomats concluded that Saddam Hussein had announced the phantom attack in a desperate warning to the West that Iran must not be allowed to defeat Iraq...
...population of Iran, lacks the might to achieve a victory. His repeated offers to negotiate a settlement have been rejected by Khomeini. Most Western analysts take Saddam Hussein's latest threat seriously: if Iran achieves a breakthrough on the ground, they believe, Iraq may feel compelled to attack Kharg. Saddam Hussein probably could not destroy the facility, since it is well protected, but he could bomb the tankers at the loading docks and disrupt Iran's oil exports. In October Iraq received from France five sophisticated Super Etendard fighter-bombers, which can be equipped with lethal Exocet missiles...
...danger was that if Iraq suffered a major battlefield defeat it might decide to use the Super Etendard fighter-bombers it bought from France last fall to attack Kharg Island, Iran's principal oil terminal. Iran has repeatedly said it would retaliate by blockading the strait, thereby halting shipment of most of the oil produced by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. Last week Iranian officials warned again that if the U.S. and its supporters try to intervene in the war "their fate would be decisively worse than their fate in Lebanon...