Iranian Gunboats Attack Kuwaiti Island

Three Iranian patrol boats exchanged gunfire with Kuwaiti military personnel guarding an island near the Iran-Iraq War front early Wednesday in an incident that left two Kuwaitis wounded and increased tension in the Persian Gulf.

An Iranian war information spokesman in Tehran denied that any clash occurred, saying, “What the Kuwaitis claim is a figment of the imagination of the emirate’s rulers.”

But Kuwait’s Defense Ministry reported that its forces on Bubiyan Island, a strategically located land wedge on Iraq’s southern flank, came under attack Wednesday morning and returned fire.

Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia condemned the attack.

Though the brief episode may represent the first direct military encounter between Kuwaiti and Iranian military forces, it was believed unlikely to lead to an escalation.

Kuwait--the Arab state most closely aligned with Iraq in its 7 1/2-year struggle against Iran--quickly announced that it hoped Iran would launch no further attacks in the waters off Bubiyan, which provide access to Iraq’s only naval base on the Persian Gulf.

At the same time, Kuwait’s Defense Ministry said it reserved the right to retaliate, though the northern gulf sheikdom has chosen not to retaliate in the past for a number of Iranian Silkworm missile attacks against its shipping and oil-loading facilities.

Iran, in its statement Wednesday, indicated that tensions have been high in the waterway that separates Bubiyan from the Iranian-occupied Faw Peninsula.

Tehran has threatened in the past to seize Bubiyan Island, and military analysts see the 160-square-mile marshland as a potentially important “bridge” between the Iranian forces on Faw and the southern Iraqi front. Many analysts believe that Iran may someday use the peninsula to launch a major new offensive, either to cut Iraq’s supply lines from Kuwait or to surround Iraq’s southern city of Basra.

In other actions Wednesday, Iraqi warplanes attacked and set fire to a Cypriot tanker off Iran’s coast. Iraq also said it fired three long-range missiles into the central Iranian city of Esfahan.

Iran said its warplanes dropped 10 tons of bombs on Sulaymaniyah, a provincial capital in northern Iraq. It said the raid was in retaliation for alleged Iraqi chemical bomb attacks on three Kurdish towns March 16-17, in which Tehran claims 5,000 civilians were killed.