In light of the recent actions by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–who was incidentally involved in the theocratic revolution of the late 1970s, and possibly the mass executions of Ayatollah Khomaini’s opponents–it is necessary to revisit and reassess the extent of Iraq’s alleged killings of Iranians during the 1980s.

No one denies that Saddam Hussein’s government killed Iranians during the war between the two countries, but it is quite likely that Iran’s mullahs and theocrats overstated Iraq’s role in causing these deaths. Not only that, the ayatollahs used Iraq’s actions as a coverup for murders and atrocities that they committed themselves. The infamous Katyn Forest massacre during the Second World War is a perfect example of this sort of thing.

My father owned a book called “These are the Russians,” which was published during the Second World War. The book describes how Russian soldiers “discovered” a mass grave in the Katyn Forest, where they accused the Nazis of murdering thousands of Polish prisoners. It was later found, however, that the Soviets had murdered the Poles themselves.

There is no doubt that, given the Nazi agenda to exterminate or enslave all Poles, the Nazis would have done something like this if they had had the chance. There is also little doubt that a vicious dictator like Saddam Hussein would have killed hundreds of thousands of Iranian Shiites if he had been given the opportunity. The truth stands, however, that Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union–which also perpetrated the genocide of seven million Ukranians–murdered the Poles in question. It is also quite likely that many if not most of the deaths that Iran blamed on Iraq either did not occur, or were the responsibility of the ayatollahs and their secular accomplaces like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

As shown by Ahmadinejad’s Demons by Matthias Küntzel, hundreds of thousands of Iranian children were murdered not by Saddam Hussein but by the ayatollahs themselves.

During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran’s forces were no match for Saddam Hussein’s professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child’s neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them.

This atrocity goes well beyond the sheer military incompetence of French generals who, during the First World War, sent human waves against German machine gun emplacements. The French generals at least intended some of the soldiers to reach the German lines, break through, and win. The ayatollahs, in contrast, sent children into mine fields for the express purpose of having them blown up by the mines. Then, like the Soviet perpetrators of the Katyn Massacre, they blamed the deaths on the Iraqis.

Although the Iraqis laid the mines, it is quite likely that they marked the minefields in accordance with international law–if only to avoid walking into their own mine fields by accident. The ayatollahs therefore were guilty of murdering the Iranian children themselves, by knowingly and willfully ordering them into mine fields.

In summary, although Saddam Hussein’s government bore some responsibility for killing Iranians, Iran’s claim that Iraq killed “millions” is doubtlessly an exaggeration and a hoax whose sole purpose is to win international sympathy and domestic support for its own corrupt and murderous government, whose own arms are red to the elbows in the blood of Iranian children.