The conflict took place between April 1974 and March 1975, and resulted in over 1,000 total casualties for both sides combined, though the Iranians eventually came to hold a strategic advantage over the Iraqis.

Open hostilities formally came to an end with the 1975 Algiers Agreement, in which Iraq ceded around half of the border area containing the waterway in exchange for Iran's cessation of support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels.

In 1968, another coup d'état—staged by the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and known as the 17 July Revolution—deposed the First Iraqi Republic and firmly established a Ba'athist regime in Iraq.

[9] In return for Iraq recognizing that the frontier on the waterway ran along the entire thalweg as per Iran's argument, the latter ended its support for Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas.

[15] Iraqi President Saddam Hussein claimed that the newly-established Islamic Republic of Iran had refused to abide by the stipulations of the Algiers Accords and Iraq therefore considered them null and void.