Capitals Attacked Again, Iran Says : Reports Firing Missiles at Baghdad After Raid on Tehran

Iran said that its missiles hit the Iraqi capital of Baghdad this morning in retaliation for Iraqi air strikes on Tehran and on two oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.

Iran’s national news agency reported that Iraqi planes roared over the Iranian capital and fired three rockets at a desolate area of the city, escaping under heavy anti-aircraft fire. It also confirmed reports that Iraqi jets struck two tankers in the Persian Gulf south of the main Iranian oil terminal on Kharg Island.

Earlier in the day, Iran had declared that it was ceasing air and missile attacks against Iraqi towns because Iraq had halted raids on Iranian civilian areas and merchant shipping.

In a War Ministry communique announcing the missile attack on Baghdad, Iran said it will retaliate firmly for every Iraqi raid but renewed its offer to stop civilian attacks if Iraq does.

“We have targeted our fiery missiles at the heart of Baghdad before dawn in order to warn the adventurous Iraqi regime once again, and to force it to stop attacks and the destruction of residential areas, ships and commercial flights,” the communique said.

Meanwhile, in an interview given to the Boston Sunday Globe before the latest developments, Secretary of State George P. Shultz said a speech by Khomeini may have hinted that the supreme Iranian leader is ready to end the war.

There was no immediate confirmation of Iran’s claim to have unleashed surface-to-surface missiles on Iraq’s capital for the fifth time since the two countries began bombarding each other’s cities. Iraq has said that past explosions in Baghdad were from car bombs, not missiles, and foreign reporters are rarely allowed into the war zones.

Bahrain-based marine salvage executives confirmed that Iraqi warplanes attacked the 50,904-ton, Maltese-registered tanker Eastern Star on Sunday near Iran’s port of Bushehr. And the Italian shipping company Flotta Lauro reported in Naples that its 250,000-ton tanker Volere was hit 37 miles off Kharg Island, sustaining extensive damage.

The marine salvage executives said that the two tankers caught fire but that salvage tugboats from Bahrain extinguished the flames, and there were no casualties.

The so-called tanker war against commercial shipping began in January, 1984, when Iraq declared an “exclusion zone” around Kharg Island with the avowed intention of cutting off Iran’s income from oil exports and thus forcing the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalist regime to the peace table.

The war, which began in September, 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran in a bid to gain total control of the strategic Shatt al Arab waterway, escalated this month with both countries attacking civilian targets--including each other’s capitals. As a result of Iraqi air and missile attacks on Tehran, hundreds of foreigners were evacuated from the Iranian capital last week.

In the speech cited by Secretary of State Shultz, Khomeini told civil and military officials in Tehran on Thursday that the most important thing for Muslim believers is not victory or defeat but whether they do God’s will.

Shultz said the speech has “the possibility of saying that the Iranians can say they have done their duty because they’ve made a major effort.”

Victory ‘Loses Meaning’

However, “I don’t want to be put down as concluding that’s so,” Shultz said in the interview, conducted Friday. “I just don’t know.”

In his speech, Khomeini said: “Victory or defeat loses any meaning, because serving God and obeying his orders is all victory . . . . Even if we are defeated or not defeated . . . it makes no difference.

“God has said that we should go and cut off the hand of the oppressor,” Khomeini said, referring to the Iraqis. “We go--and, as much as we are able and have the power, we cut off the hands of the oppressors.

“If we cannot do this, we have done our duty anyway.”

The Observer newspaper in London reported Sunday that leaflets found on the bodies of Iranians killed in a recent unsuccessful border offensive indicate that senior clerics in Iran are criticizing the conduct of the 4 1/2-year-old war.

The newspaper said one tract was a reprinted series of lectures by the Ayatollah Ozma Golpayegani, a senior religious figure who lives in the shrine city of Qom, that attacked the government’s declaration of a holy war against Iraq. The newspaper said the text implied that Tehran should halt the war once Iraqi troops are no longer on Iranian soil.

Two other ayatollahs “have been more explicit” in their dissent, the Observer reported.

“Ayatollah Mourtaza Haeri, godfather of Khomeini’s elder son, distributed a text through his supporters hinting that the Iranian regime’s pursuit of the war might be ‘aggressive’ and ‘anti-Islamic,’ an extraordinary claim,” the paper said. And the Ayatollah Hassan Ghomi “declared that the death of (both) Iraqi and Iranian soldiers was ‘a crime against Islam.’ ”

In Vienna, meanwhile, one of eight Iranian soldiers who were hospitalized on Thursday with signs of chemical poisoning died Sunday. Dr. Gernot Pauser said Saturday that doctors are positive that the eight men flown to Vienna from the Iran-Iraq war front were exposed to mustard gas.