Iran Lost the War / Iran Won the War

July 27 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Iran's acceptance of UN Resolution 598 in 1988, which paved the way for the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War the following month. Did the Iranians win or lose this war? Did Iran suffer defeat or achieve victory in the eight-year war with Iraq? This is an important question for Iranians regarding a war that claimed at least 220,000 Iranian lives and caused around one trillion dollars in damage to the country's infrastructure. The people were directly affected for eight years and have not escaped the detrimental effects for three decades. A look at the developments in the last five months of the Iran-Iraq War indicates multiple defeats for Iranians in the final months of the war. From April 1988 to late August of that year, the Iraqi army, through a series of rapid operations, expelled Iranian forces from all territories they had occupied from 1982 to 1986. The beginning of these operations was the 'Ramadan al-Mubarak' operation, which started on April 17, 1988, with an attack by the Seventh Army of Iraq, commanded by General Maher Abdul Rashid, utilizing elite units of the Iraqi Republican Guard, commanded by General Iyad Fattah al-Rawi, including the Medina, Baghdad, and Hammurabi divisions to retake Faw. The Iranians, who had captured Faw after a hard-fought 75-day battle in 1985, lost it in less than two days. Celebrations erupted across Iraq, and then-President Saddam Hussein awarded medals of bravery and merit to the commanders involved in the operation. Some Iranian commanders recount that when the heavy attacks of the Iraqi army to retake Faw began using chemical weapons, Iranian forces threw down their weapons and tried to save their lives. When the Iraqi Air Force targeted the bridge built by the Iranians over the Arvand River, Faw was lost to the Iranians, along with several forces trapped on the other side of the river. As Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the senior commander of the war, noted in his memoirs, Ayatollah Khomeini attempted to downplay the significance of Iraq's retaking of Faw, stating that they had taken a place from the Iraqis, and now they had taken it back. However, the reality of the battlefield showed that the defeat of the Revolutionary Guard at Faw was complete, and the victory of the Iraqi army was decisive and flawless. The loss of Faw marked the beginning of further defeats for Iran in the southern front. Thirty-five days later, Iraq retook all territories occupied by Iran in the Basra plain and the Shalamcheh area in less than a day. The Iranians had captured this small but militarily significant area in 1986 during Operation Karbala-5 and lost it on May 24, 1988. Iran had spent years trying to capture this strategic land to pave its way to Basra, but each time, despite heavy casualties, it had only made slight advances in these lands and the eastern Basra plain. It had completely failed in the Ramadan operation in 1981, made slight advances in Karbala-4 in 1985 but had to retreat again, and finally, in one of the fiercest battles of the eight-year war, succeeded in making a few kilometers of progress in Karbala-5 in the same year by breaking through Iraq's defensive fortifications and reaching the shoulder of the fish canal, a defensive stronghold set up to defend Basra. All these minor but significant achievements of previous years were lost in one day in 1988. When the armored and artillery units of the Iraqi army began firing on May 24, 1988, the Revolutionary Guard units were quickly forced to retreat. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani bitterly recalls this defeat, stating that all the achievements of Karbala-5 were lost. The third wave of defeat occurred three weeks later in the middle front in southwestern Ilam, where the Iraqi army swiftly retook the Qalawezan and Kal Qandi heights from Iran. The fourth wave of attack began the following week, and on June 24, Iraq retook the entire Majnoon Islands area from Iran, territories that had been captured by Iran during Operation Kheibar in 1983. The defeats were so swift and surprising that one of the most important commanders of the Revolutionary Guard, Ali Hashemi, commander of the Nasr headquarters, was trapped during the Iraqi helicopter assault on the Iranian main headquarters, and his fate remained unknown for years until it was announced in 2010 that he had lost his life in this attack. The three consecutive major defeats of Iran in Faw, Shalamcheh, and the Majnoon Islands, all of which were under the control of the Revolutionary Guard, dealt a significant blow to the credibility of the Revolutionary Guard, which had been known for its offensive attacks against the Iraqi army in previous years. The Revolutionary Guard units were under such pressure from the numerous and mobile Iraqi army units in the southern front that their commanders were forced to hastily transfer some of their units that had been sent to the northern front in hopes of capturing areas of Iraqi Kurdistan back to the southern front, forcibly evacuating all the areas captured in the northern front and Kurdistan, although they themselves labeled it as voluntary evacuation. Of course, the defeats were not limited to the Revolutionary Guard. On July 11, the ground forces of the Iranian army were so surprised by the attacks of the Iraqi units in the Ain Khush and Mousiyan areas in northern Khuzestan that the Iraqi army captured the command center of the Iranian ground forces in a humiliating act and took thousands of Iranian forces captive, largely compensating for its eight-year backlog in terms of the number of prisoners within two days. The eight-year war resulted in the deaths of over 220,000 Iranians. The series of military defeats imposed on Iranian forces one after another led Ayatollah Khomeini and the four-member team of Hashemi, Khamenei, Ardabili, and Mousavi, who were the governing authorities on behalf of Ayatollah Khomeini at that time, to decide that continuing the war was impossible and dangerous. They then informed Ayatollah Khomeini of this decision, and he accepted the end of the war through the acceptance of Resolution 598. Even this did not mean the end of Iran's military defeats at the end of the war. Four days after Iran announced its acceptance of Resolution 598, Iraq launched new attacks in the southern front with the aim of occupying more territory before the ceasefire was established. More areas of southwestern Khuzestan came under Iraqi occupation, and the Iraqis even blocked the Ahvaz-Khorramshahr road in two areas. Although with Ayatollah Khomeini's admonition to the Revolutionary Guard, Iranian forces were able to push the Iraqis back to the border once again. The overall meaning of all these consecutive defeats was that the Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian army ended the war in August 1988 with a series of tactical defeats. The military credibility of the Revolutionary Guard, in particular, suffered among senior Iranian officials, and there were even discussions about the trial and execution of commanders who might have been responsible for these defeats. Although ultimately Hashemi Rafsanjani states that through his mediation, this issue was dropped, the prevailing sentiment within the government in the final months of the war and even in the early months after the war was that the Revolutionary Guard left the war defeated and lost many areas in the final months of the war. Victory for Iran in the War Saddam Hussein, when he issued the order for a large-scale ground attack by the Iraqi army into Iranian territory on September 22, 1980, had declared the 1975 Algiers Agreement worthless just a week earlier. The basis of the 1975 Algiers Agreement was the declaration of the Arvand River (Shatt al-Arab) as a border river based on the Thalweg line. By declaring the 1975 Agreement worthless, Iraq claimed the Iranian ownership of the Arvand River, but in 1988, after 96 months of extensive and intense ground battles with Iranian forces, it had achieved the least success in claiming the Arvand River as Iraqi territory, which was not a small defeat for Iraq and Saddam, who had started the war with this goal and fought for eight years to achieve it. Worse for Iraq and Saddam Hussein was that when the Iraqi army attacked and occupied Kuwait in 1989, to confront the coalition led by the United States and its allies formed to liberate Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was forced to officially announce in a letter to Hashemi Rafsanjani, the then President of Iran, Iraq's acceptance of the 1975 Agreement again; a significant political victory for Iran against Iraq. The Iraqi army, even during the eight-year war with Iran, despite the fact that the Iranian army had been severely weakened after the 1979 revolution, was unable to tactically capture even the shores of both sides of the Arvand River. The Iraqi army, which was assigned this mission in the Shalamcheh axis, could barely capture Khorramshahr after 34 days of fighting and was unable to capture Abadan, while not even a single brigade from the main defending forces of Khuzestan, namely the 92nd Armored Division of Ahvaz, was present in the Khorramshahr area against them. The shores of the Arvand River from the Abadan area to the Persian Gulf were never captured by the Iraqis. In the Ahvaz front, the Iraqi army, despite the advance of the 5th and 9th divisions to the gates of the city of Ahvaz, was never able to capture the provincial center of Khuzestan. The greater failure of Iraq occurred in the northern front of Khuzestan. The Iraqi army advanced to the Naderi Bridge area in front of the cities of Andimeshk and Dezful but, failing to cross the Karkheh River, was never able to capture these two cities and the more important goal of cutting off Khuzestan from the rest of Iran. The Iraqi army also lost many of the areas it had occupied one after another during the second half of 1980 and the first half of 1981, showing no creative strategy or tactics to defend against the Iranian chain attacks. Worse for Iraq was that from 1982 onwards, when the joint offensive operations of the Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian army began into Iraqi territory, it witnessed the loss of significant areas within its own territory, the most important of which were in the Hawr al-Azim, Faw, the Basra plain, and parts of Iraqi Kurdistan. In fact, the army that had gone to occupy Iranian soil was losing its own territory. The position of the Iraqi army from 1981 to 1985 was primarily defensive (except for limited attacks known as the strategy of mobile defense), which was a significant defeat for an army that was supposed to capture Khuzestan in a short time, complete Iraq's control over the Arvand River, impose a ceasefire on Iran, and end the war from a superior position. The greater defeat for Iraq was the comparison of the situation on the first day of the war with the end of the war in terms of the occupation of the areas desired by Iraq within Iranian territory. The Iraqi army began the war with the aim of occupying disputed areas within Iranian territory and expanded it in the first week of the war to a larger goal of occupying Khuzestan, but as the war ended in 1988, Iraq did not achieve this goal, marking a complete defeat for Iraq.