Moslem v. Moslem

The latest explosion of violence in the Middle East does not involve Arab and Israeli. It pits Moslem against Moslem. On the long-embattled 630-mile border between Iraq and Iran, troops of the two oil-rich nations blazed away at each other last week in a battle that left perhaps as many as 65 dead and 103 wounded. It was the third and most serious clash in less than two months, involving tanks and artillery. Each side claimed that the other had initiated the hostilities, but both in fact had been spoiling for the fight.

Though they share the same religion, the two countries could hardly be more different. Iraq is an Arab state, governed by the left-wing Baathist regime and aligned with Moscow. Iran is a conservative, Western-oriented monarchy whose people are of predominantly Aryan origin. The Iraqis are armed by the Soviets; the Iranians bought some $2 billion worth of U.S. arms last year.

Since the British pulled out of the Persian Gulf in 1971, Iran's Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi has engaged in an expansionary policy aimed at filling the power vacuum. His troops have occupied the Persian Gulf islands of Greater and Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa, which--despite their comic-opera names--guard the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which 120 tankers a day carry a little more than half the oil consumed by the non-Communist world. Iran earlier had abrogated a treaty granting equal navigational rights to the crucial Shatt al-Arab, a confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates that leads to the gulf. Iraq feared that Iran was attempting to cut off its oil routes from Khor al-Amaya, Iraq's principal oil terminal at the top of the gulf. Iraq broke off diplomatic relations with Iran.

An older, more bitter bone of contention is the fate of the Kurds, the nomadic people who inhabit a mountainous region that includes parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. The Kurdish tribes have long sought nationhood but are divided politically between left-and right-wing elements, which are supported respectively by Iraq and Iran--each of which accused the other of trying to subvert its native Kurdish leadership.

Yet another source of friction is Iran's dispatch of an estimated 1,500-man commando brigade to the Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman, where it is helping 11,000 loyalist troops who are trying to put down a Soviet-armed guerrilla force.

The October Arab-Israeli war brought a temporary truce, and diplomatic relations were reestablished. Iraq then felt free to send an army division to face the Israelis on Syria's Golan Heights. With the ceasefire, the Iraqi troops were again posted on the Iranian frontier. Inevitably, a series of border incidents led to last week's duel.

Both sides now accuse each other of massing troops on the border. Ironically, as long as the Arab-Israeli cease-fire holds, the Iraqi-Iranian conflict will almost certainly grow more bitter and more bloody.

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