Iraq-Iran war: the forging of the Islamic Republic

Seeing an opportunity, on 22 September 1980 Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. The Iranian military had largely dissolved following the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic, less than a year old, was far from having consolidated its power. The Islamists faced the grueling task of rebuilding the Iranian bourgeois state, as power remained effectively in the streets.

It was the entry of the workers, through the general strike of the autumn of 1978, that transformed middle-class bazaar and student protests into a real revolution. The workers formed neighbourhood and factory shuras (soviets), they demanded higher wages, and in some instances took over their factories. They fought so that the tyranny of the bosses – who were closely aligned with Pahlavi during the revolution – would never return. 

But the complete failure of the communists to present any clear alternative, against the backdrop of growing repression, allowed the revolution to be hijacked by the Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini. While the revolution itself had involved communists, including the Stalinist Tudeh Party, communist guerrillas such as Fadaiyan-e-Khalq, ‘Islamic-Marxists’ Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), and secular nationalists such as the National Front, the Islamists did everything to isolate the communists and the left. 

Khomeini began to use the clergy to hijack many of the neighbourhood shuras, which were transformed into ‘Islamic Revolution Committees’ around local mosques. These later formed the foundations for the Islamist paramilitary organisations. At this point, Khomeini was bolstered by western imperialism, which preferred him to the communists. The US had even negotiated the neutrality of remnants of the Pahlavi army prior to the victory of the revolution.

Khomeini condemned workers’ control as sabotage by “enemies of the revolution” / Image: public domain

But despite the initial victory of the Islamists in hijacking the revolution, the energy of the masses did not immediately dissipate. On 8 March 1979 – International Women’s Day and just a month after Khomeini had come to power – street fights broke out when the mandatory wearing of the hijab in public buildings was announced. It turned into four days of mass protests involving the communists of Fadaiyan-e-Khalq, the MEK, and the Tudeh Party. There were violent confrontations with the Islamist thugs, but the counter-revolution was still too weak, and Khomeini was forced to retract the edict.   

Directly after seizing power, Khomeini called for workers to return to work and threatened them if they refused. By June 1980, he condemned workers’ control as sabotage by “enemies of the revolution” and called strikers “enemies of the people and of God”. Despite this, the mood of the workers was defiant, with workplaces expelling the new managers put in place by the emerging Islamic Republic.

The Kurds

Khomeini’s Shia Islamism had little appeal among Iran’s predominantly Sunni ethnic minorities, such as Kurds, Turkmens, Balochs, and Arabs, which were dominated by left-wing nationalist and communist organisations. These included Kurdish organisations such as the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) and the Society of Revolutionary Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan (Komala). Among the Turkmens there was also the People’s Cultural and Political Society, linked to Fadaiyan-e-Khalq. 

The Kurdish parties demanded autonomy within Iran, to be governed by their own town councils, language rights in education and local administration, and recognition of the Sunni clergy within the Islamic Republic. During the revolution, they disarmed and pushed out various Islamic paramilitaries and the army from their territories. 

Khomeini had declared jihad against the Kurds on 19 August, 1979, declaring them to be “separatists”, “infidels”, and “enemies of Islam”. The Islamists quickly occupied many Kurdish cities, but were met with enormous resistance. In the towns of Paveh, Sanandaj, and Mahabad, unarmed civilians attacked the occupiers, where the Islamists conducted massacres, most notably in the village of Qarna (Qarne) where dozens of civilians were killed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

Unable to crush them immediately, Khomeini was again forced to retreat, calling for negotiations in late 1979, which broke down by the spring of 1980. Until 1983, effective autonomy reigned in the Kurdish regions, and parties like the PDKI and Komala maintained control over large rural areas and roads.

The invasion of Iran

Having come to power in 1979, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq had quickly assumed the character of a sectarian Sunni regime. After declaring war on Iran on 22 September 1980, Saddam framed the conflict as a continuation of the Arab-Persian war of 633, making references to the Islamic conquest of Iran. Saddam, believing his own pan-Arabist propaganda, arrogantly believed the Iranian Arabs – largely concentrated in the oil rich province of Khuzestan on the Iraqi border – would welcome him as a liberator. 

In reality, this war proved to be a godsend for the Islamists and Khomeini, by providing them with a perfect opponent. Shia Islam has deep roots in Iranian society, especially among the Persian speakers and Iranian Azeris. As such, Saddam’s forces met with stiff resistance. The city of Khorramshahr, directly on the Iraqi border, fell after 34 days, with door to door fighting and even civilians attacking Iraqi forces. This earned Khorramshahr the nickname the ‘city of blood’, with 7,000 killed in the first battle alone.  

The city of Khorramshahr, directly on the Iraqi border, fell after 34 days, with door to door fighting and even civilians attacking Iraqi forces / Image: fair use

They met the same resistance in many Iranian cities including Abadan, Ahvaz, Dezful, and others. Abadan was besieged for 11 months and never fell, with Iran never losing its oil refinery (the country’s largest), and oil workers refusing to evacuate. 

Despite stubbornly fighting against Iraqi forces, the first three months of the war alone saw over 1.5 million Iranians internally displaced and 18,000 killed, as Iraqi forces advanced 80 kilometres into Iranian territory.

The Iranian army was in tatters and the Islamic Republic had only rebuilt it to 150,000 soldiers, nearly half its pre-revolutionary size. Qualitatively, the situation was even worse, as 12,000 officers and 85 senior commanders had been purged from the Iranian army following the 1979 revolution. Most of the equipment was in a complete state of disrepair, with only half of the air force, tanks, and a third of the helicopter fleet functional.

Khomeini was also justifiably afraid over the loyalty of the army. It retained many monarchist loyalists, and a section of it had attempted a coup in July 1980, which failed. The Iranian military also had a long history of infiltration by communists, as well as sympathy with guerilla organisations. The Tudeh Party refounded its military organisation in the 1970s to increase its presence in the army. In fact, it was Tudeh Party military officers who foiled the July 1980 coup plot. 

The first elected president of the Islamic Republic, Abolhassan Banisadr, an Islamic liberal and former member of the National Front, championed the rebuilding of the army. Khomeini instead favoured the Islamist paramilitaries, with himself as commander-in-chief, transforming them into the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp, which also led the Basij paramilitary forces. The parallel military of the Islamic Republic was born, with the IRGC always better armed than the secular army.

The IRGC and Basij paramilitaries recruited among the urban poor, and even lumpenproletariat, close to the bazaars – layers which have always been close to the clergy. They – along with the bazaaris, and the Persian-speaking and Azeri rural population – were the social base of the emerging regime. The IRGC quickly expanded from 10,000 in 1980 to 450,000 in 1987. The Basij paramilitary also grew rapidly, and by 1983 had 450,000 troops at the frontlines, with another two million trained in the use of arms. 

Iraq, which was already armed by the Soviet Union as a proxy in the Cold War, also found allies among the western imperialists. The US had been humiliated when the Iranians stormed their embassy in November 1979, holding it for 444 days. Khomeini had supported the storming, using it to improve his anti-imperialist credentials in order to consolidate power. The storming of the American embassy had a deeper significance, however, as it was from that embassy that the Americans had planned the 1953 coup, and Khomeini was justifiably paranoid about a new coup.

US imperialism never truly sided with Saddam. Rather, they wanted to weaken both sides and rule over the ruins. Saddam was their only option to have any control over the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, especially as the Iranian monarchists were not a serious alternative, despite US support.

Throughout the war, Iraq received approximately $5 billion in economic credits and dual-use technology from the US, along with critical satellite intelligence. Alongside support from other western allies, including the pro-western Arab regimes, Iraq received over $63 billion in arms and $80 billion in loans. 

The Islamic counter-revolution in full swing

On Nowruz, the Iranian New Year’s celebration, 1980, Khomeini launched the ‘Islamic Cultural Revolution’. Universities were closed until 1983, Islamist thugs dissolved left-wing student groups, and university staff, who were predominantly left-wing, were purged.

The hijab was gradually made mandatory, initially enforced by the government’s thugs through terror in the streets, but by 1983 the hijab was legally enforced with the threat of fines and whipping. In August 1980, they began the process of purging factory shuras, and transforming them into Islamic Labour Councils, to facilitate the reinstatement of the capitalist order.

Banisadr was blamed by the Islamists for military defeats against Iraq / Image: public domain

On June 21, 1981, President Abolhassan Banisadr was impeached by the Majlis (parliament) and dismissed by Khomeini. Banisadr had been elected one year earlier on a huge majority and had attempted to consolidate his power through leaning on the shuras and Kurdish groups. Conflict arose regarding the very nature of the Islamic Republic and Banisadr was blamed by the Islamists for military defeats against Iraq. 

On 20 June, even before his impeachment, Banisadr called for protests. These calls were echoed by the MEK, and attracted 500,000 in Tehran, as well as other protests in Tabriz, Rasht, Amol, Qiyamshahr, Gorgan, Babolsar, Zanjan, Karaj, Arak, Isfahan, Birjand, Ahvaz, and Kerman. 

Khomeini had consolidated a massive repressive force in the Basij and IRGC, and violently put down the protests, declaring protestors to be “enemies of god”. In the vicinity of Tehran University alone, 50 people were killed, 200 injured, and 1,000 arrested. A reign of terror began, with tens of thousands arrested between June 1981 and March 1982.

First, members and supporters of the MEK were targeted, then the terror expanded to Fadaiyan-e-Khalq (minority) and the Organisation of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class (Peykar). By the end of 1982, an estimated 7,500 people had been executed or killed in street battles. 

In response to the crackdown, the MEK turned to terrorism, conducting 336 assassinations between August 1981 and December 1982. But any sympathy remaining among the Iranian masses later vanished when they allied with Saddam, as the MEK eventually relocated to Iraq, and fought alongside Iraqi forces from 1987-88. 

In the Kurdish regions, the cities were reoccupied by the government through a brutal campaign, although resistance persisted in the form of the guerilla struggle. In 1983, motivated by desperation, Kurdish parties even received aid from Saddam. Despite the fact that these Kurdish groups condemned the Iraqi invasion, the war allowed Khomeini to paint the Kurdish movement as separatists, foreign mercenaries, and enemies of Islam.  

The role of the Tudeh Party 

The Tudeh party was the oldest communist party in Iran, and prior to the 1953 coup, could mobilise millions. But after the revolution they were still rebuilding their forces, and in 1980 had 5,000 members and 100,000 sympathisers. Unfortunately, the Tudeh Party was founded firmly in the Stalinist tradition, which characterised the tasks of the Iranian revolution as being to ‘consolidate the anti-imperialist gains’, and characterised Khomeini and the Islamists as ‘leaders of an anti-imperialist force’ and supposed representatives of a ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie.

This resulted in a ridiculous attitude towards the shuras. The shuras represented the embryo of workers’ power, like the soviets in Russia in 1917, and could have been developed into a real alternative to the capitalist state. Instead, the Tudeh Party put forward the demand for them to become merely trade union organisations alongside the capitalist state, and they later supported the hijacking of shuras by the Islamists.

Throughout the revolution, they attempted to gather together left-wing forces, but only one wing of the Fadaiyan-e-Khalq, which had recently split on the group’s attitude to the regime, became closely aligned to the Tudeh party. The counter-revolutionary nature of Khomeini became increasingly clear to all but the Tudeh Party, which stayed out of the anti-Islamist street protests.   

The logical conclusion of the Tudeh Party’s attitude to the revolution was its support, during the war, for the regime’s suppression in 1981 (see, for example, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, pp. 115-116). The Tudeh Party became isolated from the rest of the left, seen by many as traitors. And despite their support for the regime, they themselves suffered from repression at the hands of the Islamists. 

Without a clear revolutionary way forward, the situation in Iran was turned into a waking nightmare / Image: fair use

By 1983, the Islamic regime had been strengthened by the defection of an Iran-based KGB agent, Vladimir Kuzichkin, to Britain in 1982, who passed on information to the CIA. In turn, the CIA provided details to the Islamic regime, including lists of Soviet agents and members of the Soviet-backed Tudeh Party. 

In February 1983, the Tudeh leadership, including Secretary-General Noureddin Kianouri, was arrested. The party was officially disbanded and outlawed in May 1983. Following this, a hunt began for remaining members, leading to the arrest of thousands. Ultimately, more than 150 individuals were executed, the majority of whom were from the party’s military organisation.

Their politics paved the way for this complete disaster. Had the Tudeh Party not already burned its bridges completely with the masses, then they would have been in a very different position. The correct approach would then have been to defend Iran against Saddam Hussein and his imperialist allies on the basis of the mobilisation of the masses themselves, whilst fighting against every attempt of the Islamists to consolidate their power. 

It would have involved participating in the shuras, organising their own militias using their military organisation, and supporting democratic and economic demands, whilst explaining the necessity of completing the revolution through the seizure of power by the masses themselves.

But by this point the Tudeh Party had squandered every opportunity since the outbreak of the revolution. In the end, they could have at least prepared to be driven underground, instead of pulling the wool over the eyes of their members through a one-sided, unrequited ‘alliance’ with the Islamists.   

Horror without end 

Without a clear revolutionary way forward, the situation in Iran was turned into a waking nightmare for the Iranian masses. Saddam, frustrated by Iranian resistance, turned to using chemical weapons including mustard gas, sarin, and tabun. The result was a total of 25,000 deaths and 100,000 people injured.

The western imperialists were completely aware of Saddam’s use of chemical weapons, which was well documented by declassified documents and interviews. In fact, western imperialism helped Iraq acquire these weapons in the first place, as British and West German companies helped build chemical facilities used for their production. The Netherlands provided over 5,000 tons of precursors for their production, and Spain, France, Austria, and Italy provided ammunition for the delivery of chemical weapons. 

Through a combination of sheer numbers and extreme sacrifice, the Iranian masses stopped the advance of Saddam by December 1980, and then began slowly pushing him out of Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran mobilised millions, even resorting to recruiting teenagers for human wave attacks and mine sweeping, with promises of reward in paradise. Tens of thousands of child soldiers were killed during the war and 200,000-600,000 soldiers were killed overall.

Tens of thousands of child soldiers were killed during the war / Image: Mohammad Hossein Heydari, Wikimedia Commons

By mid-1982, Iraqi forces were expelled from Iran, and by July 1982, Iran began its offensive into Iraq. In his desperation, Saddam started the bombing campaign known as the ‘War of the Cities’, bombing every major city in Iran, killing 16,000 civilians. Iran, with its limited air force due to western sanctions, turned to developing its own missiles and drones as a result. And now the West, which was responsible precisely for this slaughter of Iranian civilians, demands that Iran dismantle its ballistic missile programme and render itself defenceless!

Khomeini even called for the overthrow of Saddam to “export the revolution” to Iraq and its pro-western allies in the region. They developed links and provided aid to anti-imperialists and other allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Al-Da’wa in Iraq, and others. For Iran, these were fronts for fighting the true enemy behind Saddam Hussein: western imperialism, and especially America. Again, US imperialism demands that the Iranians cease backing ‘proxies’ in the region, but it was precisely aggression backed by US imperialism that impelled the Iranians to develop these proxies! 

Iran’s aid to Hezbollah against the American intervention in the Lebanese civil war in particular served to antagonise its relationship with US imperialism. However, the expected expansion of the Islamic Revolution never came. The Shias of Iraq were violently put down by Saddam, and members of the Shia clergy and Persian-speaking Iraqis were expelled or deported to Iran. After Saddam’s forces were driven out of Iran in 1982, he sent repeated requests for a ceasefire, and by August 1988 it had become clear even to Khomeini that the war had reached a stalemate. By the war’s end, the masses were exhausted by both war and repression on the back of defeats in the class struggle.

It was the war which ultimately consolidated the counter-revolution in Iran. Directly after the war, the Iranian regime’s prisons were full of political prisoners, who were massacred on charges such as collaborating with Saddam, being apostates from Islam, and waging war against God. It is estimated that up to 30,000 were executed. 

Imperialists: Hands off Iran!

Both the counter-revolution and the war in the 1980s left Iranian society completely traumatised. Ever since, the Iranian regime has linked its entire legitimacy to independence from western imperialism and avoiding the horrors of another war. Their foreign policy has been built around this purpose. And whilst the nonsense of ‘exporting the revolution’ has been abandoned in substance, Iran is still surrounded by hostile American imperialism, and so has maintained and expanded its proxies. 

Both the counter-revolution and the war in the 1980s left Iranian society completely traumatised / Image: fair use

At the same time, the regime has repeatedly shown a willingness to come to an understanding with western imperialism, demanding to be accepted as a legitimate power in the Middle East. American imperialism, in its arrogance, cannot accept Iran as a legitimate power, however, and holds a grudge against the Islamic Republic because of its refusal to submit to them.

But this attitude is completely hypocritical. It was western imperialism which helped create and strengthen the Islamic Republic, initially by direct support for Khomeini, and then indirectly through the Iraq-Iran War and the constant hostility ever since, which far from weakening the counter-revolutionary Islamist regime, has only strengthened it politically by bolstering its anti-imperialist credentials. 

Ultimately, the Islamic Republic is a Frankenstein’s monster which western imperialism has a large hand in making, and that they have so far been unable to control or overthrow.    

Any talk by the western charlatans of ‘human rights’ of the Islamic Republic, especially in the 1980s is absolute nonsense. The horrors of the Islamic Republic match those of the western-backed Pahlavi regime, which itself dreamed of achieving what was eventually achieved by the Islamists, the eradication of the communist movement. Western imperialism is the most reactionary force in the world. This is seen in Iran alone in its criminal conduct in the Iraq-Iran war and the myriad crimes that it has committed in the last century of Iranian history.