TEHRAN, 19 May 2003 — Iran exchanged yesterday the bodies of 83 Iraqi soldiers for 45 of its own troops killed during a 1980-1988 war with Iraq, in the first such operation since before the US-led war on Baghdad, the official IRNA news agency reported.
The remains were exchanged by the International Committee of the Red Cross at the Shalamsheh border post, 10 km east of Iraq’s southern port of Basra, the head of the search committee for missing soldiers, Mir-Feysal Baqerzadeh, told IRNA.
The Geneva-based ICRC confirmed the exchange and the figure of 45 Iranian remains, but said 84 Iraqi bodies had been received and passed on to British forces for return to Iraqi families.
Press reports said Tehran recently refused a British offer to return the remains of dozens of Iranians found in southern Iraq because this would have meant recognizing Iraq’s occupation by the US and British-led forces.
“In facilitating the bodies’ return, the ICRC acted as a neutral intermediary between the British, an occupying power in Iraq, and the Iranian authorities,” the humanitarian group said in a statement.
The Iranian soldiers’ bodies were found in an abandoned army headquarters in Al-Zubeir near Basra a few days after the US and British invasion of Iraq began on March 20.
At the time, Baqerzadeh said about 100 Iranian corpses had been discovered shortly before the US-led war and he asked the ICRC to retrieve the remains and deliver them to Iran.
Iranian experts searching for the bodies of missing soldiers pulled out of Iraq in early March as the US-led war against Saddam Hussein’s regime loomed.
Iran and Iraq never signed a peace treaty following their war in which an estimated one million people perished, but the two regularly exchanged remains of soldiers who fell during the conflict or died in detention.
On May 5, 59 Iraqis held prisoner in Iran since the 1980-1988 war returned home, said the ICRC. Tehran said this was the last group of Iraqi prisoners of war held in Iran.
