Iran Claims Important Territorial Gains in War With Iraq

Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani of the Iran’s Parliament said Friday that Iranian forces have captured 140 square miles of Iraqi territory in five lightning attacks since mid-June and inflicted 3,000 Iraqi casualties.

State-run Tehran radio, heard here, quoted Rafsanjani as telling worshippers at Friday prayers in the Iranian capital that the five operations were Iran’s reply to Iraqi raids on its cities earlier this year.

There was no immediate Iraqi comment on these latest reports of fighting in the 5-year-old Persian Gulf war and no way of independently confirming them.

However, Baghdad has dismissed all recent Iranian reports of victory, saying that fighting continues on all fronts and that nearly 5,000 Iranian soldiers were killed in the last two weeks of July alone.

“Our young militants are willing to go on with the war and are capable of penetrating any area throughout the battlefronts,” Rafsanjani said, adding that he hopes for “an early end to the tyranny” of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Speaking to the state-run media, Rafsanjani said that the “Iranian combatants sustained almost no casualties” in capturing 140 square miles of Iraqi territory of “very high strategic importance.”

Rafsanjani said that about 3,000 Iraqis were killed or wounded and another 233 captured in the five thrusts. He praised Iran’s switch in June from massive offensives to smaller lighting incursions across the border.

Besides leading Parliament as speaker, Rafsanjani is the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s representative on the Supreme Defense Council.