‘War of the Cities’ Taking a Bitter Toll in Iraqi Port

The city is still asleep when the first shells usually start to fall on Basra.

A thin gray sky hugs the Shatt al Arab waterway as an artillery piece is fired in the distance, sounding like a vacuum cleaner being switched on down a lengthy corridor.

The shell lands with a shattering blast only 40 yards from a hotel on the edge of the waterway, sending up a large plume of gray smoke. It has hit a house.

With the explosion still echoing through the town, residents emerge from their doorways in bathrobes and begin scurrying down the dusty streets toward shelters, which are marked with a green sign showing a stick-figure man running like a track star.

An air raid siren begins to wail, and the residents peek nervously down the street, as if expecting a taxicab rather than an Iranian artillery shell. But as the siren dies, people have already begun drifting back to their homes.

It is another day in the increasingly destructive “war of the cities,” the latest phase in the grisly marathon of 4 1/2 years of combat between Iraq and Iran.

Between Wednesday night and Thursday morning alone, the Iranians said, Iraqi warplanes killed 39 people and wounded more than 250, the largest one-day casualty toll so far in the escalating war against civilian areas.

Sixteen of the dead and 199 of the wounded were in Tehran itself, demonstrating that even the Iranian capital is wide open to devastating attack.

As the war has worn on, strategies have shifted. After neither side could win a decisive victory early in the war, each thought it could prevail by attacking commercial shipping bound for the other side in the Persian Gulf.

Lloyd’s shipping intelligence unit reported March 12 that 127 ships had been attacked in the gulf since 1981, including 15 hit since the beginning of this year.

Although costly to both countries in terms of higher insurance premiums and reduced oil exports, the attacks on shipping have clearly failed to bring either country to its knees morally or financially.

So, Iraq and Iran began launching attacks on purely civilian targets in hopes of spreading enough fear to force the other side to capitulate. Iraq hoped at least to force Iran to the peace table to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement.

The attacks became so destructive that U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar intervened and finally negotiated an agreement ending the use of civilian targets last June.

Agreement Collapses

The agreement collapsed March 4 when Iraqi warplanes attacked an uncompleted Iranian nuclear power plant at Bushehr and a steel mill at Ahvaz, 43 miles from the southern Iraqi frontier.

“Our bombs will continue falling on their heads,” explained an Iraqi military spokesman, “so long as they continue the aggression and unless they submit to our just will for a comprehensive peace.”

According to Western diplomats in Baghdad, the Iraqis apparently believe that Iran used the lull in attacks on civilian targets last year to prepare for the offensive that they launched two weeks ago in the southern Hawizah marshes. The assault was repulsed by the Iraqis with thousands of casualties, mostly Iranians.

In addition, the Iraqis are said to believe that the Iranians shelter their fighting forces and material in civilian areas to escape raids form Iraq’s superior air force.

Iraqi Air Superiority

The Iraqis have about 500 combat aircraft, mainly French-supplied F-1 Mirages and Soviet warplanes, while the Iranians have only 80 operational aircraft, according to reliable intelligence estimates. Even the Iranians seem to admit they have lost control of the skies.

The result now is that the Iraqis are flying hundreds of bombing sorties a day against Iranian cities, including Tehran.

With their air force all but grounded, the Iranians have had to content themselves with retaliating for the air raids with sporadic long-distance attacks--the Iranians assert they are firing missiles on Baghdad--and more frequent artillery barrages against Iraqi border towns, especially this southern seaport city.

Seaport in Name Only

Actually, Basra is now a seaport in name only since the Iranians closed the Shatt al Arab to shipping in the early days of the war. Seventy-one vessels have been trapped here for four years, riding in the gently brown current and gathering rust.

The city’s normal peacetime population is 1.5 million, although after two weeks of daily shelling, it is hard to believe that Basra is that large. The streets are virtually deserted during daylight hours, with most shops closed behind iron grills.

Millions of sandbags have been formed into miles of protective walls that run down sidewalks on the western sides of the streets, where the shells fired from Iran in the east are expected to fall.

Even the portraits of President Saddam Hussein, which are omnipresent on street corners throughout Iraq, have taken on a martial quality in Basra, showing him in combat gear and a helmet.

‘The Valiant Knight’

“In the days of the valiant knight,” says a poster in a hospital, “Saddam Hussein the leader revives the splendid glory of the Arabs.”

Two weeks ago, Basra was subjected to shelling for hours at a time, with huge explosions every 20 seconds. Now, the shelling is more sporadic.

At the largely empty Basra Sheraton, hotel desk clerks warn guests with mystifying prescience of artillery shelling expected at 6 p.m. Guests take their cocktails at a basement bar, and the prophesied shells arrive with a great whoosh on the dot.

While the level of shelling has been greatly scaled back in recent days, the threat of further shelling alone has been sufficient to keep people away from the city.

No Casualty Figures

City officials said during a recent tour by a group of foreign journalists that they have no specific figures on the number of casualties in Basra since the “war of the cities” resumed earlier in the month. But a number have been killed and several dozen injured.

A school and a women’s hospital that were hit by shells are displayed with particular indignation by the authorities here, who have also opened a museum dedicated to the “martyrs of the Persian aggressive shelling” in the center of town.

“This crime will not go unpunished,” said one Iraqi official of the Iranian shelling. “We will retaliate against the Iranian rulers’ savagery until they cease committing such crimes.”