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The Second Battle of al-Faw (also known as the Operation Ramadan Mubarak (Blessed Ramadan)), fought on April 17, 1988, was a major battle of the Iran–Iraq War. After their defeat at the First Battle of al-Faw two years earlier, the newly restructured Iraqi Army conducted a major operation to clear the Iranians out of the peninsula. The Iraqis concentrated well over 100,000 troops from the battle-hardened Republican Guard versus 15,000〔''Arabs at war: military effectiveness, 1948–1991'', Kenneth M. Pollack, U of Nebraska Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8032-8783-6, (p. 225 )〕 Iranian Basij volunteers. The southern wing of the assault consisted of the Republican Guard's Madinah and Baghdad Divisions, which assaulted the Iranian lines and then allowed the Hammurabi Armoured Division to pass through and move along the southern coast of the peninsula and into al-Faw itself. Meanwhile, the regular Iraqi Army's VII Corps attacked the northern end of the line with the 7th Infantry and 6th Armoured Divisions. While the 7th Infantry's attack became bogged down, the 6th Armoured broke through the Iranian lines, the 1st Mechanised Division pushed through, and later linked up with the Republican Guard divisions outside al-Faw. Thus the peninsula had been secured within thirty-five hours, with much of the Iranians' equipment captured intact.〔 ==Prelude== Following the Karbala campaigns of 1987, but before the end of summer, the Iraqi Army started secretly practicing maneuvers in the desert behind Basra. The training maneuvers often involved multiple divisions and huge mock-ups of objectives Iraq intended to seize from Iran.〔 The Iranian defeat during the Karbala Campaign of the previous year had dented the Iranian Army's manpower, supplies, and morale, and as a result increasing numbers of Iranians were turning against the war. This meant that the Iranian Army's mobilization attempt for a renewed offensive against Iraq in 1988 had failed. The Iranian military leadership had also decided at a major strategic conference that the Iranian Army had to undertake extensive retraining and rearming in order to defeat Iraq, which could in turn take up to 5 years. As a result, the Iranian Army did not try to invade Iraq in 1988.〔 Meanwhile, with extensive supplies from Europe as well as the Soviet Union, the Iraqi army had extensively re-armed, becoming the 4th largest military in the world. Despite that, they had chosen to stay on the defensive and let Iran bleed itself in costly offensives, in which the majority of the operations ended in defeat or stalemate hence a failure to deliver the desired results. The al-Faw peninsula had been under Iranian control since 1986 when they launched a surprise attack on the peninsula as part of the larger Operation Dawn 8. The taking of the peninsula by the Iranians was a strong blow to Iraq's prestige whilst also threatening Basra from the south-east. The retaking of the peninsula was seen by Saddam Hussein as a top priority, and Iraqi General Maher Abd al-Rashid promised to recover the peninsula, going so far as to offer his daughter Sahar to Saddam's son Qusay to show his certainty.〔 Planning for the recovery of the peninsula began soon after it had been taken by the Iranians, and was largely done in secret by a small group of 6, with Saddam Hussein himself being heavily involved in the planning process. For the second battle the Iraqis had concentrated over 100,000 soldiers, of whom approximately 60% where from the Republican Guard, against some 15,000 Iranian Basij volunteers. The Iraqi command had expected the battle to take several weeks, but Iraq managed to seize the peninsula in a single day due to the collapse of the Iranian units present, with only minimal losses.〔 This stunning success led the Iraqi command to decide to expand the original battle into a larger offensive campaign against Iran. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Second Battle of al-Faw」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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