Persian Gulf: Sandy Flies and Corpses

Iraq holds the line, but Khomeini plans to step up the war

Under the cover of darkness last Wednesday night, the invading Iranian forces of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini launched a large-scale artillery barrage that lit the eastern sky. Tanks rushed forward in long columns, flanked on either side by Iranian Revolutionary Guards carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. Thus resumed the fierce battle for Basra, Iraq's second largest city, which lies only 14 miles from the Iran-Iraq border. Once again the fighting involved tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides, and in scope and intensity resembled the desert battles of World War II. The Iraqi forces of President Saddam Hussein fought tenaciously to hold their positions, and at week's end had managed to blunt the Iranian attack.

The Iranian tanks were met by fierce fire from Iraqi artillery and helicopter gunships. Khomeini's troops advanced in waves, stepping over their own wounded on the battlefield, before many fell to join them. "If you ever wanted to know what suicide means," said an Iraqi officer at the site, "you should have seen how they advanced and how they were mowed down. Then the flies began to swarm over the Iranian dead. That's all you could see: the sand, the flies and the corpses. I have never seen anything like it."

The Iraqis claimed that 1,564 Iranians had been killed in the clash and 65 Iranian tanks had been destroyed. For their part, the Iranians claimed that 2,100 Iraqis had been killed or wounded, and that 372 Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers had been destroyed. Whatever the truth, casualties were heavy on both sides, and, as U.S. intelligence satellites confirmed, the Iraqi lines had held.

Late in the week, fighting continued a mile or two inside Iraqi territory to the east of Fish Lake, the site of an Iraqi victory a few days earlier (see box). The Iranians are still hoping to break through the Iraqi positions and advance quickly to Basra (est. pop. 500,000), an important oil center that lies 280 miles from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. But Iraqi officials suspected that the attacks in the vicinity of Basra might be a diversionary tactic aimed at distracting the Iraqis from a larger and more serious threat to the north. If the Iranians should attack along the central border, where their troops are reported to be concentrated, they would be threatening Baghdad from a distance of only 75 miles.

Speculation that the Iranians were on the verge of opening a second front increased Wednesday when two Iranian F-4 Phantom jets staged a dawn air attack on Baghdad. One Iranian plane was shot down and the other dropped its bombs on the wrong target, hitting a hotel instead of the conference center where a meeting of nonaligned nations is scheduled to be held in September, against the strident objections of the Iranian government.

Iraqi officials were struck by the fact that the raid had involved only two Iranian planes, and that the pilot of the downed jet turned out to be Major Abbas Dowran, who was famous in the Iranian air force for his exploits in previous missions over Iraq. Baghdad officials suspected that Iran, in its preparation for an all-out assault along its central border with Iraq, had sent the Dowran mission not only to bomb the Iraqi capital but also to survey and test the city's air defenses.