Air Strikes, Missiles Hit Iran, Iraq : Baghdad Struck; Troops Battle to Dislodge Invaders

Iran and Iraq attacked one another’s cities with missile and air strikes Sunday as Iraqi troops sought to drive back Iranian reinforcements sent to bolster a three-day-old offensive near the port city of Basra in southeastern Iraq.

An Iranian surface-to-surface missile landed on the outskirts of Baghdad shortly before 6 a.m., “martyring a number of people and wounding others,” an Iraqi military spokesman said. It was the first time in more than six weeks that the Iranians have fired one of their long-range missiles at the Iraqi capital.

Several hours later, Iraqi jet fighters bombed the Iranian shrine city of Qom for the second time in two days in what a military spokesman said was retaliation for the missile attack. Iraqi jets also attacked the cities of Esfahan and Dezful for the second day, scoring “devastating hits,” the spokesman said.

Basra Hardest Hit

But it was Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, about 300 miles southeast of Baghdad, that again came under the heaviest attacks as Iranian missiles and long-range artillery battered the city for the third straight day, killing 22 civilians and injuring 70, Iraqi officials said.

“Basra is burning,” one resident of the city said in a telephone conversation with a reporter in Baghdad. “From our rooftop, we can see columns of thick smoke billowing up everywhere.”

Groups of foreign construction workers in Basra were reported to be fleeing the city, and one diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that his embassy was considering organizing a formal evacuation to Baghdad of his country’s nationals.

58 Killed, 282 Wounded

The continued shelling of Basra raised the casualty toll in the beleaguered city to 58 people killed and 282 wounded over the last three days. A military communique said an Iranian jet fighter attacked the town of Diyala in central Iraq, hitting a primary school and injuring 48 people, including 34 children.

(Tehran radio, monitored in Nicosia, Cyprus, claimed that the Iranian missile fired at Baghdad struck Iraq’s air force command headquarters, a claim denied by an Iraqi spokesman, who said the missile exploded in a residential area.)

Military spokesmen, meanwhile, said that heavy fighting was continuing east of Basra around an area known as Fish Lake, where the Iranians established a foothold at the start of the latest offensive.

The spokesmen conceded Tehran’s claims to have sent in reinforcements but said that the fresh Iranian attack was contained on the eastern bank of the long and narrow artificial lake.

The Iraqis earlier had said that they cleared the Iranians out of positions on the lower tip of the lake’s west bank, about four miles inside Iraqi territory and only six miles due east of Basra, on Saturday.

While it is impossible to verify these claims from Baghdad, the Iraqi reports suggested that the main Iranian invasion force was now bottled up in an oblong, island-like area, bordered on the west by Fish Lake and on its three other sides by a marshy region that the Iraqis have flooded to create a water barrier extending back to the Iranian frontier.

Western diplomats in Baghdad agreed that the Iraqis, evidently surprised by the initial assault, now appear to have gained the upper hand in the fighting.

“As far as I can see, they have the Iranians boxed off, and I doubt the Iranians have much chance of a breakthrough now,” one senior Western diplomat said.

Still, the Iranians seemed determined to hold on this time and to open a bridgehead for a push towards Basra, and one Western military analyst said he thought that casualties on both sides in the current fighting will prove to be far higher than they were in a similar battle a few miles southeast of Fish Lake last month. Western diplomats here now estimate that about 10,000 Iranians and 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqis were killed in that earlier fighting.

Claims 11 Divisions Wiped Out

Since the battle at Fish Lake began, the Iraqis claim to have wiped out 11 divisions of Iranian Revolutionary Guards and four other brigades and to have destroyed or captured 250 tanks and “hundreds” of other vehicles.

“Iranian losses surpass the imagination,” asserted Maj. Gen. Abdul Jabbar, director general of the Iraqi Defense Ministry’s political department.

(Iran’s official IRNA news agency, monitored in Cyprus, said that 1,000 Iraqis were killed Sunday in combat with Iranian troops just inside southern Iraq, about 17 miles southeast of Basra. Tehran radio claimed that Iranian forces have killed or wounded 15,000 Iraqi soldiers and captured 1,000 since the offensive began late Thursday.)

While the Iraqis have not detailed their own casualties, war communiques suggested losses heavier than those admitted to in last month’s fighting.

One communique conceded that two Iraqi warplanes were shot down over the battlefront Sunday, raising the number of planes Iraq has admitted to losing over the past three days to four.