Iran-Iraq War Research Articles

Illuminationist cinema: How Islamic mysticism inspired Morteza Avini’s Sacred Defence documentaries of the Iran–Iraq War and his attempt at constructing a film theory

"‘Sacred Defence cinema’ is the official title given to Iranian pro-establishment war films concerning mainly the Iran-Iraq War [1980-1988]. The most prominent figure of this filmmaking movement who both made films and wrote about them was the documentary filmmaker, Morteza Avini [1947-1993]. In his search for a new Islamic inspired cinematic language, Avini argued that Islamic mysticism could inspire a mode of filmmaking which he called ‘illuminationist cinema’. He used this term mainly in order to reflect on the filmmaking techniques he developed and used during the making of his own documentaries, but also proposed it as a filmmaking method to be adopted by other Islamic filmmakers. Avini’s early death in 1993 put a stop to his theorisation of ‘illuminationist cinema’; however, his films and his writings continue to inspire new generations of Iranian propaganda filmmakers. In this paper, by analysing Avini’s films and writings, I lay out a definition of his ‘illuminationist cinema’ and explain what aspects of Islamic mysticism inspired which filmmaking techniques developed and theorised by him. "

Effects of Chemical Warfare Throughout Time on Mental Disorder Symptoms and Brain Executive Functions of Veterans Exposed to Chemical Weapons

Background: During the Iran-Iraq war (1980 - 1988), Iran was subjected to chemical attacks for over five years. These attacks left many mental injuries, especially for the veterans exposed to chemical weapons. Objectives: This case-control study compared mental disorder symptoms and brain executive functions of veterans exposed to chemical weapons with healthy individuals. Methods: The present study was conducted on veterans exposed to chemical weapons during the war. The control group comprised healthy individuals matched to the cases based on age, gender, occupation, level of education, and place of residence. One hundred seventy participants were included in the study, with 85 individuals in each group. The Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) and Nejati questionnaire were used to collect data on the symptoms of mental disorders and brain executive functions. Multivariate analysis of variance was used for data analysis. Results: The findings revealed that the total effect of the subscales of mental disorders in all nine domains was significantly higher in veterans exposed to chemical weapons than in healthy individuals (P < 0.05). In addition, the actual impact of the subscales of the executive brain functions of veterans exposed to chemical weapons was significantly lower compared to healthy individuals (P < 0.05). Conclusions: Our findings showed that veterans exposed to chemical weapons exhibited higher mental disorder symptoms across all domains than the control group. Moreover, veterans demonstrated weaker cognitive functions in terms of executive brain functions compared to healthy individuals. The implications of these findings are significant for mental health specialists working with veterans exposed to chemical weapons.

A Medical Bibliographic Source of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

A Medical Bibliographic Source of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

Suggestions for Improving Health Care Delivery: Al-Qalam University College Perspective

Quality improvement of health care in Iraq is an essential social standard demand now. The health care system, health care providers, and delivery of health care have confronted a series of extremely unusual difficulties during the period from 1980 to date. When the infrastructure of Ministry of Health and health care availability to Iraqi community unexpectedly started to deteriorate because of the wars (Iraqi-Iranian war wich lasted for eight years and two Gulf was), the economic sanctions imposed upon the country and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Medical education is under reform as it has started to change from teacher-centered to student-centered education. Researchers are woring seriously to find and set a workable system to improve the medical education in Arab Countries. The medical research is important as it led to health development, breakthrough and medicine future shaping, as it provides the required information that is vital in improvement of disease diagnosis, disease prevention, community health, establishment of new treatment approaches, discovery of new drugs, and economical benefit.

Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq

Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq

The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

Years of life lost to revolution and war in Iran

AbstractHow was life expectancy in Iran affected by the Islamic Revolution and subsequent war with Iraq? This study examines the joint effect of regime change and the war against Iraq on life expectancy in Iran between 1978 and 1988. If there had been no revolution and war in Iran, how would the life expectancy of Iranians have developed? To answer this question, we use a synthetic control model to construct a counterfactual Iran based on a weighted average of other comparable countries, which reproduces the situation of pre‐revolution Iran but does not experience the revolution and war. We then compare the life expectancies of the counterfactual and actual Iran that underwent a regime change and war with Iraq. Our results indicate that an average Iranian's total life expectancy would have been approximately five years longer without the revolution and war. The revolution had a moderate long‐term impact on total life expectancy at birth, with the most significant influence being attributed to the war itself, particularly on male life expectancy. Our main findings are robust to a series of tests, including placebo tests. We investigate possible reasons that may explain the impact on longevity.

Evaluating emotional and social interactions in museum liminal spaces: A case study of the National Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defense of Tehran, Iran

AbstractBackgroundThis study explores which architectural features of interstitial spaces improve visitors’ interactions with the overall museum space and with other visitors at the National Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defense in Tehran, Iran. Interstitial or liminal spaces are defined as “in‐between” spaces connecting primary spaces in a building that have a key role in relating humans to places.ObjectivesThis study asks which geometric features can increase the socio‐emotional interactions for visitors.MethodsTo answer the question, observations of behavior and body language were made at the study site. These data were analyzed based on body language science and neuroscience literature. Five in‐between spaces connecting exhibition halls were selected, and visitor behaviors were observed and analyzed using the Observer XT software by Noldus.ResultsResults showed that certain types of passages were associated with the highest levels of emotional interaction, while others are associated with the highest levels of social interaction.ConclusionsThe results of this study align with earlier neuroscience findings regarding brain activities in relation to certain geometries. The methods used in this study can be applied by architects and designers in their predesign planning and post design evaluation processes to improve socio‐emotional interactions for visitors.

A Geographical analysis for mine distribution and its impact on natural pasture in Sulaymaniyah government.

Mine is identified as a part of war and intimidating weapon for people. It is a war weapon which is used for the purpose of disserving both physical and material damages. It is the most effective and the cheapest weapon which is designed to be placed under a material or under the ground near the surface of the natural pastures that are not useful for the purpose of cultivating and farming due to some natural factors such as (topography, climate, soil, etc.) of the lands which covered with forests and grasslands because of the diversity of the places, the types and the variability of the seasons which grow up without any human efforts. The lands that are the main sources of the best, healthiest, and cheapest kinds of fodders and algae for all domestic and wild animals. Natural pastures are also renewable resources that have influence on all the aspects of geographical, environmental, economic, social, etc. of each regions. The study attempts to show the distribution of minefields in Sulaymaniyah province, the history of mines in the study area, and their effects on natural pastures in the Sulaymaniyah province. Some factors in the study area cause an increase in mines; the study attempts to show the distribution of minefields in the Sulaymaniyah province to protect people, tourists, and livestock owners in the border region in particular. In the study, inductive, regional, and analytical methods are used. The study consists of three main parts: the first is about the site and situation of Sulaymaniyah province; the second is about the types of mines and the distribution of minefields in the Kurdistan region and Sulaymaniyah province. The last part is about the effect of mines on the natural pastures in the study area, with a conclusion and suggestion to reduce the impacts of mines on the natural pastures and their people in Sulaymaniyah province in general. At the end of the study, some results were obtained, such as: Sulaymaniyah province has the highest rate of landmines, which is about %64 of all landmines included in the Kurdistan region, and about %84 of landmines in Sulaymaniyah province are located in districts that have borders with Iran, because of the Iraq-Iran war. In the study area, minefields have an impact of about %4.11 on natural pastures, and about %64.43 of the livestock wealth in Sulaymaniyah province depends on natural pastures.

When Security Imperatives meet Sectarian Temptations: the Tehran-Riyadh rivalry

This paper discusses how security considerations and sectarianism have served Iran and Saudi Arabia as mutually reinforcing tools in their strife to secure their positions in the struggle for regional influence and standing. It premises that no single factor can explain this conflict and that its proper understanding requires a more comprehensive approach that links factors and analyses their joint impact. The main hypothesis is that an analysis of the impacts of security and sectarianism, both individually and as mutually reinforcing dynamics, allows for a more credible understanding of the Iran-Saudi Arabia conflict. The discussion studies the approaches that both sides have adopted as they dealt with regional developments and made efforts to preserve their legitimacy and internal stability. It contextualizes these approaches with the rivalry during the era of the Shah, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the end of the Cold War, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and the Arab uprisings of 2011, particularly the conflict in Syria. This study proposes that understanding how sectarianism and security considerations have impacted both countries’ decision-making since 1979 can help explain how security has become an essential element in the Tehran-Riyadh conflict.

Hypocrisy & Norm Enforcement: US Responses to Chemical Weapons Allegations against Iraq and Syria

The use of chemical weapons (CW) by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War appears to have been subject to far less decisive US responses than similar accusations against Syria during the Syrian civil war. However, the two instances have not yet been subject to direct scholarly comparison. This article treats the Iraqi and Syrian instances as two distinct cases and compares US actions to prevent, investigate and deter CW use on each occasion. After demonstrating that the US responded more decisively to the allegations against Syria, we then employ process tracing to locate both cases within existing theoretical discussions of US intervention in the global South generally, as well as CW norm enforcement in particular. In doing so, we propose that, in addition to other factors including the US aspiration to world dominance and its resultant framing of its material and security interests as well as a lesser regard for citizens of the global South, the anti-US stance of either the CW perpetrator or victim can also affect how the US responds to accusations of CW norm violation. This casts further doubt on the veracity of stated humanitarian motives for US intervention abroad.

Discourse analysis of texts on Iraq-Iran War: A case study of Persian to English narrations

While critical discourse analysis has gained solid ground in war literature and narratives, few studies have used this analytical tool to scrutinize the translation of ideology in the literature relating to war. This study aimed to analyze how ideology was (re)produced and translated in the Iraq-Iran War narrations. To this end, a sample from a corpus of such narrations was selected and analyzed based on Farahzad’s (2012) CDA model. The results showed that ideologies produced in the proto-texts were rendered in the meta-texts with a few alterations at the textual level and with no change at the semiotic level. The findings indicated the role of ideology in shaping the translated text and revealed how language can be manipulated as a social practice to support ideologies, maintain power, and serve the interests of powerful groups in society. Such materials could also shape the reader’s mind about war. Parallel studies would shed more light on the function of ideology in war literature, narratives and translation processes. This research has implications for professional translators, translation educators, translation teachers and students as well as policymakers for publications of translated texts loaded with ideologies, raising their awareness regarding the importance of critical discourse analysis in translation studies to trace hidden ideologies in texts and meta-texts.

Reports

Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh, Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran–Iraq War (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2021), 457 pp. International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Commission on the Middle East Conference ‘The Middle East from the Margin’, 7–9 September 2022, Istanbul, Türkiye.

A woman should be scared: maternal ambivalence in Under the Shadow

ABSTRACT Mothers in horror films have been theorized as monsters through concepts such as the monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993) and the monstrous-maternal. In this paper, I examine how this figuration of the maternal is taken up in the British-Iranian horror film Under the Shadow (dir. Babak Anvari, 2016). The film hybridizes the ‘maternal horror film’ with the genre of the Iran-Iraq war film, which also bears a complex relation to the figure of the mother. Drawing on the concept of maternal ambivalence, I argue that Under the Shadow posits in the mother protagonist and the feminine jinn (spirit) that haunts her a tension that unsettles the longstanding dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers in horror films. The film’s ambivalent position on mothers is expressive of a general cultural ambivalence toward mothers in post-revolutionary Iranian cultural politics.

State and Religion in Iraq: The Sufi Insurgency of the Former Baʿth Regime in Historical Context

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, Iraqi society has experienced profound crises in its transition from a strong centralized state under secular Baʿth Party authoritarianism to a new weak but still authoritarian federal state that is dominated by Shiʿi Islamist parties and plagued by factionalism, open sectarian competition, and conflict. A comprehensive scrutiny of the country's recent historical ruptures and continuities that pertain to the relations between the state and religion in particular is still a desideratum in contemporary Iraq studies. The extent to which thirty-five years of Baʿthi dictatorship transformed and lastingly shaped Iraq's diverse religious landscape is still not yet fully understood. Following the US-led invasion, the former regime was well-remembered for its repression and atrocities against almost all segments of society, but its image and the long-held notion and memory of it as “atheist” and “antireligious” are increasingly being challenged. Moreover, sectarian conflicts and violence since 2005 reveal an ongoing conflict over the interpretive sovereignty and ownership of famous religious sites of memory, such as shrines and mosques, between the various factions in Iraq. Beginning with the Iran–Iraq War in 1980, the Baʿth regime lavishly sponsored Sunni and Shiʿi shrines and advertised them in its religious war propaganda all over the country as sites of memory for the Iraqi and Arab nation. Many of these religious sites were surrounded by a certain confessional ambiguity and constitute memorials and meeting places for Sunnis and Shiʿis equally. After the fall of the regime, this ambiguity sparked sectarian competition over these sites since both communities often associated with one and the same shrine quite different memories of the same saintly figure, or they disagreed about who was buried there. Radical jihadist Salafis, in turn, generally rejected them as un-Islamic and even associated them with the old regime from 2014 onward.

Port Cities in the Persian Gulf: From Quiet Pearling Towns to Global Cities

Abstract Divergent historical paths and different levels of state attention have led to different developmental paths by the contemporary port cities of the Persian Gulf. Some port cities were established as company towns by Western oil enterprises, with Abadan and Dammam as primary examples, designed specifically for purposes of segregating Western employees from local ones and housing each according to hierarchy and rank. Dammam has received government attention and resources, but Abadan has mostly been left on its own, still bearing the scars of Iran's war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988. Also largely ignored are secondary port cities such as Basra, Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas, especially in comparison to the aspiring global cities of Kuwait, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai. Whether this latter group of port cities have reached the status of “global cities” is an open question, despite their expanding roles as nodes in global networks of transportation, logistics, and services. Impressive buildings and modern landmarks they have in abundance, but whether form can attract or foster substance is yet to be seen.

The Form of Remembrance: Prison Writing and the Memory of the Ba‘th in Dreaming of Baghdad and I‘jaam

In his 2019 critical study, Husayn Sarmak Hassan complained that not enough attention has been given to the production of Iraqi prison writing even after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime and its censorship apparatus. He notes, for example, that during the 2017 Cairo book fair, he found thirty (presumably new) prison novels, none of which were written by Iraqis. The relative scarcity of prison novels from Iraq is most certainly not due to lack of content; since the collapse of the old regime, there has been a proliferation of personal accounts, both oral and written, detailing the horrors of Saddam's Ba'th and the extent of the human toll of its wars and oppression. The ensuing documentation projects that emerged out of this mass catharsis aimed to amplify voices that had hitherto been marginalized and silenced, including the experiences of political prisoners. Hassan's study on prison writing, published by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, can be seen in this light: as part of a national effort to process the literary and psychological aspects of the Ba‘th's legacy. However, the author's interest in prison writing also stems from his professional background as a medical doctor and psychiatrist directly involved in the study and treatment of PTSD in military veterans of the Iran–Iraq War. His personal interest in the experiences of Iraqi political prisoners is also made clear by certain paratextual elements in his study; in the acknowledgements, for example, Hassan dedicates his text to a friend who spent twenty years in incarceration as a political prisoner, and to his brother, who he found unrecognizable due to starvation and torture on a visit to a Najaf prison in 1994.

Remnants of Pain and Suffering

During an archaeology of garbage project in the city of Tehran in 2018, a garbage bag was documented that presented objects signifying pain and illness. The study of this material evidence indicated that the garbage was from a patient who was hospitalized at home, but a written document also present in the same garbage bag provided further context that led us to revise our initial interpretation. The document showed that these objects were linked not just to a disabled person, but to a victim of the Iran–Iraq War. The violence of war thus extends through time and affects all aspects of everyday life, changing its victims forever. The evidence for this includes waste and garbage. In this paper, we attempt to narrate the story of the pain and suffering of a war victim based on his garbage, a man whose life has been changed forever by war.

An Evasive Aesthetics: Appropriation, Witnessing and War in Shadi Angelina Bazeghi’s Flowmatic

ABSTRACT In this article, I investigate how Shadi Angelina Bazeghi writes about the Iran-Iraq War in her poetry collection Flowmatic (2020). Bazeghi assembles several different kinds of texts in Flowmatic, and one of these texts is a testimony by an Iranian soldier-engineer who worked as a programmer setting up at system to identify the bodies and body parts of fallen Iranian soldiers. Both the words of the soldier’s testimony and the act of programming and data processing have found their way into the poem; as appropriated text and as the poem’s overarching aesthetic mode. Using the soldier’s witness account as a prism, I will look at three aspects of the poetry collection: 1) how the testimony is appropriated, 2) how Bazeghi is witnessing though appropriation, and 3) how she writes about war from a feminine point of view. I argue that Bazeghi through the evasive aesthetics and the heightened appropriation in Flowmatic challenges how women can witness and write about war.

US Policy in the Persian Gulf in the 1980s

The article deals with the U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf region in the 1980s. During this period, the neoconservatives came to power in the U.S., which was the reason for the tightening of foreign policy. The administrations of J. Carter and R. Reagan began an unprecedented build-up of forces in the region, which was justified, in particular, by the Iran-Iraq war. The fall of the Shah’s regime in Iran after the 1979 revolution forced the U.S. to change allies. The author proves that during the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. played a double game by supplying weapons to both warring countries. This policy caused a prolongation of the war. Weakening the two most important countries in the region was in line with the U.S. geopolitical objective: during the war, it played the role of “balancer” or “rejoicing third”. However, Washington’s official support for Baghdad led Iraqi leaders to believe that the U.S. would support them in the next aggression