After their defeat at the First Battle of al-Faw two years earlier, the newly restructured Iraqi Army conducted a major operation to clear the Iranians out of the peninsula.

Following the Karbala campaigns of 1987, but before the end of summer, the Iraqi Army started secretly practicing maneuvers in the desert behind Basra.

The training maneuvers involved multiple army and Republican Guard divisions and huge mock-ups of objectives Iraq intended to seize back from Iran.

Despite that, they had chosen to stay on the defensive and let Iran bleed itself in costly offensives, in which the majority of the operations ended in defeat or stalemate hence a failure to deliver the desired results.

The Iraqi command had expected the battle to take several weeks, but Iraq managed to seize the peninsula in a single day with only minimal losses due to the collapse of the Iranian troops.

[4] This stunning success led the Iraqi command to decide to expand the original battle into a larger offensive campaign against Iran.

[8] Using helicopters, the Iraqis 7th Corps under the command of General Maher Rashid moved down the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and blocked the rear of the Iranians on the peninsula.

The advanced Republican Guard units launched their attack, moving down the peninsula 21 miles south of Umm Qasr.

The attacks were preceded with numerous chemical weapons bombardments, killing and/or sickening close to the majority of the unprepared Iranian troops on the peninsula.

Within 48 hours, all of the Iranian forces had been killed or cleared from the al-Faw Peninsula, with survivors retreating via a single pontoon bridge remaining.

The attack coincided the same day as the US (unofficially allied with Iraq at that time) launched Operation Praying Mantis on Iran, destroying their navy.