A Territorial War or a Sectarian One? Two Readings

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Historians divide over how far the Iran-Iraq War was a sectarian, Sunni versus Shia, conflict. The broader scholarly consensus, argued by the historian Efraim Karsh among others, holds that the war was fundamentally a territorial and interstate power dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway and regional dominance rather than a sectarian one, pointing to Iraq's own Shia majority population's continued loyalty to the Iraqi state through the eight years of war as evidence against a straightforward sectarian reading of the conflict.

A sectarian-framing camp, argued by the scholar Vali Nasr among others, holds that Khomeini's revolutionary government explicitly framed the war and its project of exporting the Islamic revolution in sectarian and pan-Islamist Shia terms, appealing directly to Iraq's Shia majority to rise against the Ba'athist government, while Hussein's government in turn invoked long-standing Sunni Arab anxieties about Persian and Shia influence to rally domestic and regional Arab support. Both readings are recorded here; the territorial-nationalist account is the broader scholarly consensus.