The Gulf Iran Strikes on Two Fronts

By William E. Smith Reported David S. Jackson and Scott MacLeod/Cairo

Winter is the killing season in the swamps around the Persian Gulf. It is then that Iran, knowing the heavy rains will blunt the firepower of Iraq's tanks and air force, can most effectively launch its "human wave" assaults against the Iraqi marshlands. For months now, as it has for several winters past, the government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has been threatening to launch a "final offensive" against the Iraqis before the beginning of the Persian new year on March 21.

That offensive seemed at hand two weeks ago, when an estimated 35,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards swarmed across the line dividing Iranian and Iraqi troops, some 20 miles to the east of Basra, Iraq's second largest city. Shouting "Allah akbar!" (God is great), they stormed over the barbed wire that crowned the embankments along a flooded artificial barrier called Fish Lake, inflicting heavy casualties on the dug-in Iraqi troops.

In Tehran, Iranian television showed pictures of slaughtered Iraqi soldiers lying face down in the muddy trenches. In Baghdad, Iraqi TV offered the same macabre programming, except that the corpses piled along barbed-wire fences were those of young Iranian soldiers. Once again the battlefront was, in the words of an Iraqi journalist, a "horrible massacre zone."

For the past year the strategic positions of the two sides have remained relatively static. In last week's battle, however, the Iranians managed not only to hold their newly won pocket of territory but even to launch a second assault in the central sector to the east of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. On Christmas Day the Iraqis turned back an Iranian assault in the southern region, killing an estimated 15,000 Iranians but losing perhaps 5,000 of their own soldiers in the process. This time the Iraqis seemed to be having trouble holding back the invading forces, and the death tolls were believed to be even heavier than in the Christmas fighting.

Day after day the two sides launched aerial and missile attacks on each other's cities. In a gesture that some observers interpreted as a sign of President Saddam Hussein's rising desperation, Iraqi warplanes repeatedly raided the Iranian holy city of Qum, a campaign calculated to infuriate the aging and increasingly frail ruler of the Islamic Republic. Reports continued to circulate in the West last week that Khomeini, 86, has been confined to bed for the past month and is extremely ill, perhaps near death.

The immediate objective of the current campaign, for which the Iranians have amassed at least 650,000 troops, is the port city of Basra (pop. 1 million). Iranian strategists hope that the fall of the city would lead to the collapse of Saddam Hussein and the creation of an Iranian-style Islamic republic. Basra, like Iran itself, is inhabited mainly by Shi'ite Muslims.

Another objective of the current drive in the south may be to link up with Iranian occupiers of the Iraqi town of Fao, which was captured almost a year ago. The latest assault began scarcely 30 miles from the Kuwaiti border, and comes amid an ongoing Iranian campaign to put pressure on Iraq's Persian Gulf allies. Iran has been trying to intimidate Kuwait by attacking tankers carrying Kuwaiti oil out of the gulf. The latest target was the Saudieh, a Kuwaiti-owned vessel that was bound for Pakistan last week when it was struck by a missile fired by an Iranian gunboat. Despite Iranian pressure, however, Kuwait has not backed away from its plan to serve as host of next week's Islamic summit conference.

As usual, Iran and Iraq reported wildly conflicting claims about the progress of the fighting. Lieut. General Abdel Jabar Muhsen, a spokesman for the Iraqi army, said in Baghdad that Iraqi forces had halted the Iranians' attempts to expand their bridgehead. He acknowledged that the Iranians continued to occupy a 4-sq.-mi. strip of land alongside Fish Lake, but contended that they were in effect pinned down there. One Iraqi communique boasted that the Iranians were being "systematically annihilated." The next day, however, Iran's news agency claimed that Iranian forces had pushed six miles farther into Iraqi territory, to a point only twelve miles from Basra, and were now occupying an area of 38 sq. mi.

While the Iraqis have the edge in air power, tanks and missiles, the Iranians have a 3-to-1 advantage over the Iraqis in population and thus military manpower. Says an Iraqi official candidly: "We cannot afford to lose 20,000 people in every battle." Throughout the week, there were signs of rising Iraqi concern over the war. Saddam Hussein made a rare visit to the southern front on the day the Iranians launched the second phase of their offensive. Western military analysts reported heavy Iraqi losses. Said a Cairo-based diplomat: "There was a higher number of casualties than usual, indicating that the Iraqis were not as well prepared as they usually are." Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, one of Iraq's staunchest backers, telephoned Saddam Hussein for a war report. In an emergency, Egypt might decide to send troops to bail out the Baghdad regime.

Western experts are divided over the present state of the war. Hans Heino Kopietz of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies believes the "final offensive" may turn out to be a series of attacks "over time and space" and that the current fighting may be the start of that process. From their new foothold on Iraqi territory, the Iranians can shell Basra from a distance of only a few miles, he notes, adding, "As of now, Basra appears effectively to be under siege."

Other analysts argue that the Iraqis, with their superior firepower, should be able to drive the Iranians back across the Shatt al Arab, the waterway that marks the southern border between the two countries. Says one Western military attache: "The Iraqi strategy is to let the Iranians come in, stop them, close off the pocket and just kill people." Even more important, this analyst believes, is the Iraqis' air superiority, which gives them the ability to carry the air war into Iranian territory whenever they choose.

In this endlessly confusing conflict, the role of the U.S. grows ever more bewildering. Officially the U.S. has remained neutral, but in November it became known that Washington was covertly shipping arms to Iran, though this weaponry does not appear to have played a significant role in the recent fighting. Later there were reports that Washington had provided Baghdad with certain military intelligence in order to avert the possibility of an Iraqi collapse. Finally there were allegations last week that the U.S. had given such intelligence information to both Iran and Iraq and that some of it had been deliberately distorted in an effort to prevent either side from scoring a victory.

Both the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency denied the allegations. For State Department officials responsible for monitoring the war and managing the U.S.'s relations with its allies in the Middle East, the charges were yet another headache in the laborious process of maintaining a policy that is increasingly difficult to defend -- or even understand.