Military Model Scene

Title: Armies of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-88
Author: Chris McNab
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-4728-4557-3

Number 239 in the Elite series of soft-cover books from Osprey, all packed into a neat 64-page book in the standard style for the series. With 8-pages of artwork illustrating figures of uniforms & equipment distributed throughout the book, all with detailed descriptions, it reminded me of their Men-at-Arms series in the attraction for figure modellers. Add a helpful map and plenty of archive images the whole story is well illustrated.
The Introduction sets the scene, along with a basic Chronology of the war. The rest is broken into sections covering the Iranian Army and their paramilitary units, along with their weaponry & equipment, and this is followed by a similar breakdown tackling the Iraqi side of the war. Essentially a border war between two neighbours, it raged for 8 years with toing and froing before finally ending with little change to the borders in the end. A long war costing thousands of lives on both sides.
Costs fuelled by profits from oil in both countries, the rival regimes fought a long, largely conventional war between themselves and I think you can't fail to wonder why neighbours can't live peacefully alongside each other. Soon after it ended Iraq turned its' attention to Kuwait and the whole different story of the Gulf War largely overshadows the earlier war with Iran. An interesting story to try and understand, though I still fail to believe that the bulk of normal people in these countries really want the kind of loss that war brings.
Thanks to Osprey for our review copy.

Robin