On the 31th day of the Iranian months of
Shahrivar in the year 1359 (Persian calendar), former Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein used an armed brigade and backed by artillery and fighter
jets to start attacking a number of border airports and other places in
Iran, kicking off a year that lasted eight years.
Saddam who was then happy of the support he received from the US, USSR, and other countries thought that he could conquer Tehran in a few days. Believing in that, he shot one of the first Iraqi missiles toward Iran to start the war.
The fledgling Iranian
revolution of whose birth no more than 19 months had passed was busy
with internal changes and oppositional movements by groups inside the
country when Iraq started the invasion.
That made late Imam Khomeini to invite all to try to defend the country, which prepared the ground for the initial public mindset to defend Iran, sending many people to the war front.
In the first 15 days of the imposed war, the forces of the Army and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps showed strong defense, but all of a sudden, the well equipped Iraqi army did an unfair move to target many Iranian cities with missiles and rockets.
In the first step, the Ba’ath army bombarded Iran’s city of Dezful with Frog-7 missiles while only 17 days had passed into the war.
The 9K52 Luna-M is a Soviet short-range artillery rocket system. The 9M21 rockets are unguided and spin-stabilized. Its GRAU designation is 9K52, and its NATO reporting name is FROG-7. "FROG" is an acronym for "Free Rocket Over Ground".
The Luna was later extensively deployed throughout Soviet satellite states. The rocket has been widely exported and is now in the possession of a large number of countries. After the war with Iran, Iraq modified its stock of 9M21s with a joint assistance programme with Egypt and Egyptian Army engineers, by extending their range to 90 km and fitting a submunition-carrying warhead. The rocket was renamed Laith-90.
As the first FROG hit Dezful, 70 were killed and over 300 wounded. Thus Saddam introduced the war as an unfair, unbalanced conflict.
Rocketing Iranian cities was continued to the year 1362, three years after the start of the war.
During that period, over 65 rockets and missiles of various classes hit the small city of Dezful alone, pretty much killing the city.
But in the meantime other cities were also under heavy bombardment. Sometimes they would use the Scud missile kind and sometimes they used long-range artillery products to hit Iranian border cities, causing great casualty.
Scud is a series of tactical ballistic missiles developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It was exported widely to other countries, both Second and Third World countries. The term comes from the NATO reporting name Scud which was attached to the missile by Western intelligence agencies.
Iraq was the first to use ballistic missiles during the Iran–Iraq War, firing limited numbers of Frog-7 rockets at the towns of Dezful and Ahvaz. On 27 October 1982, Iraq launched its first Scud-Bs at Dezful killing 21 civilians and wounding 100. Scud strikes continued during the following years, intensifying sharply in 1985, with more than 100 missiles falling inside Iran.
After a request for TR-1 Temp (SS-12 Scaleboard) missiles was refused by the Soviets, Iraq turned to developing its own long-range version of the Scud missile, that became known as the Al Hussein. In the meantime, both sides quickly ran out of missiles, and had to contact their international partners for resupply. In 1986, Iraq ordered 300 Scud-Bs from the USSR, while Iran turned to North Korea for missile deliveries, and for assistance in developing an indigenous missile industry.
In response to heavy Iraqi bombardment, the IRGC would also use some missiles to hit military targets in Iraq. But that wasn’t enough and Iran would have to think something in order to end the missile strikes.
In the month of Bahman of the Iranian year 1362, Iran bombarded Basra and Khanaqin. Iran had previously warned the people of these cities of the impending bombardment in order to prevent civilian loss, something ordered by Imam Khomeini.
But he act did not come by fruitful in turning Iraq’s blazes of war down, till Iran decided to do something new, something that changed the fate of the war.
Iran decided that it had to respond Iraqi bombardments in kind in order to force Baghdad back down. But as they looked back, Iranian officials found little of missile and the kind at home.
Under these circumstances, Iran decided to send a group of 13 officers of the artillery of the IRGC, headed by Hassan Tehran Moqaddam, to Syria to acquire military lessons in the field of missiles.
Then minister of war Mohsen Rafiqdoust was missioned to equip the IRGC artillery’s first unit, which came as the first step to launch a missile unit with the task to educate how to use and shoot missiles as a way to respond to heavy bombardments of the Ba’ath regime of Iraq. This became a stepping stone for a new wave of measures by Iranian military bodies to boost the country’s missile capabilities.
