Iran-Iraq War

The Iran-Iraq War was fought from 22 September 1980, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran hoping to exploit the chaos following the Iranian Revolution, to a United Nations-brokered ceasefire on 20 August 1988. Eight years of trench warfare, static front lines, mass infantry assaults and the repeated use of chemical weapons by Iraq killed on the order of half a million people, making it, by most tallies, the deadliest conventional war ever fought between the regular armies of two developing countries. The war ended in stalemate on a status quo ante bellum basis, with no territorial changes and no reparations, after inflicting catastrophic economic and human cost on both nations and drawing in outside support, including American and Soviet backing for Iraq and arms supplies to Iran, that shaped the wider Middle East for a generation.