Both Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini used Islam
to whip up nationalistic fervor and generate domestic support
for their regimes. Yet Saddam was especially fearful of Khomeini’s
capacity to frame Islam in a way that would threaten
him by bolstering alliances between Iran’s majority Shi’a
population and the Shi’a footsoldiers who formed the bulk
of Iraq’s conscript army as well as the majority of Iraq’s total
population.14 As a means of unifying Iranians and promoting
Islam around the world, Khomeini’s active attempts to export
the Iranian Revolution to other Muslim countries continued
until his death on June 3, 1989. Just as Islam increasingly
became the catalyst for the 1979 revolution, it also acted as a
unifying force for Iranians throughout Khomeini’s tenure as
supreme leader.