ivalry between the Ottoman Turks which ruled Mesopotamia from 1517 until the end of the First World War and the Safavid empire in Persia (1501 1722) were fueled by sectarian enmity and recurring disputes over the disputed boundary between the two empires, especially control over the Shatt al Arab waterway which runs from the central border area down to the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf. Major wars occurred along the border in the 1600's and in the 19th century.
Through the intervention of Britain and Russia, two treaties were imposed on the disputants in the 19th century and by the British in 1937 to define navigational rights on the Shatt al Arab and to settle territorial claims to its banks, but the demarcation lines and legal rights of the two countries still remain unsettled. In the early 1970's, the Shah of Iran gave substantial aid to a Kurdish rebellion in Northern Iraq and re asserted Iran's claim to control the Shatt al Arab. In 1975 in Algiers, Saddam Hussein on behalf of Iraq made territorial concessions to Iran as the price for persuading the Shah to abandon the Kurds. Lisa Mannetti says that "Hussein felt he was pressured to sign" (17). A more recent bone of contention has been the central Iranian province of Khuzistan, eighty percent of the population of which speak Arabic and in which large oil reserves were discovered.
The most immediate cause of the war was the Iranian revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeni which took power in February, 1979 and which, according to Ismael, "changed the power configuration in the area" (35). Saddam Hussein took supreme power in Iraq in July, 1979. Simon Henderson says that Hussein "saw the Iranian revolution and its aftermath as both a threat and an opportunity" (Henderson 102). The secular state of Iraq enjoyed substantial economic growth in the 1970's. Iraq's oil income increased from $75 million in 1972 to $8 billion in 1975. Since the days of Ottoman rule, the Shias, who were mo...