Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. He also served as prime minister of Iraq from 1979 to 1991 and later from 1994 to 2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organization, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism.
Basra is a city in southern Iraq located on the Shatt al-Arab. It had an estimated population of 1.4 million in 2018. Basra is also Iraq's main port, although it does not have deep water access, which is handled at the port of Umm Qasr. However, there is ongoing construction of Grand Faw Port on the coast of Basra, which is considered a national project for Iraq and will become one of the largest ports in the world and the largest in the Middle East, in addition, the port will strengthen Iraq's geopolitical position in the region and the world. Furthermore, Iraq is planning to establish a large naval base in the Faw peninsula.
The Shatt al-Arab is a river of some 200 kilometres (120 mi) in length that is formed at the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the town of al-Qurnah in the Basra Governorate of southern Iraq. The southern end of the river constitutes the Iran–Iraq border down to its mouth, where it discharges into the Persian Gulf. The Shatt al-Arab varies in width from about 232 metres (761 ft) at Basra to 800 metres (2,600 ft) at its mouth. It is thought that the waterway formed relatively recently in geological time, with the Tigris and Euphrates originally emptying into the Persian Gulf via a channel further to the west. Kuwait's Bubiyan Island is part of the Shatt al-Arab delta.
The Al-Faw peninsula is a peninsula in the Persian Gulf, located in the extreme southeast of Iraq. The marshy peninsula is 20 km (12 mi) southeast of Iraq's third largest city, Basra, and is part of a delta for the Shatt al-Arab river, formed by the confluence of the major Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The al-Faw peninsula borders Iran to the northeast, with the cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr on the opposite side of the Shatt al-Arab, and Kuwait to the southwest, opposite from Bubiyan Island and Warbah Island, near the Iraqi city of Umm Qasr.
The Khawr Abd Allah is today an estuary, but once was the point where the Shatt al-Arab emptied into the Persian Gulf. It is located in southern Iraq and northern Kuwait. Both countries' border divides the lower portion of the estuary, but adjacent to the port of Umm Qasr, the estuary becomes wholly Iraqi. The Shatt al-Arab is now the from which the rivers drain out and is east of the Khawr Abd Allah. As the estuary extends northwestward into Iraq, it changes its name to Khawr az-Zubayr at Umm Qasr. From that point, it links by canal again to the northwest and into the Tigris and Euphrates proper. It forms the northeastern coastline of Jazirat Bubiyan and the northern coastline of Jazirat Warbah. Both of these islands are officially Kuwait.
The 1975 Algiers Agreement, also known as the Algiers Accord or as the Algiers Declaration, was signed between Iran and Iraq to settle any outstanding territorial disputes along the Iran–Iraq border. Mediated by Algeria, it served as the basis for additional bilateral treaties signed on 13 June 1975 and 26 December 1975. The territorial disputes in question concerned Iraq's Shatt al-Arab and Iran's Khuzestan Province, and Iraq had wished to negotiate to end Iran's support for the then-ongoing Iraqi Kurdish rebellion after suffering a military defeat in the 1974–1975 Shatt al-Arab conflict. On 17 September 1980, shortly after the Iranian Revolution, the Iraqi government abrogated the treaty in light of another series of cross-border clashes between the two countries. On 22 September 1980, the treaty was completely voided with the Iraqi invasion of Iran, which triggered the eight-year-long Iran–Iraq War.
Iran–United Kingdom relations are the bilateral relations between the United Kingdom and Iran. Iran, which was called Persia by the West before 1935, has had political relations with England since the late Ilkhanate period when King Edward I of England sent Geoffrey of Langley to the Ilkhanid court to seek an alliance.
The Iraqi Armed Forces are the military forces of the Republic of Iraq. They consist of the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi Air Force, and the Iraqi Navy. Along with these three primary service branches, there exists the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service and the Popular Mobilization Forces. The President of Iraq acts as the supreme commander as outlined by the constitution.
The Navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the naval warfare service of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps founded in 1985, and one of the two maritime forces of Iran, parallel to the conventional Islamic Republic of Iran Navy. The IRGC has been designated as a terrorist organization by the governments of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United States. IRGC's Navy has steadily improved its capabilities to support unconventional warfare and defend Iran's offshore facilities, coastlines, and islands in the Persian Gulf.
Al-Alam is an Arabic news channel broadcasting from Iran and owned by the state-owned media corporation Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).
Gunmen kidnapped Jalal Sharafi, the second secretary of the Iranian embassy, as he drove through Karrada district in central Baghdad, Iraq on 6 February 2007. The gunmen wore uniforms of the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion, a special Iraqi unit under United States direction. The U.S. military denied any involvement in the kidnapping. After his release on 3 April 2007, the diplomat claimed he was tortured by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives. The U.S. government denies that they had involvement in the kidnapping and alleged torture of Sharafi.
On 23 March 2007, fifteen Royal Navy personnel from HMS Cornwall were searching a merchant vessel when they were surrounded by the Navy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and detained off the Iran–Iraq coast. In the course of events, British forces claimed that the vessel was in Iraqi waters, but the Iranians insisted that they were in Iran's territorial waters. The fifteen personnel were released thirteen days later on 4 April 2007.
The Iran–Iraq border runs for 1,599 km (994 mi) from the tripoint with Turkey in the north down to the Shatt al-Arab waterway and out to the Persian Gulf in the south. Although the boundary was first determined in 1639, certain disputes continue, particularly surrounding navigation on the Shatt al-Arab.
The First Battle of al-Faw was a battle of the Iran–Iraq War, fought on the al-Faw peninsula between 10 February and 10 March 1986. The Iranian operation is considered to be one of Iran's greatest achievements in the Iran–Iraq War. The Iranians were able to capture the al-Faw peninsula, cutting off Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf in the process; this in turn hardened Iraqi attitudes to prosecute the war. The Faw peninsula was later recaptured by Iraqi forces near the end of the war.
Operation Karbala-4 was an Iranian offensive in the Iran–Iraq War on the southern front. The operation was launched after the failure of Operation Karbala-2 and Operation Karbala-3 to move the Iraqi lines in an effort to capture Iraqi territory.
Umm Qasr Port is Iraq's only deep water port, part of the city of Umm Qasr.
Patrol Forces Southwest Asia (PATFORSWA) is a United States Coast Guard command based in Manama, Bahrain. PATFORSWA was created in November 2002 as a contingency operation to support the U.S. Navy with patrol boats. The command's mission is to train, equip, deploy, and support combat-ready Coast Guard forces conducting operations in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) in the Naval Forces Central Command's area of responsibility. It was commissioned as a permanent duty station in June 2004. In July 2003, PATFORSWA moved from its own compound to facilities at Naval Support Activity Bahrain.
On January 12, 2016, two United States Navy riverine command boats were seized by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy after they entered Iranian territorial waters near Iran's Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. Initially, the U.S. military claimed the sailors inadvertently entered Iranian waters owing to mechanical failure, but it was later reported that they entered Iranian waters because of navigational errors.
The Shatt al-Arab dispute was a territorial dispute that took place in the Shatt al-Arab region from 1936 until 1975. The Shatt al-Arab was considered an important channel for the oil exports of both Iran and Iraq, and in 1937, Iran and the newly independent Iraq signed a treaty to settle the dispute. In the 1975 Algiers Agreement, Iraq made territorial concessions—including the Shatt al-Arab waterway—in exchange for normalized relations. In return for Iraq agreeing that the frontier on the waterway ran along the entire thalweg, Iran ended its support for the Peshmerga in the Second Iraqi–Kurdish War. The Iraqi government reneged on the Agreement shortly before launching the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, but accepted it once more after the war.
The 1974–1975 Shatt al-Arab conflict consisted of armed cross-border clashes between Iran and Iraq. It was a major escalation of the Shatt al-Arab dispute, which had begun in 1936 due to opposing territorial claims by both countries over the Shatt al-Arab, a transboundary river that runs partly along the Iran–Iraq border. The conflict took place between April 1974 and March 1975, and resulted in over 1,000 total casualties for both sides combined, though the Iranians eventually came to hold a strategic advantage over the Iraqis. Open hostilities formally came to an end with the 1975 Algiers Agreement, in which Iraq ceded around half of the border area containing the waterway in exchange for Iran's cessation of support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels.
British Royal Navy 
Navy of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution 
