According to history, the Iraqi Army took the Iranians by surprise with an invasion that started a conflict that lasted until 1988.
Al Jazeera recalled on its website that in the next eight years of ferocious battles, the United States, western nations and Arab countries supported Iraq, in order to prevent another Islamic Revolution.
It is obvious that then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein fell in a trap set by Washington and London, which were interested in recovering the national resources that the Islamic Revolution had nationalized in Iran.
The war is considered one of the deadliest, with a death toll of 500,000 lives in both countries, and hundreds and thousands of injured and missing people.
Neither country won and the war ended in the same positions as before, but it paved the way for the ambitions of Washington and its allies.
‘The Iran-Iraq war introduced a new culture in the Middle East, influenced by an intellectual and military legacy,’ Jalo Marie, president of the group of experts of the Centers of Political Decisions of Baghdad, told Al Jazeera.
The human and economic catastrophe extended its sequels beyond the two countries’ borders.
That confrontation divided the region into sectarian lines, and created the criterion of a clash between Iraqi Sunnites with the Shiites of the Iranian Revolution.
It was also the precedent of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to get resources with which Baghdad paid its accumulated debts due to unnecessary loans to maintain its military machinery.
That step led to the first US attack on Iraq in 1991, and Washington’s invasion and occupation of the country in 2003.
The vivid memories of the war still haunt those who participated in it.
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