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mark upon the Baathist government in Baghdad. Conscious of Iraq’s inferi­
ority to Persia in terms of population, wealth and military strength, alarmed by
what they saw as a display of belligerence by the shah when his troops occupied
Abu Musa and the Tunbs at the end of 1971, and all too aware, also, of their
own friendless condition in the Arab world, the Baathists began a hasty search
for wealthy and powerful allies. They found one in the next two or three years
in the Soviet Union, whose interest in the Gulf had been growing ever since the
British government at the beginning of 1968 had declared its intention of
abandoning its political and military position in the region. The principal
attractions for Russia of a foothold in Iraq were twofold - access to Iraqi oil and
access to the Gulf. As the Soviet government was not anxious to be drawn into
the dispute over the Shatt al-Arab, thereby needlessly antagonizing the shah
and his government, and as that waterway was in many respects, practical as
well as legal, unattractive as a means of egress to the sea, it was hardly
surprising that, as Iraq’s contacts with the Sc/iet Union became more inti­
mate, the Baghdad regime began to show signs of preparing to reopen the
frontier dispute with Kuwait.
While a number of agreements concerning trade, technical assistance and
the supply of arms had been concluded between Iraq and the Soviet Union
before 1969, they were as nothing compared with the hectic succession of
agreements which now followed. Some of the more significant of these pro­
vided for Russian assistance in the development of Iraq’s oil industry, in
association with the Iraq National Oil Company. Payment for this assistance
was to be made in crude oil. Particular attention was given in these agreements
to the exploitation of the North Rumailah field, south-west of Basra, which had

been discovered by the Iraq Petroleum Company some years earlier and
expropriated by Qassim in i960. With Russian help North Rumailah was
expected to come on stream in 1972, with an initial annual output of 5 million
tons rising to 20-25 million by 1975. The Russians also undertook to build a
pipeline from North Rumailah to Fao, near the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab,
and to construct storage tanks and loading facilities at that port to handle the
increased flow of oil for export.
Fao, however, had its deficiencies as an oil-loading port. It lay upstream of
the bar at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab, and could be reached only by vessels
of under thirty-five feet in draught. A second oil-loading terminal at Khaur
al-Amayah, to the westward, was restricted to vessels of under fifty feet in
draught. A deep-water terminal for large tankers was thus badly needed, and
there was no suitable site for one along the brief span of coastline between the
Shatt al-Arab and the Kuwait frontier. That frontier struck the coast at a point
just below Umm Qasr, which had been developed as a port by the British and
Americans during the Second World War to aid in the trans-shipment of goods
to Russia. Afterwards it was dismantled and abandoned, but in 1960-61 the
Iraqi government began to restore it, first as an alternative port to Basra and