Iraq Steps Up Attack on Iran to End Stalemate

BAGHDAD, Iraq —  After a year of stalemate in its war against Iran, the Baghdad regime is now pursuing a policy of “maximizing pressure on the Iranians,” Iraqi officials have told foreign diplomats here.

“The Iraqis don’t have many options,” said one diplomat. “They can’t surrender, they can’t go on with this stalemate forever and they can’t win outright.”

A week ago, the Iraqis repulsed a major Iranian offensive in the Hawizah marshes after the Iranians had briefly crossed the Tigris River and cut the main highway running from Baghdad to the southern city of Basra.

Descriptions of the battle sound eerily like the epic struggles of World War I, with neutral diplomats saying they believe that the Iranians suffered about 30,000 casualties and that several thousand Iraqis were killed or wounded.

Since the beginning of the war in September, 1980, each country’s army has crossed the border and managed to seize territory, but neither has gained a decisive advantage. Iraq’s reported superiority in weapons quality seems roughly balanced by Iran’s substantial 4-to-1 population edge and the religious fanaticism of its Shia Muslim troops.

Because the Iraqis probably cannot score a decisive military victory over the Iranians, it appears likely that they will apply pressure in the form of stepped-up air strikes against civilian population centers and against shipping, particularly oil tankers bound for Iran.

Just last week, the Iraqis announced that the war zone had been extended to include civilian aircraft flying to Iran. Even though the policy brought cancellations of flights to Baghdad as well as Tehran, diplomats said the Iraqis scored an enormous propaganda victory as Europeans were seen fleeing Tehran before the deadline.

The latest round of attack and counterattack began Sunday, when Iraqi warplanes, believed to be F-1 Mirages supplied by France, attacked two oil tankers in the area around Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal.

Retaliation by Missile

Iran said that in retaliation, it fired a ground-to-ground missile at Baghdad. At 3:45 a.m., the Iraqi capital was awakened by a massive explosion followed by an equally loud echo. The blast rattled windows for miles.

At least eight people were killed in the explosion, the first such blast here in 12 days, but it was unclear whether it was caused by saboteurs or by an Iranian missile. The explosion wrecked about a quarter of a three-story apartment building, the only occupied structure in an immense housing development under construction in central Baghdad.

An Iraqi military spokesman said Iraqi warplanes immediately retaliated for the explosion by bombing targets in the Iranian capital, Tehran, and four other cities. There were no reports of casualties.

Although the Iraqis have said that at least two previous explosions here were the work of Iranian saboteurs, a military spokesman Monday obliquely suggested that the blast may have been the result of a missile attack.

‘Arabs of the Tongue’

Let “the Tehran rulers understand,” the spokesman said, “that the weapons supplied to them by the servants of Zionism from Arabs of the tongue will be retaliated by destructive blows on them and their allies and masters.”

The phrase “Arabs of the tongue” is Iraqi jargon for Libya and Syria, suggesting that those radical states are not really Arab but merely speak the language.

One theory expressed here is that Iran obtained a supply of Soviet-made Scud missiles from Libya and that these non-nuclear missiles are now being fired at Baghdad from positions near the border.

Western analysts who have examined the wreckage caused by the explosions are still unconvinced, however, saying the damage in Monday’s blast was not extensive enough to have been caused by a Scud missile.

Three floors of apartments were crushed into a tangle of concrete and steel poles, and buildings across the street lost ceilings. But the analysts said a Scud missile would have wiped out the immediate area, not just a portion of the building.

A Warning to Iraqis

Iran’s war information headquarters said the explosion was aimed at warning “the adventurous Iraqi regime once again and to force it to stop attacks and this destruction of residential area, ships and commercial flights.”

The Iranians asserted that 4,000 civilians have been killed or wounded by Iraq’s recent round of air raids against Iranian cities.

The Iraqis evidently believe that the new pressure on Iran is having an effect, although there has been little sign that the Tehran government has moved closer to accepting a negotiated settlement. Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, has insisted that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein be replaced as a condition for peace.

Diplomatic sources here expressed doubt that Iraq, even with its growing margin of material superiority over Iran, will ever be able to inflict enough damage to significantly alter public opinion in Iran. The danger, they said, is that the attacks will unite the Iranians even more.

Futility of Fighting

But by sustaining the air war, one diplomat said, “the Iraqis want to make the Iranian people feel more effects of the war. They are trying to drum home the futility of continuing the fighting.”

Diplomats are divided about whether the Iranians will soon be capable of mounting another ground offensive like the one that ended so disastrously last week.

For the past eight months, there have been rumors that the Iranians were preparing a major battle that was intended as the coup de grace for the Iraqi regime. Reports spoke of 400,000 troops being massed near the border.

As costly as was last week’s battle, it apparently involved between eight and ten divisions of Iranian troops, or only 60,000 men. The Iranians attacked on a narrow front across open marshlands without benefit of air cover or artillery, while the Iraqis had planes, cannon and helicopter gunships.

“Everyone fails to comprehend how the Iranians believed they had any chance of succeeding,” said one Western military expert. “There must have been absolute carnage on the way to the beaches.”

Remarkably, the Iranians managed to drive the Iraqis back, if only briefly.

While the Iranians regroup, the Iraqis have embarked on a policy of small counterattacks of their own. On Saturday, for example, Iraqi forces captured two mountain peaks in the northern sector of the war front.

Western analysts said this was part of an Iraqi strategy to seize the initiative and deny the Iranians the opportunity to dictate the pace of the fighting.