Wikiquote of the day
Daily quote by Iran-Iraq War
- A curious military force of professional soldiers, mullahs, neighborhood militiamen and schoolboys as young as 13, linked by an intense Islamic fervor, broke the long deadlock in the Persian Gulf war by routing entrenched Iraqi troops.
- Why should we hate the people we once loved because of a war that mars even our memories?
- Frouzanda Mahrad, an Arabic poem by Lamia Abbas Amara (translated by Mike Maggio in: Buckley, Jorunn Jacobsen (2002). The Mandaeans: ancient texts and modern people. New York: Oxford University Press.). This poetic line alludes to how the Mandaeans, an ethnoreligious group, were divided by the Iran-Iraq War.
- The need to escape, whether from poverty or punishment, can force people into the military, while others are encouraged and sustained even in combat by their own cultures. Values and ideologies, including religion and nationalism, motivate individuals just as they do nations. Religions promise immortality or rewards in the afterlife for those who die in battle. Thousands of Iranian volunteers marched across mine-strewn battlefields in the long war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, believing that they would go directly to heaven when they died because the ayatollahs had told them so. Some carried keys they had been given which were supposed to speed their entry.
- Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020)
- In September 1980, Iraq went to war with Iran. Saddam's ostensible aim was to capture the Shatt al-Arab waterway that separates the two countries, but in reality he wanted to secure the Iranian oilfields and strike a blow against Iran’s Islamic revolution which threatened to seduce his own Shia minority. After some initial successes, the Iraqi army was pushed back. Saddam’s forces seemed on the verge of collapse until the US provided Iraq with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop manoeuvres, allowing Saddam to deploy his aircraft with greater effect.
- Simon Sebag Montefiore, Monsters: History's Most Evil Men and Women (2009), p. 354
- Certain aspects of the Iran-Iraq conflict — including trench warfare, barbed-wire fences and soldiers attacking machine-gun emplacements across open ground — echoed the fighting of the First World War. But there were some sinister innovations, such as Iran’s sending of human waves of young boys — who were told that they would become ‘martyrs’ if they were killed - across minefields. No less horrific was Saddam’s profligate use of chemical weapons against the advancing Iranian troops. The conflict settled into a war of attrition. By the time a ceasefire was agreed, in July 1988, both sides were effectively back where they had begun — with over a million lives lost.
- Simon Sebag Montefiore, Monsters: History's Most Evil Men and Women (2009), p. 354