The Invasion

Saddam Hussein had been watching the Iranian revolution with calculation and alarm. Ayatollah Khomeini, newly installed in Tehran, was calling on Iraq's Shia majority — 60% of the population — to rise up against the Baathist government. Khomeini had been expelled from Iraq by Saddam in 1978. The personal hatred was mutual.

Saddam's military advisors told him what he wanted to hear: Iran's military, hollowed out by revolutionary purges of the officer corps, would collapse in weeks. He also had practical grievances — the Shatt al-Arab waterway boundary, Iranian support for Kurdish rebels, and the seizure of Iraqi territory under the 1975 Algiers Agreement he had been forced to sign.

The invasion began on September 22, 1980, on four axes simultaneously. Iraqi forces crossed the border with 80,000 troops, 2,200 tanks, and complete air superiority. Within days, they had penetrated 15-25 miles into Iran and reached the outskirts of Khorramshahr, Iran's most important port city.

And then the resistance stiffened. Iranian Revolutionary Guards, regular soldiers, and armed civilians fought in the rubble of Khorramshahr building by building. The city that Iraqi commanders expected to fall in days held for 35 days. When it finally fell, it had been nearly destroyed — Iranians renamed it 'City of Blood.'

Saddam's intelligence was fatally wrong. The revolution had not weakened Iran's will to fight — it had inflamed it. Khomeini turned the war into a religious crusade, calling on Iran's 38 million people to defend Islam against the Baathist infidels. Young men volunteered in their hundreds of thousands.