The Iran-Iraq War and the creation of Sacred Defence cinema

The vast body of literature dedicated to the subject of warfare, as Maltaby suggests, reflects the difficulties of analyzing war, particularly its causes, conditions and effects. While the term 'war' is used to describe a myriad of ambiguous and fractious social situations in which organized violence occurs, the structural factors involved in its cause and execution vary greatly.2 Since 1980, the commencement of 2,920 days of war inflicted on Iran by Iraq, this devastating human disaster has been ignored almost universally.3 The war began with Iraq's attack on Iran on 22 September 1980 and ended eight years later, on 20 August 1988, leaving at least 300,000 martyrs and injuring more than 500,000 of a total population of Iran that, by the war's end, numbered approximately 60 million. Today, the Iranian government claims that there are still more than 50,000 bodies of Iranian volunteer soldiers (razmandeh) remaining in former battlefields situated in Iran and Iraq.