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Basra sits along the Shatt-Al-Arab waterway, which runs into the Persian Gulf, 65 miles away.

Within two years Iran will have built a bridge over the Shatt-al-Arab river into Iraq and into the Fertile Crescent, he says.

"They asked our company to go to Khorramshahr, and from our company only five people managed to cross Shatt-al-Arab waterway bordering Iraq with Iran," says Adnan.

The Iranians, on the other hand, claimed they had merely been trying to capture four Iraqi islands in the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and had inflicted heavy casualties.

Two thousand Iranian soldiers, toting U.S.-made equipment, goose-stepped through Abadan's native quarter, in a sputtering gesture of defiance at the British cruiser Mauritius and other British warships anchored close by, in the Shatt-al-Arab estuary.