Iran-Iraq War

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Iraq's September 1980 invasion of Iran, driven by Saddam Hussein's territorial claim over the Shatt al-Arab waterway and his calculation that Iran's post-revolutionary government was militarily weak, opened eight years of trench warfare between the two countries. The Republic of Iraq under Hussein and the Ba'ath Party was backed for much of the war by the Gulf Arab states, the Soviet Union and, increasingly after 1982, the United States and Western Europe. Iran, under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's post-revolutionary government, carried its war effort disproportionately through Revolutionary Guard volunteer forces recruited in large numbers from a population still animated by the recent revolution.

The conflict included chemical weapons use against Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish civilians, and missile exchanges between the two countries' cities known as the War of the Cities. It ended in a stalemate substantially along the prewar border under a United Nations Security Council Resolution 598 ceasefire that took effect in August 1988, with neither side gaining significant territory despite roughly eight years of fighting and enormous casualties on both sides.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Historians divide over how far the Iran-Iraq War was a sectarian, Sunni versus Shia, conflict. The broader scholarly consensus, argued by the historian Efraim Karsh among others, holds that the war was fundamentally a territorial and interstate power dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway and regional dominance rather than a sectarian one, pointing to Iraq's own Shia majority population's continued loyalty to the Iraqi state through the eight years of war as evidence against a straightforward sectarian reading of the conflict.

A sectarian-framing camp, argued by the scholar Vali Nasr among others, holds that Khomeini's revolutionary government explicitly framed the war and its project of exporting the Islamic revolution in sectarian and pan-Islamist Shia terms, appealing directly to Iraq's Shia majority to rise against the Ba'athist government, while Hussein's government in turn invoked long-standing Sunni Arab anxieties about Persian and Shia influence to rally domestic and regional Arab support. Both readings are recorded here; the territorial-nationalist account is the broader scholarly consensus.