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Baghdad residents took the attacks calmly. Shops remained open, schools continued to hold classes, and youths wearing blue overalls and armed with fire extinguishers took positions in hastily erected tents in the city's many traffic circles, ready to fight any blaze started by Iranian bombs. "We are ready for this war and have been for a long time," a high school student told TIME Cor respondent Adam Zagorin. "Like the Iranians we are Muslims, but Khomeini is a devil who has forced his people against us." Iraqi newspapers played up the propaganda aspects of civilian casualties caused by the bombings, showing pictures of mothers and children injured and in shock. Said the captions: "They fail to face an Iraqi soldier, but they turn to kill Iraqi children."
On day two, the war took a more ominous turn: it singled out oil, the mainstay of both countries' economies. Iranian naval vessels shelled oil terminals at Fao island, and the Phantoms returned to bomb and rocket Basra's vast new petrochemical complex. Twenty-nine people were killed in that raid, some of them Britons, Americans and other foreign workers among a labor force of thousands. The foreigners and their families fled in cars and buses to the Kuwait border 15 miles away. "It all happened so fast," said Briton Roger Elliott. "I was just sitting there getting my truck started when I looked up and saw these jets screaming towards me. The bombs exploded 50 yards away and I could feel the skin on my face being peeled off by the concussion."
At about the same time the Iraqis sent their bombers against Iranian oil facilities across the Shatt al Arab at Abadan and farther south against Kharg island, where 14 tankers at a time can load crude. At Abadan, one of the biggest refineries in the world (587,000 bbl.-per-day capacity) and the principal source of fuel for Iran's domestic needs, flames and smoke shot skyward. "There are going to be a lot of cold Iranians this winter as a result," said a U.S. diplomat monitoring the fighting. In Tehran, the government decreed that no gasoline would be sold to private motorists for at least a week.
Meantime, Iraqi troops and armor crossed the frontier in force. The invaders mounted a multipronged drive aimed at Abadan, the nearby port of Khorramshahr, Ahwaz and Dezful, a vital pumping station on the Abadan-Tehran pipeline, and to the north around Kermanshah. The heaviest fighting, reported TIME Correspondent William Drozdiak, was around Khorramshahr, which was being pounded from three sides by Iraqi tank and artillery fire. Making his way through dust clouds raised by the armor, Drozdiak bumped into an Iraqi general, who gave him an impromptu briefing: "There is terrible fighting around Khorramshahr. Unfortunately we are not yet in control of the city."
Iran admitted the loss of five border posts in the early fighting. But as the week went on, the Iranian defenses hardened and the Iraqis found themselves pressed to maintain their salients.