Word: shatt
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Iran's setback in the gulf was serious enough, but the loss of the Fao was devastating. The peninsula, gateway to the Shatt al-Arab waterway and the southeastern port city of Basra, had been captured by Iranian forces in 1986. In a surprise offensive code-named Blessed Ramadan, after the Islamic holy month that began last week, President Saddam Hussein ordered the Iraqi Seventh Army, supported by elite Presidential Guards, to attack the peninsula's Iranian defenders. Early last week, following a successful 36-hour armored blitzkrieg, the Iraqi victory was complete...
...thriving port of Basra, Iraq's second largest city, has become the longest and most crucial campaign in the 6 1/2- year Iran-Iraq war. More than 20,000 Iranian troops and 10,000 Iraqis have died since Jan. 9, when Iranian Revolutionary Guards attacked Iraqi defenses along the Shatt al Arab, a broad waterway that forms the southern frontier of the warring nations, and advanced on Basra some ten miles away. The stakes in the fighting, which has settled into a ferocious standoff a few miles outside the city, could not be higher: an Iranian victory would demoralize...
...Iranians are clearly trying to break the city's will. Nearly every building along the section of the Shatt al Arab that flows past Basra has been damaged or destroyed. The beige facade of the deserted four-story Sheraton Basra is pockmarked with shrapnel and shell holes. During the intense bombardment in January and February, thousands of panicked residents abandoned their middle-class brick homes near the water...
Beneath the onslaught, the city's piers lie idle. A major shipping center in calmer days, the port of Basra is now filled with stranded and rusting vessels. In the middle of the Shatt al Arab, formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, two cargo ships lie half submerged, the apparent victims of random shells...
...least 200,000 soldiers. Since beginning its offensive in December, the Iranian army has made small gains south of Fish Lake, a 120- sq.-mi. area flooded by the Iraqis as a defensive barrier. Iran has also made incremental progress southeast of Basra in the marshy terrain along the Shatt al Arab, a strategic waterway that affords access to the Persian Gulf. The new toehold has enabled the Iranians to bombard Basra from closer range...