The International Committee of the Red Cross supervised the handover through a border crossing near the southern Iraqi city of Basra, agency spokesman Mohammed Salman said.
Iraq’s post-Saddam government is led by Shiites — the Muslim sect marginalized under the Sunni dictator — who have established closer ties to Shiite Iran.
They have established stronger trade and political relations and have taken steps to deal with the legacy of the 1980-1988 war, which killed 1 million people on both sides and involved the use of chemical weapons by Saddam’s Iraq.
The two governments signed an agreement in October 2008 to find tens of thousands of fighters still missing after the war. It was the first direct agreement to tackle the problem together. Previously, each side dealt separately with the Red Cross.
Also Monday, the US military announced that an American soldier died Sunday in a non-combat incident in northern Iraq. The announcement follows the deaths on Saturday of two US soldiers in an unrelated rocket attack in the country’s south.
A military statement Monday gave no details and withheld the soldier’s name pending notification of next of kin. The death raises to at least 4,444 the number of US military personnel who have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
About 47,000 US troops remain in Iraq, down from 166,000 in October 2007 at the peak of the military surge that kept the country from dissolving into civil war.
As the number of troops has dwindled, and with their mission largely confined to bases around Iraq, their casualties also have dropped. A security agreement between Baghdad and Washington requires all US troops to leave Iraq by the end of the year.
But deadly shootings and bombings still occur every day in Iraq, and followers of anti-American cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr have vowed to continue targeting US troops until all have left.
Al-Sadr’s political influence in Iraq is steadily growing, and Iraq’s parliament voted Monday to approve Sadrist lawmaker Ali Yousf Shukri as the government’s new planning minister.
Iraqi officials also are being targeted by extremists.
Police and hospital officials in Baghdad said roadside bombs hit motorcades carrying the director of Iraq’s investment board and an Industry Ministry director as they headed to work Monday. One person was killed in the separate attacks and nine people were wounded, including Investment Board director general Rashid Mihsin.
