The
Khuzestan War was main theater of the Iranian Civil War after the failure of the post-Shah regime to create a unified government from the shaky coalition of forces that had overthrown the Pahlavi dynasty. Emboldened by the chaos, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein repudiated an earlier agreement that had ended Iraq's claims to the oil-rich Khuzestan province of Iran and sent his troops in to annex it. Despite the element of surprise and an Iran beset by civil war, the Iraqi advance into Khuzestan was surprisingly halted before it could reach the edge of the territory Hussein had claimed was Iraqi. Both factions opposing Iraq, the National Council for Iran (the shaky coalition of nationalists and liberals) and the Council of the Islamic Revolution (followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini), despite fighting fiercely throughout the rest of the country, agreed to not oppose the others' efforts at fighting the Iraqis, stopping short of an alliance.
The war devastated Khuzestan and the refineries that had made it such a valuable region and destabilized Iran even more, with both factions involved in Khuzestan being unable to consolidate their territory outside of it and resulting in large parts of the country falling outside the control of any faction that could unify the country. The devastation of the oil refineries and the danger to shipping near Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf caused global oil prices to rise, adding an economic impetus to the regional crisis felt as a result of the vacuum left by the Shah's departure.
The Soviet Union's agreement in favor of the creation of the United Nations Stabilization Force For Iran (UNSFFI) marked a crucial point in the Cold War as the two superpowers' militaries fought with each other for the first time since the Second World War and started the two on the road to the Bern Accords. With China being the only permanent UN Security Council member not sending troops, Iraq's defeat was a foregone conclusion. It took less than two weeks for UN forces to remove Iraqi forces from Iran following a prolonged bombing campaign of Iraqi positions while the majority of the force gained control over Tehran and other major cities in the rest of the country.
The war's legacy profoundly eased the "Vietnam syndrome" that the US had suffered from since the 1970s and firmly entrenched Iranian democracy, despite intermittent spurts of violence following the expulsion of Iraq until the country’s first free elections in 1985. Furthermore, the cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union marked a new era in both each superpowers' understanding of one another as well as global espionage- since the end of Soviet participation in UNSFFI, dozens of captured agents from both sides have cited information learned about the other side as part of the war and occupation as vital to their operations. International sanctions placed on Iraq as a result of the conflict would not be lifted until 1995, after UN inspectors reported that Iraq had dismantled its nuclear weapons program that Hussein had begun in the 1970s.
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