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Khomeini’s Ceasefire 38 Years Ago: The Key to Stopping Iran’s Conflict Today

Written by Mohammad Sadat Khansari
iran nla mek army women (1)
Victorious female fighters of the National Liberation Army chant “Today Mehran, tomorrow Tehran” after liberating the strategic border city of Mehran on June 18, 1988

Four-minute read

Today, 38 years ago, on July 17, 1988, Ruhollah Khomeini sent a letter to the United Nations accepting UN Security Council Resolution 598. It was a ceasefire he had fiercely fought against for six years. Days later, the founder of the clerical dictatorship delivered a stunning public confession: “Acceptance of this matter is more lethal for me than poison… I had made a pledge that I would fight up to the last drop of blood.”

This reluctant capitulation shattered Khomeini’s carefully cultivated image of divine infallibility. He had originally paved the way for the conflict by orchestrating border skirmishes, publicly calling on the Iraqi people to oust their government, and backing assassination attempts on Iraqi officials. By framing the resulting war as a holy crusade, he tied his absolute authority to absolute victory. Drinking the “poison” of peace exposed him not as a divine emissary, but as a defeated mortal, profoundly demoralizing his fanatical loyalists.

In truth, Khomeini had weaponized the conflict to silence domestic opposition under the guise of a wartime emergency. Even after Iraqi forces withdrew to the international border in 1982 and Baghdad signaled readiness for a truce, Khomeini refused, vowing to fight “until the last house in Tehran.” He needed the war to consolidate power; ending it meant unleashing the pent-up domestic fury he had ruthlessly suppressed.

The Staggering Cost of Survival

The cost of the regime’s survival strategy was apocalyptic. The six years of unnecessary continuation resulted in over $1 trillion in economic damages for Iran. The human toll was catastrophic: one million dead, two million injured and permanently disabled, and four million displaced on the Iranian side alone.

The regime’s desperation to sustain the conflict birthed unimaginable cruelty. Teenage schoolboys were drafted as disposable soldiers to exhaust enemy munitions. Children as young as twelve were recruited into the Basij militia and sent in human waves to clear minefields. The government famously imported 500,000 plastic keys from Taiwan, hanging them around the children’s necks as literal “keys to paradise.”

Throughout this localized carnage, Baghdad accepted numerous international peace initiatives and UN resolutions. Khomeini systematically rejected them all, insisting his forces would march to Jerusalem through Karbala. He only reversed course when an existential threat emerged from within his own borders.

The Threat from Within

What ultimately broke the regime’s will was not diplomacy, nor the opposing Iraqi military, but the National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA)—the armed wing of the Iranian Resistance. In the spring of 1988, the NLA launched Operation Aftab (Shining Sun), routing the regime’s elite 77th Khorassan Division in a devastating 24-hour offensive.

On June 18, 1988, the NLA followed up with Operation Chelcheragh (Forty Stars). Resistance forces liberated the strategic city of Mehran, annihilating two elite military divisions—the IRGC’s 11th and the Army’s 16th Armored—and seizing over $2 billion in military hardware. The victorious fighters chanted a slogan that resonated all the way to the capital: “Today Mehran, tomorrow Tehran.”

And the call indeed reached Tehran.

What made the NLA disproportionately threatening to the regime was not its size or conventional military strength, but its political and social character. In purely numerical terms, it was far smaller than the armed forces available to either Iraq or the Iranian regime. Yet the NLA was never merely a military formation. The regime understood that the MEK enjoyed extensive support across Iran and that, in effect, the NLA was an army whose officers stood at the front while many of its potential soldiers were already dispersed throughout the country’s cities. Its advance, therefore, could not be measured solely by the number of fighters crossing the border. The real danger was that, once it began to move, it could gather momentum like an avalanche, with thousands joining it in city after city. It was this prospect—an organized Iranian force capable of activating a much broader domestic uprising—that made the NLA far more dangerous to the clerical establishment than its military size alone would suggest.

The Permanent Need for Conflict: July 2026

Today, the clerical establishment finds itself in a strikingly similar bind, rooting for regional war to stave off domestic collapse following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in February 2026. As proven in the last three decades, the regime fundamentally needs war. The recent collapse of the June 2026 Islamabad Memorandum ceasefire on July 8 is a testament to this desperation. Instead of embracing the truce to rebuild, Tehran immediately resumed its brinkmanship by threatening commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz to extract tolls and assert control.

Much like Khomeini in the 1980s, the current leadership regards any durable peace as an existential threat. Genuine peace would require accountability, transparency, an end to permanent emergency rule, and the dismantling of the machinery of repression—conditions the clerical establishment cannot tolerate, particularly amid the power vacuum created by Khamenei’s death. Yet the regime’s greatest fear today is not primarily a foreign army or another external war. It is the prospect of a population driven beyond endurance finding direction, organization, and a credible political alternative from within.

The National Liberation Army is no longer stationed along Iran’s borders, and it may no longer possess the tanks, artillery, and conventional military structure it once had. But it has not disappeared. From its inception, the NLA was never merely a military force; it was also a political and social force whose potential soldiers existed throughout Iran. Following the closure of Camp Ashraf in Iraq—the principal base of the NLA—the center of its activity shifted from the border to the interior of Iran. The strategy of creating “a thousand Ashrafs” took shape as Resistance Units affiliated with the MEK were established across the country’s provinces, towns, and cities. Over the years, these networks have helped sustain and propel successive nationwide uprisings, becoming one of the regime’s most persistent sources of fear.

The strategic landscape has therefore shifted, but the underlying threat to the regime remains the same. In 1988, Khomeini was forced to confront an organized Iranian force capable of transforming widespread discontent into a direct challenge to his rule. Today, that force no longer advances in columns from a military camp; it operates through a decentralized resistance embedded within Iranian society. The regime understands that millions of impoverished, outraged, and disillusioned citizens could become the human force of this new liberation army once a nationwide movement gathers momentum. As the 2026 Iran war continues and international diplomatic initiatives remain stalled, the lesson of July 1988 remains relevant: lasting regional stability will not be achieved solely through sanctions, negotiations, or foreign military pressure. The decisive force will come from within Iran—from its people and from an organized resistance capable of turning public anger into a movement for fundamental change.

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