World Notes

The battle of the cities was on again as Iraq and Iran resumed the bombing of each other's capitals after a respite of several weeks. Iraq opened the latest round with air attacks against Tehran, Iran's capital, and a dozen other cities. Iran in turn fired a surface-to-surface missile at Baghdad, reportedly destroying part of a soccer stadium, and launched air strikes against nine other Iraqi targets. Iran apparently was also responsible for a rocket strike on a West German freighter in the gulf.

Iraq, whose air superiority over Iran is estimated at about 7 to 1, declared that it had rekindled the air war in retaliation for Iran's alleged involvement in an aborted car-bomb attempt on the life of the ruler of Kuwait, an Iraqi ally, two weeks ago; Tehran denies the charge. Iraq's basic problem is that it desperately wants to end the war it started 56 months ago, but does not know how to achieve that aim. The Iranian leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, continues to insist that hostilities will not end until the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has fallen. Some of Khomeini's domestic enemies maintain that another reason for the Ayatullah's inflexibility is that he needs the gulf war to hold his increasingly fractious country together.