CHAMCHAMAL, Iraq, 20 March 2003 — A group of Iraqi prisoners of war just freed from Iran after decades in a prison camp near Tehran were yesterday back on the road again, trying to flee their homeland for safety the day after their emotional return. “We spent nearly 22 years in jail in Iran, and they decided to exchange us yesterday,” complained 49-year-old Muhammad Nurat, one of three POWs seen walking into northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish zone trying to escape imminent war.
Nurat and his companions, from a group of Iraqi troops captured while fighting Iran in 1982, said they were among 341 prisoners freed on Tuesday at the Iranian border town of Qasr-e-Shirin “We were exchanged yesterday, arrived in Baghdad last night and left this morning for the north,” Nurat told AFP after walking across the front lines here between the government-held city of Kirkuk and the Kurdish-held city of Sulaymaniya.
“Most of the other prisoners are in Kirkuk trying to get taxis as well to get up here. None of us wanted to stay in Baghdad, and the Iraqi Army felt sorry for us and let us leave.” He described his two decades in an Iranian jail as “very boring”.
Iran and Iraq exchanged a total of 1,239 prisoners Monday and Tuesday amid the quickening countdown to a US-led war, an Iranian official said. Tehran is to release the remaining 350 within a month, the head of the armed forces POW committee, Abdullah Najafi told the official IRNA news agency yesterday. Iran returned 888 prisoners of war to Baghdad at the Khosravi border crossing post, near Qasr-e-Shirin. Iraq handed over 351 Iranians at the same spot. The liberation of the remaining 350 has been delayed for a month due to administrative problems, Najafi said.
