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The agreement held as long as the Shah lived. Though Baghdad never forgot its Shatt al Arab concession, though it resented the Shah's self-appointed role as the policeman of the gulf and worried about Iran's steadily growing military strength, it reaped instant benefit from the accord. Without the Shah's support, the Kurdish rebellion fizzled, allowing Iraq to concentrate its oil resources on fast-paced economic development and to emerge as a military power. But the squabble was renewed with the Shah's demise, the Iranian revolution and the advent of the Khomeini era. Khomeini had spent 14 years in exile in Iraq during the Shah's reign, but never concealed his dislike for the Iraqi reqime. Now, stressing old cultural and religious divisions, Tehran accused the Iraqis of fomenting unrest among the predominantly Arab population of Iran's oil-rich Khuzistan province, and called on Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, the majority in the country, to overthrow the Saddam government, which is dominated by Sunnis. Iraq in turn demanded amendment of the Algiers agreement. It also insisted on the return to "Arab" sovereignty of three small strategic islands—Abu Musa, Greater and Lesser Tunb—at the Strait of Hormuz that had been occupied by the Shah's forces in 1971. Iran did not respond.
On Sept. 17, apparently convinced that Iran's revolutionary convulsions had left the country divided and its military forces weak, Saddam made his move. Before Iraq's National Assembly he declared the Algiers agreement "null and void." Five days later full-scale fighting broke out.
For the Iranians and Iraqis living along the Iran-Iraq frontier, the war hardly came as a surprise. For months they had lived with increasingly sharp border battles, including artillery bombardments and occasional air raids as Iraq stepped up its drive to regain control of the Shatt and of the Musian region. The difference last week was the range and intensity of the fighting and the commitment of forces on both sides.
The war, the first fought in modern times around the gulf, began in the air early Monday morning. From airfields deep in Iraq, Saddam sent his warplanes to strike Iranian military bases, including Mehrabad airport only four miles west of Tehran; Mehrabad serves as a military field as well as Iran's principal commercial airport. The Iraqi objective was straight from the military textbooks: to knock out the Iranian air force before it could ever get off the ground. The effort failed. Scarcely two hours after the attack, U.S.-made Iranian Phantoms were streaking toward two Iraqi bases in the Basra area. Then, beginning at dawn on Tuesday, the Iranian air force launched strikes against at least 16 different targets in Iraq. A principal one was Baghdad, the capital, as well as the military garrisons in the sprawling city of 2.8 million people along the banks of the Tigris River. Iranian planes also attacked the northern oil cities of Mosul, Kirkuk and Erbil. Iraqi gunners sent up barrages of antiaircraft fire and ground-to-air missiles that lit up the skies and brought down a reported 67 Iranian planes.