The Bath party, ruled by Saddam Hussein, exiled between one hundred to two hundred thousand ethnically Persian Iraqis to Iran. This community, which moved across the border to an unfamiliar land because of their supposed ethnicity, has been afforded surprisingly little more than brief mentions in the historiographies of Iran and Iraq. From the 1970s through the 1980s, “Persian” Iraqis were forced to divorce spouses, relinquish inheritance rights, and migrate to Iran. During the bloody eight-year war (1980-1988), both the Islamic Republic and the Bathists failed to integrate this community. These exiles, I argue, represent the counterpoint to the fight between the Bath and Islamic Republic to win the loyalties of historically marginalized communities, namely the Shias of Iraq and the Arabs of Iran. While Iran fiercely fought for the support of their Arab population and aggressively courted Shia Arab POWs, the regime strangely fumbled with Persian Iraqi exiles. I assert this proves both the Islamic Republic’s desire to weaken Iran’s ethnocentric nationalism as well as the vulnerability of this group (and any group, in fact) that held no historic claim to territory, like the Kurds of Kurdistan or Arabs of Khuzistan, which would give the Islamic Republic justification for annexation.
The definition of a Persian Iraqi was, after all, exceptionally nebulous. In fact, many scholars of Iraq have discussed the tendency among Sunni pan-Arabists to conflate Shia Arabs with Persians. Whether these “Persians” truly self-identified as such or were mistakenly assigned that identity by the state made the situation all the more complex. While Iraq assumed the loyalty of its “Persians” lied with Iran, as much as they expected the loyalties of Khuzestani Arabs lied with Iraq, I demonstrate that the Islamic Republic considered these Persians a liability and preferred they return back from where they came. Ultimately, neither wished to acknowledge this community as “native” to their territories. By engaging oral histories, literature, memoirs, print journalism, and documentaries produced during the conflict, I demonstrate the social and cultural frontier on which the Iran-Iraq War was fought and bring to light the stories of this forgotten community.
