Sandy Flies and Corpses

By William E. Smith

Iraq holds the line, but Khomeini plans to step up the war

Under the cover of darkness last Wednesday night, the invading Iranian forces of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini launched a large-scale artillery barrage that lit the eastern sky. Tanks rushed forward in long columns, flanked on either side by Iranian Revolutionary Guards carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. Thus resumed the fierce battle for Basra, Iraq's second largest city, which lies only 14 miles from the Iran-Iraq border. Once again the fighting involved tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides, and in scope and intensity resembled the desert battles of World War II. The Iraqi forces of President Saddam Hussein fought tenaciously to hold their positions, and at week's end had managed to blunt the Iranian attack.

The Iranian tanks were met by fierce fire from Iraqi artillery and helicopter gunships. Khomeini's troops advanced in waves, stepping over their own wounded on the battlefield, before many fell to join them. "If you ever wanted to know what suicide means," said an Iraqi officer at the site, "you should have seen how they advanced and how they were mowed down. Then the flies began to swarm over the Iranian dead. That's all you could see: the sand, the flies and the corpses. I have never seen anything like it."

The Iraqis claimed that 1,564 Iranians had been killed in the clash and 65 Iranian tanks had been destroyed. For their part, the Iranians claimed that 2,100 Iraqis had been killed or wounded, and that 372 Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers had been destroyed. Whatever the truth, casualties were heavy on both sides, and, as U.S. intelligence satellites confirmed, the Iraqi lines had held.

Late in the week, fighting continued a mile or two inside Iraqi territory to the east of Fish Lake, the site of an Iraqi victory a few days earlier (see box). The Iranians are still hoping to break through the Iraqi positions and advance quickly to Basra (est. pop. 500,000), an important oil center that lies 280 miles from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. But Iraqi officials suspected that the attacks in the vicinity of Basra might be a diversionary tactic aimed at distracting the Iraqis from a larger and more serious threat to the north. If the Iranians should attack along the central border, where their troops are reported to be concentrated, they would be threatening Baghdad from a distance of only 75 miles.

Speculation that the Iranians were on the verge of opening a second front increased Wednesday when two Iranian F-4 Phantom jets staged a dawn air attack on Baghdad. One Iranian plane was shot down and the other dropped its bombs on the wrong target, hitting a hotel instead of the conference center where a meeting of nonaligned nations is scheduled to be held in September, against the strident objections of the Iranian government.

Iraqi officials were struck by the fact that the raid had involved only two Iranian planes, and that the pilot of the downed jet turned out to be Major Abbas Dowran, who was famous in the Iranian air force for his exploits in previous missions over Iraq. Baghdad officials suspected that Iran, in its preparation for an all-out assault along its central border with Iraq, had sent the Dowran mission not only to bomb the Iraqi capital but also to survey and test the city's air defenses.

The tension in Baghdad (pop. 4 million) increased sharply as the week passed, affecting the holiday mood of the Id al Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan. The city's international airport was temporarily closed to civilian traffic for the first time since the war began in September 1980. Several Western embassies drew up emergency evacuation plans for getting their citizens to Jordan by overland routes. They remembered all too well that the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, who supposedly enjoyed diplomatic immunity, spent 14 months as prisoners of the Iranian zealots now attacking Iraq.

How long will the war last? On that question at least, most Iraqis and Iranians agreed: a long time. When Khomeini ordered the invasion of Iraq, he assumed that Iraqi defenses would quickly crumble. He also assumed that Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, who form 55% of the country's population, would rise up against the Saddam Hussein government and welcome the Iranian liberators. After that, Khomeini believed, it would be an easy matter to overthrow Saddam and his ruling Baath Party and to establish an Islamic republic in Iraq. But so far, the Iraqis have fought bravely and the Iraqi Shi'ites have shown no signs of mass rebellion.

Despite their public declarations of loyalty, most Iranian military commanders are said to be critical of the ruling clergy's tendency to use human-wave attacks to achieve quick victories. These commanders believe that Iran should try to wear down the enemy more slowly without wasting men and resources. Through further attacks, they reason, they could weaken the Iraqis' morale and gradually expand the size of the Basra front, which at present is only ten miles wide. The Ayatullah reportedly rejects such talk out of hand. Complains a former military official in Tehran: "Khomeini and his aides think only of one thing, the protection of their regime at any cost."

The Iranian government went to some effort last week to persuade the gulf states that it had no designs on any Arab countries other than Iraq. Complained Majlis Speaker Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani: "The West is trying to depict us as an expansionist power." He noted that the gulf states had supported the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, but magnanimously said that his government considered their action "pardonable."

The fears of the gulf states have hardly been allayed by such words, though their governments have decided not to launch military exercises with the U.S. aimed at discouraging Iranian expansionism. Explains a Saudi Arabian official: "This would have played straight into the hands of the radicals in Tehran." For the moment the Saudis and their neighbors see no point in unnecessarily provoking the ayatullahs. --By William E. Smith.

Reported by Dean Brelis/Baghdad and Raji Samghabadi/New York

With reporting by Dean Brelis, Raji Samghabadi

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