Word: shatt
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Former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, acting as the U.N.'s peacemaker, returned from successive visits to the two warring capitals with an agreement in principle for freeing 63 merchant ships trapped in the Shatt al Arab waterway. Said he: "The first ray of hope." In Washington, a high State Department official was less sanguine: "It's a bloody low-level conflict, a bit like the trench warfare of World War I. It could...
...bustling port with a population of 150,000. Weeks of fierce house-to-house fighting between Iran's fanatical Revolutionary Guards and Iraqi infantrymen have turned it into a ghost town, as its inhabitants have fled inland to the safety of mountain camps or bolted across the contested Shatt al Arab waterway to seek refuge in Basra. On a tour of Khorramshahr last week, TIME Correspondent William Drozdiak found very few signs of life; emaciated dogs foraged for scraps in the rubble, swarthy Iraqi soldiers lounged in the shade as they listened to the echo of sporadic shelling...
Along the bumpy roads leading from the Iraqi border to Khorramshahr, trees and broken telephone poles are strewn alongside the wreckage of burnt vehicles. At Khorramshahr's gutted railroad station, Iraqi soldiers use wall portraits of Ayatullah Khomeini for target practice. At the huge port sprawling along the Shatt al Arab, stacks of mammoth loading containers, stripped of their spoils by Iraqi invaders, are tangled with rusted steel pipes and charred, broken cranes. In makeshift barracks built under pylons, a few off-duty soldiers nap or thumb through magazines to pass the idle time...
...preparation for the long rainy season that begins this month, the Iraqis continued construction of an all-weather military road linking Khuzistan's provincial capital of Ahwaz with the outskirts of Basra on the Shatt al Arab estuary. The Iraqis were also proceeding toward one of their key tactical goals: cutting off most of the supply of oil from Khuzistan to Iran's heartland by severing pipelines and inflicting heavy damage on the huge refinery at Abadan, which will take years to rebuild. As part of this strategy, the Iraqis have repeatedly shelled Dezful, nexus for most...
...preventive self-defense." The territory now occupied by Iraq constituted "the necessary positions for defense," Hammadi said, adding ominously that "there may be better positions forward." He insisted that there could be no withdrawal until Iran recognized all of Iraq's territorial claims, including sovereignty over the Shatt al Arab estuary. The only possible solution to the conflict, said the Iraqi diplomat, would be a U.N.-sponsored cease-fire immediately followed by negotiations to adjust the boundaries "in a final manner...