The Iran-Iraq war radically transformed the political economy and the social organization of resources in Basra and its environs. From an industrialized port city with a relatively productive agricultural hinterland, Basra was transformed into center for the mobilization of troops and goods, its hinterland destroyed by Iranian bombardment and the forcible removal of populations. While the Ba’thist government had, by 1979, managed co-opt or suppress labor and dissident party activism in Baghdad, it was only with the advent of the Iran-Iraq war that Communist labor activism gave way to other forms of resistance in Basra. My paper will examine the development of forms of resistance to the new realities of the war. I will argue that labor and party activism gave way to new forms or resistance. These included the developments of illicit networks of resistance to the war, often supported by an underground economy that facilitated the movement, employment and concealment of deserters even as the Ba’th Party spent inordinate amount of its resources trying to control these networks. In addition, the terrain of contestation to the Ba’th and to the war moved from organized labor and underground party activism within Basra and its immediate hinterland, into a campaign of insurgency waged on the eastern borderlands of the city. These forms of contestation did not constitute organized opposition or social movements with clear political agendas. Rather, they remained fragmented, fluid and multi-dimensional. They included entrepreneurs within the armed forces who sold false identity cards and a network of smugglers connected to opposition parties in Iran. They centered around certain mosques in hard hit parts of the city and the rituals of burial of the dead of the war. The Ba’thist state waged multiple campaigns to control these networks throughout the 1980s, but could not eradicate them. My paper examines the connection of these networks and the state’s violent attempts to control them with the dynamics of contention during within the city and its surrounding area during the 1991 Intifada. It asks whether the nature of the resistance itself, its fragmentation and its fluidity were not a result of the disciplinary structures instituted by the state during wartime, a problem that manifested itself in the fragmentation of the rebellion in 1991. I will draw in my analysis on Ba’th Party documents and interviews.