Relations with Iraq

Iran's relations with Iraq present a complex series of challenges. On September 22,1980, Iraq sent troops into Iran in an attempt to take Iranian lands and negate an earlier treaty about the use of the Shatt al-Arab, the river that is formed when the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers converge. The Shatt al-Arab forms part of the southern border between Iran and Iraq.

For eight years Iran fought Iraq to regain land, including the port city of Khorramshahr, which was recaptured in 1982. Partially through the use of human waves of people to fight the better-equipped Iraqis, Iran won the war. Nevertheless, the Iran-Iraq War took a huge toll on both the Iranian and the Iraqi people. It left Iran with great feelings of insecurity about its neighbor to the west.

Troubling to Iran was the fact that Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, had been accused of making chemical and biological weapons and of possibly creating nuclear warheads. The Iranians realized that these weapons could be turned against them. In fact, during the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq had used mustard and cyanide gases at Halabjah.

As the Iraqis often refused to allow United Nations inspections of their factories and arsenals, all nations in the Middle East, including Iran, became wary of Iraq. However, Iran took some precautions against Iraq. In 1998 there was evidence that Iran had created its own nuclear warheads. This evidence led Israel to threaten to bomb Iran in an attempt to get rid of the warheads.

Not only did Iraq present problems for Iran from a military viewpoint, but it also presented problems from humanitarian and economic perspectives. There was evidence that Hussein wished to rid Iraq of the Kurdish population that lived in its northeastern area. Many of these Kurds fled to Iran, creating further burdens for a country already suffering from a weak economy. In addition to Kurdish refugees from Iraq, Iran has also accepted many refugees fleeing from the Taliban in Afghanistan.

At the end of 1998, 600,000 Kurdish refugees were living in northwestern Iran, as were two million refugees from Afghanistan. At that time the United Nations high commissioner for refugees declared Iran to be the "most generous asylum country in the world."

During 2002, after driving the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, the government of the United States began to seriously and publicly consider invading Iraq as part of the U. S. global war on terrorism. While no faction of the Iranian government had any love for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, reformers and religious hard-liners were united in their opposition to an American invasion of Iraq. Many Iranians feared that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would cause upheavals throughout the region and Muslim religious leaders could not abide the idea of American troops occupying a neighboring country.

Annita Marie Ward Updated by the Editors