A senior army commander has said that the remains of 200 people found by British troops in a barrack near Basra are those of Iranian soldiers killed in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The Persian-language newspaper Jomhouri-E Eslami quoted Brigadier-General Mirfeisal Baqerzadeh, the head of the search and recovery committee for those missing in action, as saying that the bodies had been discovered over the recent months in joint recovery operations in Iran's Shalamcheh, and Iraq's Az Zubair and Al Faw. Baqerzadeh stressed that the remains were to be repatriated to Iran, but the repatriation did not proceed as the US-led war against Iraq started. "We eagerly ask the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to carry out its obligations and immediately take delivery of the bodies from the US-British troops, and return them to Iran in Shalamcheh border point with Iraq," he said. Baqerzadeh further said that Iran and Iraq scrapped the search and recovery operations for the missing in action on the Iraqi territory only 15 days before the war started.
That's an explanation of why the bodies were kept around. It doesn't explain the "shot to the back of the head" parts, or the fotos of the victims... |