Read part one of this two-part series
The Dawa Party Issue
As the conflict between Iran and Iraq heightened in 1980 moving toward an outbreak of war, the Islamic Dawa Party, or Ḥizb Al-Da’wa Al-Islamiyya, was a major source of tension between the two countries.
The Dawa Party was founded in 1957 as an Islamist organization. This party, whose leaders were Shia clerics, backed the Iranian revolution of 1979 and opposed the Baath party, Iraq’s ruling party at the time (three prime ministers serving in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, i.e., Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Nouri al-Maliki and Heydar al Ebadi, had all been Dawa members).
On June 12, 1979, the Baathist government arrested Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the spiritual leader of the Dawa Party. He was a Grand Ayatollah who was born in Iraq but belonged to a famous Iranian family of Shia clerics. The Iraqi government later released al-Sadr but placed him under house arrest. However, his imprisonment sparked widespread public protests by Dawa followers in various cities, leading to the arrest of thousands of protesters. On July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein became president and increased the suppression of Dawa sympathizers by ordering a mass trial of about 1200 Shia protesters and the execution of 86 people. This move brought about the Dawa’s call for an armed rebellion against the Iraqi government. Then, in summer 1979, the Dawa moved its headquarters to Iran to protect its leaders from persecution.
Following on from these developments, Baghdad accused Iran of supporting an armed Shia opposition force against the Iraqi government. Tension between the two countries particularly increased on April 1, 1980, when a Dawa member carried out an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister of Iraq, which resulted in the death of a number of his companions.
In response to this attempt, Saddam Hussein put the blame on Ayatollah Khomeini and his policies to “export the Iranian revolution.” In another statement, he vowed to take “revenge the attack on Tariq Aziz. Four days after the failed assassination attempt, Iraq again imprisoned Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Hoda, and then executed both of them on April 8. This intensified tensions between Tehran and Baghdad, to such an extent that Ayatollah Khomeini openly and repeatedly called on the Iraqi army to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Dispute over the Algiers Agreement
Despite tough political disputes between Tehran and Baghdad before the war, Iraq's official justification for starting the war against Iran was that Saddam Hussein claimed the Islamic Republic had failed to comply with the Algiers Agreement.
The two countries signed the Algiers Agreement in 1975 to settle their long-lasting border disputes. These disputes concerned, in particular, the division of Shatt al-Arab, known in Iran as Arvand Rud (which constitutes the border between Iraq and Iran north of the Persian Gulf), and the heights of Meimak (in Iran’s western borders with Iraq).
On September 17, 1980, Saddam Hussein invited members of the Iraqi National Assembly to an emergency meeting and declared that the Algiers Agreement was invalidated due to Iran’s policies. Saddam tore up the Algerian Agreement in front of television cameras, claiming the entire ownership of Shatt al-Arab. His pretext for accusing the Iranians of breaching the 1975 agreement was that Iran had to give parts of Meimak to Iraq, but that the Islamic Republic forces had not evacuated these parts yet.
The heights of Meimak comprised a vast mountainous area, and defining the exact border between Iran and Iraq required a great deal of cartographic work under the supervision of international observers. In March 1978, a few months before the Islamic revolution, pre-revolution Iran and Iraq started this complicated task, based on which Iran’s army had to withdraw from parts of Meimak. However, after a short delay in this withdrawal, the Iraqis suddenly stopped the job halfway through its completion.
After the Iranian revolution and the upcoming decline in Iran’s military apparatus due to post-revolution chaos, occasional armed confrontations took place on Iran-Iraq borders. These confrontations intensified in 1980, when the two countries’ forces exchanged fire from time to time and small groups of Iraqi forces crossed Iran’s territory on a number of occasions. Beginning in summer 1980, Iran increased its retaliatory actions, and small groups of Iranian forces crossed the Iraqi borders too. On September 4, 1980, Iranian forces bombed two Iraqi border towns (Badra and Zorbatia), which was widely covered by the Iraqi media. In fact, the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein always emphasized that the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war had been on September 4, 1980, when these Iraqi cities were bombed. Yet according to Iran, the war began on September 22, 1980, when 12 Iraqi divisions carried out a ground invasion of the Iranian provinces of Khuzestan, Ilam and Kermanshah. The latter version was recognized in a UN Secretary General report on December 9, 1991.
Pre-War Warnings
In the context of Iran-Iraq political and territorial disputes before the war, a number of Iranian politicians of the time have said or written in their diaries that they had warned the Islamic Republic’s highest-ranking authorities about the prospects of a possible military confrontation with Iraq. Some of them, including Ebrahim Yazdi, the then foreign minister (who died in 2017) and Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the second most influential cleric of the time (who died in 2009) stated that they firmly believed Tehran needed to avoid provocative actions that could escalate tensions.
Ebrahim Yazdi and Abbas Amir-Entezam (Iran’s ambassador to Sweden at the time, who later spent 27 years in prison and died in 2018) even testified that the then US government had warned Iran that Iraq might be preparing for a possible military confrontation.
Some American sources, too, have confirmed that the Carter administration had informed the interim government of Prime Minster Mehdi Bazargan about this possibility.
For example, Mark Gasiorowski, a well-known American political scientist, published an article in the autumn 2012 issue of The Middle East Journal with reference to specific US intelligence reports from 1979. In his article, Gasiorowski explains that, in early September 1979, parts of the American intelligence community came to the conclusion that Iraq was preparing for a possible attack on Iran. They also emphasized that Iraq was secretly deploying large quantities of military equipment and supplies to the borders, and was implementing military engineering plans that could facilitate an attack on Iran. According to the article, US authorities passed this information on to Tehran. Islamic Republic high-ranking authorities did not take it seriously.
It must be borne in mind that the aforementioned US effort to help Iranian officials took place before the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. At that time, relations between the two countries had not yet deteriorated, and the interim government of Bazargan was a strong supporter of maintaining relations with America, while the Iraqi government was viewed as being a Moscow ally. Mehdi Bazargan and his cabinet resigned on November 6, 1979 in protest over the hostage-taking of US diplomats in Iran.
The occupation of the US embassy in Tehran led to a decades-long crisis in Iran’s relations with the US that continues to this day, and a complete marginalization of the remaining moderate elements within the Iranian government. In this new era, it was imperceivable in the Islamic Republic of Iran to advocate for any compromise with foreign enemies or for a reduction in tensions with hostile states, including Iraq. In fact, this new political atmosphere paved the way for an intensification of the crisis between Iran and Iraq, which finally led to the war.
Read part one of this two-part series
Read more in the Decoding Iran's Politics series:
Decoding Iran’s Politics: The IRGC and the Iran-Iraq War
Decoding Iran’s Politics: The Concept of Revolution in Iran, 40 Years After 1979
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