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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iraq
Index
Iraqi tank outside Khorramshabr, Iran, October 1980
Courtesy Photri/Lehtikuva
Naval operations came to a halt, presumably because Iraq and
Iran had lost many of their ships, by early 1981; the lull in the
fighting lasted for two years. In March 1984, Iraq initiated
sustained naval operations in its self-declared 1,126-kilometer
maritime exclusion zone, extending from the mouth of the Shatt al
Arab to Iran's port of Bushehr. In 1981 Baghdad had attacked
Iranian ports and oil complexes as well as neutral tankers and
ships sailing to and from Iran; in 1984 Iraq expanded the socalled tanker war by using French Super-Etendard combat aircraft
armed with Exocet missiles. Neutral merchant ships became
favorite targets, and the long-range Super-Etendards flew sorties
farther south. Seventy-one merchant ships were attacked in 1984
alone, compared with forty-eight in the first three years of the
war. Iraq's motives in increasing the tempo included a desire to
break the stalemate, presumably by cutting off Iran's oil exports
and by thus forcing Tehran to the negotiating table. Repeated
Iraqi efforts failed to put Iran's main oil exporting terminal at
Khark Island out of commission, however. Iran retaliated by
attacking first a Kuwaiti oil tanker near Bahrain on May 13 and
then a Saudi tanker in Saudi waters five days later, making it
clear that if Iraq continued to interfere with Iran's shipping,
no Gulf state would be safe.
These sustained attacks cut Iranian oil exports in half,
reduced shipping in the Gulf by 25 percent, led Lloyd's of London
to increase its insurance rates on tankers, and slowed Gulf oil
supplies to the rest of the world; moreover, the Saudi decision
in 1984 to shoot down an Iranian Phantom jet intruding in Saudi
territorial waters played an important role in ending both
belligerents' attempts to internationalize the tanker war. Iraq
and Iran accepted a 1984 UN-sponsored moratorium on the shelling
of civilian targets, and Tehran later proposed an extension of
the moratorium to include Gulf shipping, a proposal the Iraqis
rejected unless it were to included their own Gulf ports.
Iraq began ignoring the moratorium soon after it went into
effect and stepped up its air raids on tankers serving Iran and
Iranian oil-exporting facilities in 1986 and 1987, attacking even
vessels that belonged to the conservative Arab states of the
Persian Gulf. Iran responded by escalating its attacks on
shipping serving Arab ports in the Gulf. As Kuwaiti vessels made
up a large portion of the targets in these retaliatory raids, the
Kuwaiti government sought protection from the international
community in the fall of 1986. The Soviet Union responded first,
agreeing to charter several Soviet tankers to Kuwait in early
1987. Washington, which has been approached first by Kuwait and
which had postponed its decision, eventually followed Moscow's
lead. United States involvement was sealed by the May 17, 1987,
Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark, in which thirtyseven crew members were killed. Baghdad apologized and claimed
that the attack was a mistake. Ironically, Washington used the
Stark incident to blame Iran for escalating the war and
sent its own ships to the Gulf to escort eleven Kuwaiti tankers
that were "reflagged" with the American flag and had American
crews. Iran refrained from attacking the United States naval
force directly, but it used various forms of harassment,
including mines, hit-and-run attacks by small patrol boats, and
periodic stop-and-search operations. On several occasions, Tehran
fired its Chinese-made Silkworm missiles on Kuwait from Al Faw
Peninsula. When Iranian forces hit the reflagged tanker Sea
Isle City in October 1987, Washington retaliated by
destroying an oil platform in the Rostam field and by using the
United States Navy's Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) commandos to blow
up a second one nearby.
Within a few weeks of the Stark incident, Iraq resumed
its raids on tankers but moved its attacks farther south, near
the Strait of Hormuz. Washington played a central role in framing
UN Security Council Resolution 598 on the Gulf war, passed
unanimously on July 20; Western attempts to isolate Iran were
frustrated, however, when Tehran rejected the resolution because
it did not meet its requirement that Iraq should be punished for
initiating the conflict.
In early 1988, the Gulf was a crowded theater of operations.
At least ten Western navies and eight regional navies were
patrolling the area, the site of weekly incidents in which
merchant vessels were crippled. The Arab Ship Repair Yard in
Bahrain and its counterpart in Dubayy, United Arab Emirates
(UAE), were unable to keep up with the repairs needed by the
ships damaged in these attacks.
Data as of May 1988
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