ABSTRACT
In terms of political violence, human losses and material destruction, the period between the Iranian-Islamic revolution in 1979 and the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 was the most devastating in the modern history of the Persian Gulf. Revolution in Iran and the ensuing war between that country and Iraq exacerbated existing insecurities amongst all the littoral states. This process transmuted regional relations into an atypical period of hostility. Never before had there been bloodshed on such a scale and not since the First World War and Vietnam had there been a comparable systematic use of chemical weapons on the warfront. The numbers give an impression about the scale of destruction during the longest conventional warfare in the twenty first century.35 On the Iranian side, according to Hadi Qalamnevis, Director General of the Statistics and Information Department at the Islamic Revolution Martyrs Foundation, 204,795 people lost their lives in the Iran-Iraq war, including 188,015 military and 16,780 civilians.36 Earlier estimates by Mohsen Rafiqdust, the former head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force, had stated that 400,000 were wounded during the war.37 According to a Senior Iranian Foreign Ministry official, about 60,000 Iranians were killed by chemical weapons attacks, with over 300,000 suffering from related syndromes.38 Overall, it is estimated that 370,000 people were killed on both sides with an additional number of approximately 700,000 people maimed and injured.39 In terms of material losses, Iranian government estimates indicate that the war caused US$ 440 billion in direct losses to the Iranian economy, with another US$ 490 billion categorised as indirect losses.40 According to other sources, it is estimated that the costs amount to aggregated direct and indirect costs of US$ 627 billion to Iran and US$ 561 billion to Iraq,41 with the total costs exceeding the overall oil revenues of the two states in the twentieth century.42
