Total dead
About 0.5-1 million -- the working band.
The 0.5-1 million band is honest uncertainty. Young Iranian infantry and Iraqi conscripts fill the lists; Halabja fills a civilian crime ledger.
Disabled survivors and unexploded munitions are a decades-long cost in both countries.
Bands
Iranian military
Often the larger share in published estimates.
Iraqi military
Hundreds of thousands, including later Anfal victims as a linked crime.
Civilians
Cities, Halabja, and the airliner.
Debt
Iraqi arrears to Gulf states -- a fuse for 1990.
Regions
Khuzestan
The invasion prize; Arab-Iranian borderland under fire.
Southern Iraq
Basra, Faw, marshes -- the long Iranian war.
Tehran / Baghdad
Missile cities.
Kurdish north
Anfal and Halabja -- a war within the war.
Gulf waters
Tankers and US escorts.
Supplier capitals
Paris, Moscow, and others as rear areas of invoices.
Key numbers
Span1980-1988
Deaths (range)about 0.5-1 million
Ceasefire20 Aug 1988
Halabja16 Mar 1988
Makers
State munitions plants
Both sides; named as political economy, not as a guide.
French and Soviet suppliers
Iraq's main high-end sources in many categories.
Covert streams to Iran
Including later US scandal -- a political fact.
Oil ministries
The fiscal lungs of both war states.
UN observers
UNIIMOG as a small end-maker.
Martyr foundations (Iran)
A postwar welfare-and-memory institution.
Iraqi debt to Gulf creditors is a number that helps explain 1990.
Iranian martyr cemeteries are a built landscape of this cost.