The Blitz Bogs Down

By Marguerite Johnson

Iran halts the Iraqi advance and turns the war into a punishing stalemate

Iraq's thrust into Iran came to a stuttering halt last week as both sides dug in and a rocking, punishing kind of stalemate set in. The enemies exchanged thundering barrages of artillery across the Shatt al Arab estuary. Iraqi infantrymen intent on consolidating their sliver of captured Iranian territory took heavy losses in hand-to-hand fighting for possession of three key towns and a vital port installation. Iranian Phantom fighter-bombers streaked low under the radar in deep penetration raids all the way to the enemy capital of Baghdad. Beneath the orange fireballs and black smoke gushing from bombarded storage tanks, the oil refining and shipping facilities of both countries suffered such severe damage that years of reconstruction, and billions of dollars, might be required to restore them. Through it all, with no realistic prospect for a cessation of hostilities in sight, the conflict showed signs of turning into a prolonged, possibly no-win war of attrition.

A series of well-meaning appeals for a cease-fire and parallel attempts at peacemaking--by the United Nations, by the fraternity of Islamic countries and by some of the frightened nations bordering on the war--got nowhere. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, declaring he had achieved his military goals and was ready to negotiate, announced a unilateral ceasefire. The aroused Iranians paid no attention. On Sunday, as the ceasefire went into effect, Tehran's jets attacked Baghdad and other cities in Iraq.

Nonetheless, a palpable, if tenuous, sense of relief was felt in the international community--most of all when Tehran formally pledged "to spare no effort" to keep open the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes 40% of the Western world's oil. In fact, tanker traffic was moving through the strait safely, even if on a reduced scale. Concluded U.S. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie hopefully: "The broader risks seem to have diminished somewhat. And I would hope they will continue in this direction."

Iraq's initial blitz had clearly failed to produce anything like the swift and easy victory that Baghdad may have anticipated. Iraq evidently miscalculated Iran's military resilience. After an initial withdrawal in the face of the Iraqis' surprise invasion along a 500-mile front, Iran rebounded with a vengeance. Iraqi claims about the capture of four cities inside Iran's oil-rich Khuzistan province in the first week of fighting proved to be embarrassingly premature. While Iranian main forces, an amalgam of Islamic Revolutionary Guards, border guards and army troops, took on the Iraqi regulars, some of the Iranian heavy artillery began to arrive from as far away as Mashhad near the Soviet border. At week's end Iranian forces appeared to have built up sufficient strength for counterattacks and, according to Tehran, a paratroop drop for the defense of Khorramshahr.

The Iranian air force appeared to have superiority in the skies, just as the Iranian navy appeared to be master of the Strait of Hormuz, and the gulf as well. Iranian Phantoms, flying in formations of two or three, darted through the air with near impunity. Early in the week, two of the U.S.-built fighter-bombers swept undetected over the heart of Baghdad in broad daylight and bombed Iraq's controversial French-built nuclear research center. The bombs missed the $275 million reactor itself, but according to foreign eyewitnesses, they destroyed a number of auxiliary facilities at the center and inflicted large numbers of casualties.

As though in revenge for the Iraqi bombing of Kharg Island, Iran's main outlet for oil, the week before, the Iranians also launched repeated bombing raids against the refineries of Basra, the pumping stations around Kirkuk and Mosul, and the oil port of Fao at the mouth of Shatt al Arab. Tehran even sent a few of its sophisticated U.S.-made F-14s into the war; they were flown sparingly, but according to Iranian reports their Phoenix air-to-air missiles succeeded in downing more than a dozen Iraqi MiG-23s.

Still, there could be no denying that Iraq was in control of a 30-mile swatch of Iranian territory east of the Shatt al Arab, the 120-mile-long border waterway that empties into the Persian Gulf. There, on the ground, the rival forces were locked in battle at four critical locations:

> At strategic Khorramshahr, scene of the heaviest fighting, where after uninterrupted artillery bombardment, elite Iraqi special forces continued to pour in against Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the arriving Iranian regulars.

> In the nearby oil-refining center of Abadan, which Iraqi infantry columns were seeking to encircle with the aid of heavy artillery fired across the Shatt al Arab from the town of Sieba one mile away.

> In the provincial capital of Ahwaz, 60 miles north, where Iranian defenders with strong air support were keeping massed ranks of Iraqi tanks and artillery guns pinned down 14 miles outside the city.

> And finally, in Dezful, a key military base and oil station, where the Iranians were successfully frustrating an Iraqi bid to vanquish the town and prepare for a possible pincer assault on Ahwaz.

Throughout the week, the Iraqis poured reinforcements through the captured Iranian border town of Qasr-e-Shirin into the crucial southern theater where Iran's major oil facilities are situated. In the welter of claim and counterclaim, for example, the Iraqi officers repeatedly said their forces were on the verge of capturing Khorramshahr. Tehran called that particular claim a "hallucination" and insisted instead that the Iraqis were being forced to withdraw, leaving behind 16 tanks and armored personnel carriers and abundant stocks of ammunition. The truth, as foreign observers were able to establish at the scene, appeared to lie somewhere in between (see box).

The Iraqi war plan apparently hinged on seizing enough Iranian territory in an initial strike to use as a bargaining chip in its efforts to regain sovereignty over the Shatt al Arab, which it had agreed to share with Iran in a 1975 agreement with the Shah. Perhaps for that reason, President Saddam Hussein not only responded favorably to a U.N. Security Council vote calling for an end to hostilities, but also issued his own "unilateral" offer of a four-day ceasefire. Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr replied to the U.N. plea with a scornful insistence that his country would not consider a cease-fire "so long as Iraq is in violation of our territorial sovereignty." A peace-seeking effort by Pakistan President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who had been dispatched to the two capitals by the 42-nation Islamic Conference, also came to naught. Reporting on his mission, General Zia expressed the hope that "peace, while it may not be at hand, was still within reach," but no combatant expected to experience it soon.

Even as hopes for an early cessation of hostilities faded, so did fears that the conflagration could spread to neighboring Arab gulf states or even escalate into a confrontation between the superpowers. Responding to Saudi Arabia's fears of possible spillover attacks against Middle East oilfields, the U.S. lent Riyadh four AWAC (Airborne Warning and Control System) electronic-surveillance planes. Mindful that Iran might misinterpret the gesture as an act of pro-Iraqi collusion, Muskie wrote a letter to Banisadr re-emphasizing U.S. neutrality. Indeed, Iran promptly denounced the action as "provocative." As usual, it did not help the hostage problem. Iran's parliament, the Majlis, put a seven-member commission of hard-liners in charge of the hostage question and also voted unanimously against any hostage negotiations for the present.

On the Iranian side of the conflict, the mood could not have been more warlike. At the militant exhortations of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the whole country rallied enthusiastically behind the government. Huddled in the dim light of candles during a blackout, Iranians listened over their radios to the 80-year-old revolutionary leader implore them to "resist with dignity and courage" and fight until the "infidels" had been driven not only from Iran but also from Iraq. When Palestine Liberation Organization Chief Yasser Arafat showed up on a self-appointed mediation mission, Khomeini refused even to see him. And when Cuban President Fidel Castro sent a message urging Iran's acquiescence in a ceasefire, Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Raja'i reported contemptuously: "What do you [Cubans] think Iran is? A lackey of the superpowers?"

By midweek 47,000 reservists had reported for duty in response to President Banisadr's call-up of the class of 1977-78. In cars and pickup trucks and on motorbikes, thousands of small armed militia groups "headed toward the front. Civilians organized convoys of food, clothing, medicine and fuel. As each newly formed battalion set off, townspeople showered it with flowers and made it pass under a copy of the Holy Koran --a Persian tradition aimed at exorcising evil. With stoic fatalism the young bride of a soldier who had just left for the fighting remarked: "Life is a borrowing from God. It must be returned to him when he so wants."

Three Iranian photographers who traveled to the front last week reported that Iran was conducting a double war: a regular campaign by the armed forces, and a "people's war." Local defense councils organized teams of civilian guerrillas, armed with homemade grenades, rifles and Molotov cocktails. Said one youthful warrior: "Iraqis have never seen this type of war. They still cannot figure out how essentially unarmed men can beat tanks. O.K. They shoot us--one, two, three or ten. But finally, we set the tank ablaze, drag them out and tear them to pieces. They have seen it happen to their colleagues. They try to avoid it themselves."

On the Iraqi side, the government's radio and television sustained a comparable campaign of martial enthusiasm. Like Khomeini, President Saddam Hussein went on television to address his nation in his field marshal's uniform. "Our army has reached its goals," Saddam boasted. "The time is over," he said, "when Iran acted as watchdog of the gulf. We are the swords of the Arab people." Yet, in some passages, the address was curiously low-keyed and Saddam otherwise displayed little of his usual bravado. At times his voice quaked as he sipped nervously from a glass of water.

It was also a fact that food and fuel supplies were running short in some Iraqi cities. The nightly blackouts made a flashlight a precious commodity. Baghdad experienced repeated power failures as a result of the Iranian bombings. Said a doctor in Basra: "Last week our lives were not too affected, and most people thought of this as a just and honorable war that was even kind of exhilarating. Now we are starting to find out about the hard times it can bring."

Baghdad hospitals took in hundreds of military and civilian casualties of the bombings. Teams dug networks of trenches around public buildings to provide cover for further raids. The war's toll was also beginning to be reckoned in terms of the flag-covered coffins that slow caravans of small white trucks carried into Baghdad from the front.

Most analysts agreed that in his military planning, Saddam Hussein had seriously miscalculated on several counts: 1) The Iraqis were said to have expected that soon after their attack, anti-Khomeini exiles would mount a coup in Tehran; it did not take place. 2) The Iraqis believed that the U.S. embargo on spare parts had totally incapacitated the Iranian air force; this proved completely wrong. Said one observer: "Even if the Iranians cannibalized half their air force to keep the other half in the air, they would have an air force much better than the Iraqis'." 3) The Iraqis assumed they would receive the support of the estimated two million Arabs living in Iran's Khuzistan province; in fact, the Khuzistan Arabs, who are Shi'ite Muslims, were inclined to rise to the defense of Tehran. 4) The Iraqis underestimated the Iranian will to fight; indeed, the Iraqi attack galvanized Iran with an internal political unity not seen since the overthrow of the Shah and prompted Khomeini himself to call it a "blessing in disguise."

Tehran also announced the establishment of a headquarters for a new organization called the "Islamic Revolution of Iraq," with the avowed purpose of fomenting subversion against Baghdad. In its first communique, the group called on the 40,000 Muslim Shi'ites who were expelled from Iraq last March to join Iranians in their "holy war."

For that matter, the Iranians had not yet committed all of the advanced-weaponry that they were known to possess--such as a large number of U.S.-supplied surface-to-surface missiles. The question was whether they were still being kept under wraps because of a lack of spare parts and skilled personnel, or because of a strategic calculation. If they were being kept in reserve for future offensives, then the Iraqis might yet face further unpleasant military surprises.

--By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by William Stewart/Baghdad and Wilton Wynn/Beirut

With reporting by William Stewart/Baghdad, Wilton Wynn/Beirut

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