Craters, Barbed Wire and Parapets : Ferocity of Iran-Iraq War Recalls Trenches of WW I

Amid the craters, the barbed wire and the endless parapets, a flock of starlings darted over the battlefield, surveying the wreckage of war that stretched to the horizon and beyond.

The piece of windswept, uninhabited earth seven miles east of the Iraqi port city of Basra fell to Iranian forces earlier this month at a horrific cost in human lives that has become the trademark of the 6 1/2-year-old Persian Gulf War.

The Iranians’ gains, constituting roughly three square miles, brought their lines well west of the Jasim River and a few thousand yards closer to Basra, whose buildings are visible beyond the flat, barren moonscape and the Shatt al Arab waterway.

The gains also gave them the eastern tip of the Fish Canal, a half-mile-wide, 15-mile-long water barrier constructed by the Iraqis as part of the Basra defenses.

Iran’s advances, after larger gains in the same area last January, were assessed by analysts as “marginally significant” in a conflict locked in an apparent stalemate.

In many ways, the scale and intensity of the Iran-Iraq War is comparable with the trench warfare of World War I in France and Belgium.

The smell of death and scale of destruction along the southern front is difficult to exaggerate.

The battlefields east of the Shatt al Arab have been churned into wasteland with debris, rotting bodies and twisted metal strewn across the landscape.

Khorramshahr, once a thriving Iranian city of 150,000, has long since been abandoned, reduced to rubble. Foreign reporters who entered the city last week were unable to find a building left undamaged.

“It’s become a war of attrition,” a senior diplomat in Tehran summed up. “I think it could go on for ages.”

Last weekend, Iran’s hold on the newly won territory was certainly less than complete--as a group of foreign reporters, who had been taken to the area, discovered when they were spotted by Iraqi forward observers and sent scrambling by a brief but uncomfortably accurate artillery barrage.

An Iranian commander involved in the weeklong battle claimed that Iraqi dead and wounded numbered 13,000, most likely an exaggeration. Western analysts estimated Iranian casualties in the thousands.

Those who were killed join the estimated one-half million believed to have died so far in the war.

Some Western and Asian military experts believe that the current fighting east of Basra is a preview to a major offensive Iran is preparing to launch within the next month, before the onset of the dry season.

Dry Weather Favors Iraq

Dry, clear weather favors Iraq, which enjoys a 5-to-1 superiority in armor and an 8-to-1 superiority in warplanes.

Any major new Iranian offensive might also gain from the momentum of previous limited Iranian successes, military experts believe.

“There are preparations--stockpiling of arms, ammunition, fuel, food and movement of artillery,” one diplomat noted. “I think a major attack is coming.”

Iranian authorities severely restricted the movements of foreign reporters who recently visited the southern front, and it was not possible to confirm plans for a new offensive. However, some troops in Khorramshahr--now nearly leveled by the years of fighting--said they had been placed on what one called a “full alert for a new operation.”

Empty crates of American-made grenades and artillery shells were clearly visible near the front, although a visitor could not assess the impact on the war of controversial U.S. arms shipments to Iran.

Analysts believe that a new Iranian offensive might come farther north along the central front, east of Baghdad, but they consider it more likely here in the crucial south, where the bulk of the two armies is deployed.

Diplomats in Tehran expressed the belief that Iranian authorities might mount a major offensive in response to a sense of war-related restlessness among the citizenry.

These diplomats admit that those opposed to the war remain a small minority in Iran and that there is little hard evidence of disenchantment, but several said they believe that support for the war has peaked.

One longtime resident of Tehran indicated that revelations of U.S.-Iranian arms deals had dampened some of the Iranians’ idealistic zeal, and several diplomats also said they sense some public disquiet over the high losses associated with Iran’s tactics of large-scale infantry assaults.

Nevertheless, morale among volunteers headed for the front remains unquestionably high.

Volunteers interviewed in Tehran ranged between 15 and 50 years of age, while many of those nearer the front appeared to be in their young teens.

Despite recent advances, not even the Iranians themselves speak of any short-term victory.

Indeed, last week the spiritual leader of Iran’s holy crusade against Iraq, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, scotched speculation of a rumored cease-fire formula that reportedly called for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to relinquish absolute power, as demanded by Iran, and share power with others.

Khomeini escalated the price for peace to include not just Hussein’s resignation, but also the demise of the entire Arab Baath Socialist Party, which has ruled Iraq since 1968.

The oft-repeated predictions by Iranian leaders of an imminent “final offensive” have faded, as have confident deadlines of “final victory.”

Since the last such deadline passed quietly March 21, the beginning of the Muslim new year, the Iranian leadership has given no new dates. Instead, Khomeini has vowed to fight 20 more years to achieve victory.

A world oil surplus and the lack of political influence on Iran have discouraged nations outside the region from exerting pressure to end the potentially destabilizing conflict in a part of the world that holds more than half the total global petroleum reserves.

However, political observers believe that an Iranian victory could lead to an unchallenged Iran-led Islamic fundamentalist crusade directed at the moderate and oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, and that the resulting impact could threaten both U.S. and Soviet interests in the region.

Iran boasts superior manpower and highly motivated troops who view their task as the defense of Iran’s fundamentalist crusade, as defined by the Shia Muslim mullahs who lead the country.

But with oil revenues less than half that of two years ago, Iran’s ability to sustain a major long-term offensive remains a question mark.

There are also doubts about the quality of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard units, which support the regular army in the war. The guards are a curious mixture of well-trained combat veterans and courageous but inexperienced volunteers, many of whom sign on for as little as 45 days’ active service.

For example, orderlies at a Revolutionary Guards’ brigade headquarters near the front, preparing for their commander’s briefing last weekend, hung a map of the unit’s sector sideways, with the western, rather than the northern, edge of the map at the top.

The commander first tried to re-hang the map, then gave up and proceeded with the briefing.

A few minutes earlier, when the second of four Toyota pickup trucks transporting reporters around the front stopped momentarily, the vehicle behind it smashed into its rear end.

For Iraq, the critical question is how to sustain its army while absorbing enormous losses. Its smaller population means that it must inflict three times as many casualties as it sustains to keep both sides in balance.

While Iranian losses have consistently outstripped Iraqi casualties, Iraq has rarely achieved a 3-to-1 ratio.

The war began in September, 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran in a dispute over the Shatt al Arab waterway, which constitutes the southern stretch of their common border.

Toehold on Peninsula

Since Iran seized the initiative in the war 14 months ago with its toehold on the Faw Peninsula, the Iranian officers conducting the war maintain that the major objective on the southern front is not the capture of Basra, but the destruction of Iraqi forces defending it.

In a meeting with foreign journalists, a young Revolutionary Guards commander whose 1,000-man unit participated in the recent Iranian offensive stressed this point.

“Our intention is not to destroy Basra but to destroy their army,” said the 24-year-old brigade commander, who called himself simply Abdullah.

He maintained that here, sandwiched between Basra and advancing Iranian forces, the Iraqi army will be crushed.

He indicated that Iranian forces have already begun draining Fish Lake, east of Basra, where Iranian forces crossed in dinghies to overwhelm surprised Iraqi defenses last January.

Abdullah said the Iraqis have stopped diverting water into the Fish Canal, apparently fearful that Iranians might use its water to flood land between Basra and the Iraqi lines.

It appears that the scale of the fighting east and southeast of Basra is unparalleled in the Middle East, a region more accustomed to short, sharp conflicts or low-grade guerrilla campaigns.

One sign of Iraq’s desperation has been evidence of its use of chemical weapons.

Iranian authorities charged that Iraqi artillery fired mustard gas rounds into Khorramshahr on April 11, killing 200 people and injuring more than 3,000. They took reporters to three locations where they said the artillery rounds had landed. Chemical warfare decontamination units were visible in the city.

While it was impossible to confirm the Iranian allegations at Khorramshahr, doctors treating Iranian troops in the West have said their wounds were caused by mustard gas and related chemical agents, and Iraq has come under international condemnation as a result.