Iran’s Cities Were Bombarded In 1980s, Today’s Attacks Could Be Worse

Israel’s unprecedented bombing campaign against Iran entered its fourth day on Monday, with its increasing toll on Iranian civilians worsening. Iranian cities and their residents haven’t endured this level of bombardment since its eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s. Some analysts even contend that the present Israeli bombardments are already somewhat worse.

Iranian Health Ministry spokesperson Hossein Kermanpour announced Sunday that the death toll from Israel’s bombing has risen to at least 224 dead and 1,200 injured, 90 percent of whom he said were civilians, including 70 women and children. The single deadliest incident for civilians so far occurred on Saturday, when a Tehran apartment block collapsed, killing 60, half of them children.

As Israel’s bombing continued deep inside the capital, Tehran, on Sunday, several panicked residents upped and left, most of them heading for the more rural north for sanctuary. One 37-year-old Tehran resident quoted by Iran International explained how her “elderly parents are reliving the traumas of the Iran-Iraq War every time a missile lands.”

Millions of younger Iranians today have no memory of that war and its impact on civilians. While it was essentially a grinding World War I-style war of attrition, primarily fought along Iran’s western border regions, the war also directly affected civilians far from the frontlines. With his infamous Scud and al-Husayn ballistic missiles, Saddam’s forces would bring the war to civilians in major Iranian cities like Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz, and, of course, Tehran. In seven weeks of tit-for-tat missile exchanges in 1988, the war’s final year, Iraqi missiles killed at least 2,000 Iranians and injured another 6,000. Two million residents fled Tehran, which then had a population of six million compared to over almost 10 million in the city alone today.

Israel’s ongoing bombardment hasn’t resulted in this level of civilian casualties or displacement—at least not yet.

“Israel’s military campaign in Iran is undeniably intense, precise, and severe – marking the most significant assault Iran has faced since the Iran-Iraq War,” Freddy Khoueiry, a global security analyst for the Middle East and North Africa at the risk intelligence company RANE, told me. “That said, it has not yet reached the scale or devastation of the 1980s conflict, which spanned nearly a decade, crippled both nations’ economies, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties.”

“Still, the economic implications from this war will be dire on Iranians.”

Arash Azizi, a visiting fellow at Boston U and author of the 2020 book The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions, believes the present Israeli attacks are “already more severe” than those historical Iraqi ones.

“That war included ground invasion of Iran, so that was a different angle,” Azizi told me. “But nothing like this level of shock and awe existed in those attacks, nor did Saddam’s army have the technological advancements of Israel’s army today.”

There are few places where most people in Tehran or other major cities can seek adequate shelter during these attacks, another striking parallel with the 1980s.

In her renowned 2003 memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi recalled how Tehran lacked public bomb shelters and adequate civil defense during that time.

“Never once during the eight years of war did the government create a cohesive program for the safety and security of its citizens,” she wrote. “Shelters meant the basements or the lower levels of apartment houses that sometimes buried you. Yet most of us did not realize our own vulnerability until later, when Tehran was also hit, like the other cities.”

Today, Israeli strikes are hitting several parts of the densely-populated Iranian metropolis often frequented by and packed with civilians. Israeli strikes hit Niavaran and Tajrish in the affluent north, Hafte Tir Square in the central business district, and the 12-mile-long Valiasr Street, which is chronically clogged with traffic on normal days, that runs from north to south.

“The displacement of civilians has already begun,” Azizi said. “Roads out of Tehran are in constant traffic as Tehranis flee to the north of Iran. Some will inevitably seek to leave via the Western land borders to Turkey and then beyond.”

“Israelis are now saying that causing an exodus out of Tehran is part of their plan as part of political destabilization.”

Iran has repeatedly hit Israel with ballistic missile bombardments since the Israeli operation, codenamed Rising Lion, began early Friday—a pre-dawn attack on Monday struck Tel Aviv and Haifa, killing at least eight Israelis.

These Iranian missile strikes have killed at least 24 Israelis and injured another 592 as of writing. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Monday that residents of Iran’s capital “will have to pay the price of the dictatorship and evacuate their homes in areas where it will be necessary to strike regime targets and security infrastructure in Tehran.”

“The Israeli bombings, given their scale, are already unprecedented in the entire history of Iran,” Azizi said. “This is similar to Saddam’s invasion of Iran in the 1980s or the Allied invasion of Iran in 1941, even though there is no ground invasion this time.”

RANE’s Khoueiry believes that as the war shifts toward one of attrition, the humanitarian toll will rise along with increasing strikes against civilian infrastructure.

“Civilian displacement will likely worsen – and we’ve already seen footage of traffic heading out of Tehran – and the damage to critical infrastructure will place significant strain on Iran’s economy, making recovery both slower and more expensive,” he said.

Khoueiry believes a more apt comparison for Israel’s present targeting of Iranian cities can be found in more recent wars between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“Strategically, the current dynamics resemble Israel’s war with Lebanon more than the Iran-Iraq conflict,” he said.

“In particular, Israel appears to be shifting towards its ‘Dahiyeh Doctrine’ – a military strategy focused on overwhelming force and the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure to deter adversaries through widespread disruption and imposing economic costs.”

While the Iraqi air and missile strikes of the 1980s caused significant death and destruction in Iran, the psychological effects they had on Iranians were arguably greater than the actual deaths and physical destruction they caused, especially near the war’s end. In 1987-88, the Iranian population and leadership alike truly feared that Saddam would saturate the country’s major population centers with lethal chemical agents, either dropped by warplanes or fitted atop his missiles. These fears certainly didn’t come out of nowhere. Iraqi aircraft dropped mustard gas on the Iranian city of Sardasht in the West Azerbaijan province on June 28, 1987, killing 130 people and injuring around 8,000.

Iraq’s deadly chemical attack against Iraqi Kurdistan’s eastern border town of Halabja on March 16, 1988, which killed 5,000 Kurdish civilians, mostly women and children, and remains the single deadliest gas attack against a civilian population in history, shocked the Iranians.

“The Iraqis showed in Halabja that if tomorrow they were to strike Tabriz in the same way, there would be nothing we could do about it,” Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, acting commander-in-chief of the Iranian military at the time, later recalled.

“Saddam’s chemical bombings of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan and Sardasht in Iran had a huge psychological effect,” Azizi said.

“Sardasht is something of an Iranian Hiroshima (there are actually links between the two cities), and this is the lens through which we (Iranians) view Saddam and the Iraqi war,” he added. “But Israeli attacks are also far and wide and have already killed so many civilians.”

“Israel will be seen in a similar light if it continues these attacks longer.”