Operation Before The Dawn - The Battle

The Battle

Operation Fajr al-Nasr (Before the Dawn/Dawn of Victory), launched on 6 February 1983, and it saw the Iranian shift of focus from the southern to the central and northern sectors. Iran, using 200,000 "last reserve" Revolutionary Guard troops, attacked along a 40 kilometres (25 mi) stretch near Al Amarah, Iraq about 200 kilometres (120 mi) southeast of Baghdad. One armoured division proceeded to Sumar in the central zone as a diversion to mask seven reserve infantry divisions that went from the southern sector to the central city of Dezful. The Iraqis knew about this concentration of forces and knew that an inevitable mass human wave assault would occur in the central zone, yet did nothing to disrupt what would be Operation Before the Dawn, which began in February 1983. This was Iran’s long awaited plan to take the war inside Iraq on a grand scale. The Iranians wanted to penetrate the cities of al-Shabeeb and al-Amarah, and to reach the highways linking the north to Baghdad. In the south, a massive Iranian force of two infantry and two armoured divisions, three border guard regiments, an airborne regiment, a Basij division, and two artillery battalions attempted to isolate Basra from the rest of Iraq.

Facing the Iranians was the Iraqi 4th Corps, which was made up of two infantry divisions, one mechanized division, and two armoured divisions. The al-Shabeeb assault was stalled by 60 kilometers of hilly escarpments, forests and river torrents blanketing the way to al-Amarah. Once the Iranians finally arrived near al-Amarah, Iraqi air force fighters thwarted Iranian close air support, but the Iraqi counter-attack was also hindered and the various attacks and counter-attacks regressed into entrenchment and artillery duels. The Iranians dug themselves in along the entire front lines, from north to south, and although Iraq countered the assault on al-Shabeeb, it did not result in Iraq’s tactical advantage as these thousands of entrenched Iranian forces now concentrated artillery on Basra, Khanqhan, and Mandali.

By the middle of the offensive, Tehran Radio reported having liberated over 120 square miles (310 km2) of Iranian territory. The reality was much more bleak, however, as Iran continually resorted to crude tactics, including the use of soldiers in human wave charges across no man's land, which was always met with withering fire from the Iraqis. Lightly equipped and often poorly trained Iranians attempted to charge dug-in Iraqi infantrymen firing from trenches. In addition, Iranian teenage soldiers died by the hundreds, and some were captured after being wounded. Residents of the city of Ahvaz, 100 miles (160 km) behind the front, reported that their morgue was filled to the rim with bodies from the field.