The dispute over the status of the 200km long Shatt-al-Arab/Arvand Rud waterway, formed by the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, was the primary issue between the two countries. Iraq, citing the 1937 Tehran Treaty, claimed sovereignty over the entire river, arguing that this should demarcate the official border between the two countries. Iran claimed sovereignty up to its deepest channel, or
thalweg.
In April 1969, Iraq sought to impose sovereignty over the entire river, demanding that no ships passing through it fly the Iranian flag or else it would block shipping to Iranian ports. Baghdad threatened to use force if Tehran did not comply with these conditions. Iran responded by abrogating the 1937 treaty and tensions mounted. Both countries had artillery guns pointed at each other across the waterway.
In an apparent show of force, Tehran launched, in April 1969, the Joint Operation Arvand. An Iranian freighter, the
Ebne Sina, flying the Iranian flag and carrying a cargo of steel beams, was escorted by the Iranian Navy, backed by a squadron of Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom IIs jet fighter-bombers, down the waterway under the nose of the Iraqis, who did nothing (“Iranian Ship Challenges Iraq Estuary”, AP, April 27, 1969). Three days later, Iran escorted another one of its freighters through the river without any repercussions. This was a humiliation for the Iraqis, whose threats were rendered meaningless by its far more powerful neighbour.
When then Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein forced approximately 60,000 Iraqis of Iranian descent, some of whom had lived in Iraq for generations, out of the country in 1971, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, visited the Iraqi border and lambasted Iraqi leaders, declaring that: “They are dying of envy at our progress and the things we have accomplished in Iran.” .
(Andrew Scott Cooper, “The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East“, Oneworld Publications, 2011, p. 155). In September 1973, during his revealing interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Pahlavi did not mince words when asked which neighbour was his worst: “Iraq is ruled by a group of crazy, bloodthirsty savages and… do you know they force our people to cross the minefields along the frontier on foot? That’s right. Iranians wishing to come home because they’re persecuted in Iraq have to cross our minefields on foot. Dozens of armless and legless people are in hospital.” (Oriana Fallaci, “The Shah of Iran: An Interview with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi”, The New Republic, December 1, 1973)
In the mid-1970s the Shah’s Iran, along with Israel and the United States, oversaw a covert war against Iraq by supporting the Kurdish revolt there. Documents declassified from that time show that the Shah wanted to use the Kurds in order to keep the Iraqi Army bogged down inside its borders, an interest he shared with Israel which also feared the Ba’athist Iraq becoming a regional military power.
When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the October 1973 war, Israel even asked the Iraqi Kurds to mount an offensive operation against Iraq in order to keep it from joining in that war. Upon consulting with the Americans, who then consulted with the Shah, about this request, the Kurds were convinced not to do so and to instead retain a defensive posture inside Kurdistan. (Roham Alvandi, “Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War“, Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 99).
Nevertheless, the Shah did not want the Kurds to prevail since he opposed Kurdish independence anywhere in the region, fearing it would inspire Iran’s Kurdish minority to revolt and secede, as they had done in Mahabad in 1946. Ironically, the Kurdish leader the Shah was supporting against Saddam Hussein, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, was a key figure in the short-lived Republic of Mahabad.
This covert war almost became hot. Through Iran, Israel supplied the Kurdish Peshmerga with portable anti-air and anti-tank missiles, captured Soviet-made 9K32 Strela-2s and 9M14 Malyutkas, to give them an edge over the Iraqi Army. Iranian artillery units deployed inside Kurdistan killed several Iraqi troops and destroyed a vast amount of Iraqi military equipment. This support from the Iranian military, which at that time was twice as large as Iraq’s, proved key to the continued success of the Kurdish revolt. However, the Shah ultimately used the Kurdish revolt to make a deal with Iraq over the Shatt-al-Arab, avoiding a potential Iran-Iraq War from breaking out in the 1970s.
Saddam Hussein, clearly the country’s strongman, offered to resolve the Shatt-al-Arab dispute in Tehran’s favour, relinquishing Iraq’s claim to the eastern part of the river. In return, in a classic trade-off, he wanted Iran to withdraw its support for the Iraqi Kurds. The Shah agreed. Consequently, on March 6, 1975, the Shah met with Iraq’s strongman in Algiers and signed the Algiers Agreement. Mere hours later, Iranian forces withdrew across the border, taking their heavy weapons with them. The Kurds were left on their own and Baghdad was able to crush any remaining resistance promptly. Over 200,000 Kurds fled to Iran. (see also George S. Harris, “Ethnic Conflict and the Kurds“, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 433, no. 1, 1977: 121).
Upon learning that the Shah had struck a deal with Saddam and was pulling Iranian forces out of Kurdistan, a furious Mullah Mustafa asked an Iranian SAVAK intelligence commander: “How can you trust Saddam, who once he gets rid of the Kurdish revolution will be stronger and then change his mind? You will regret this. (Jonathan C. Randall, “After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?: My Encounters with Kurdistan”, Routledge, 2019, p.169).
Upon learning that the Shah had struck a deal with Saddam and was pulling Iranian forces out of Kurdistan, a furious Mullah Mustafa asked an Iranian SAVAK intelligence commander: “How can you trust Saddam, who once he gets rid of the Kurdish revolution will be stronger and then change his mind? You will regret this. (Jonathan C. Randall, “After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?: My Encounters with Kurdistan”, Routledge, 2019, p.169).
In July 1977, six bilateral agreements were signed between Iran and Iraq which covered “trade and cultural relations, freedom of movement by Iranians in visiting Shi’it[e] holy places in Iraq, agriculture and fishing, railway systems linkages, and co-ordination of activities concerning the movement of ‘subversive elements.'” (S. H. Amin, “The Iran-Iraq Conflict: Legal Implications“, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1, January 1982, p. 167–88). It seemed, from the perspective of many observers at the time, that Iran-Iraq relations had truly turned a new page.
Opponents of the Shah in Iran used this thaw to visit Iraq and meet with the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who lived in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf after the Shah exiled him in 1963, to plan the Shah’s overthrow. As Richard Helms, the U.S. ambassador to Iran in those years, noted in retrospect: “People knew about Khomeini. This was particularly true after the Algiers Agreement of 1975, when Iranian pilgrims were again permitted to visit the holy shrines in Iraq at Karbala and Najaf. Some pilgrims brought tapes back from Khomeini, and one began to hear reports of their being played in mosques and circulated clandestinely. So that as a political factor, people were aware of him.
