Word: shatt
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...hand-war amid the oilfields and across the vital oil routes of the Persian Gulf. Day after day last week, Iraqi pilots flying Soviet-built MiGs headed eastward for bombing raids on military targets and oil facilities across the Iranian border, including the Tigris-Euphrates estuary known as Shatt al Arab. Caught by surprise at first, the Iranians responded with attacks of their own, sending American-made Phantom F-4 fighter-bombers against Iraqi cities and installations. A fearful battle was under way. Iraqi armor and infantry punched across 500 miles of desert front at many points, surrounding...
...ideological differences, Iraq and Iran had come to a temporary accommodation in 1975 when Saddam, then Vice President, and the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi announced a frontier agreement during an OPEC summit in Algiers. The centerpiece of the accord was a change in the status of the Shatt al Arab, long a source of friction between the two nations. Under the Algiers agreement, the border was moved from the Iranian side of the disputed waterway to the middle of the estuary; in return, the Shah agreed to stop his support for Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq who had been...
...agreement held as long as the Shah lived. Though Baghdad never forgot its Shatt al Arab concession, though it resented the Shah's self-appointed role as the policeman of the gulf and worried about Iran's steadily growing military strength, it reaped instant benefit from the accord. Without the Shah's support, the Kurdish rebellion fizzled, allowing Iraq to concentrate its oil resources on fast-paced economic development and to emerge as a military power. But the squabble was renewed with the Shah's demise, the Iranian revolution and the advent of the Khomeini...
...Iranians and Iraqis living along the Iran-Iraq frontier, the war hardly came as a surprise. For months they had lived with increasingly sharp border battles, including artillery bombardments and occasional air raids as Iraq stepped up its drive to regain control of the Shatt and of the Musian region. The difference last week was the range and intensity of the fighting and the commitment of forces on both sides...
Iraq last week attempted to reassert its sovereignty over the 60-mile-long Shatt al-Arab river separating the two countries renouncing the 1975 agreement in which it had partially relinquished control to Iran...