Saddam Hussein’s armored divisions crossed the Shatt al-Arab waterway at dawn. The Iraqi president cited a disputed 1975 border treaty as his casus belli, but his true aims were territorial and hegemonic. He sought to seize Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province and topple the nascent Islamic Republic, which had been openly inciting Iraq’s Shia majority. Hussein assumed Iran’s military, purged after the 1979 revolution, would collapse. It did not.
The invasion miscalculated Iranian resolve. Initial Iraqi gains stalled within weeks. By 1982, Iranian forces had pushed the invaders back and the conflict settled into a grueling war of attrition. It featured trench warfare, ballistic missile attacks on cities, and the large-scale use of chemical weapons by Iraq. The conflict drew in foreign powers, with the United States, Soviet Union, France, and Arab Gulf states providing varying levels of support to both sides, often cynically.
The war’s conclusion in 1988 left borders essentially unchanged. It exhausted both nations economically and socially, with estimates of combined casualties ranging from 500,000 to 1.5 million. The conflict entrenched theocratic rule in Iran and left Hussein with a massive debt, contributing to his decision to invade Kuwait two years later. It forged a generation of commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and established patterns of proxy warfare and regional rivalry that define the Middle East today.