Khomeni v Saddam: The Iran-Iraq War

Stunning, newly discovered front-line archive footage gives maximum visual impact to the first-hand testimony from a range of participants. Access has been secured to private photo collections, personal recollections from Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, expert historians and government insiders, including many from the US.

Triggered by the rivalry between the despot Saddam Hussein and the religious fanatic, Ayatollah Khomeini, the war grew from a blitzkrieg attack by Iraq to a total war that threatened to escalate into a global conflict. September 2020 will be the 40th anniversary of the start of the war and with the US and Iran currently at loggerheads, Iraq in chaos and the ideology of martyrdom as powerful as ever, the story has a strong relevance to the Middle East of today.

Soldiers on both sides who fought in war – the longest conventional conflict of the 20th century - tell their remarkable stories for the first time on television. It was a war of great brutality. Child soldiers as young as eight were needlessly slaughtered in their thousands and chemical weapons were deployed with horrific effect against both soldiers and civilians. Whole cities were levelled and vast human wave attacks were launched on a scale not seen since WWI. In all, 2.5 million soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded.

Supported by the leading scholar on this subject – French historian Pierre Razoux – this landmark series is the first ever to reveal the full story of the Iran-Iraq war - a conflict which consolidated the Islamic Revolution and its foreign policy, and led Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, triggering three decades of chaos in the region.