TEHRAN – A military commander has urged Washington to provide Iran with documents related to the burial locations of Iranian soldiers confiscated after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“In order to find remains of the bodies of 4,000 Iranian soldiers still unaccounted for and finding their exact burial location in the Iraqi soil, we want access to the related documents seized by American forces after entering Iraq,” General Mohammad Baqerzadeh, commander of the Committee to Find Missing Soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War, told the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) on Tuesday.

Lack of information and the logistical problems have created obstacles on the way to find the bodies of the Iranian soldiers who were martyred during the war, General Baqerzadeh said.

After entering Iraq, U.S. forces seized the war documents and transferred them to their country, said the commander, adding Iran needs those documents to discover the exact location of the bodies.

Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, launched war against Iran on September 22, 1980 with the aim of capturing Iran’s oil rich Khuzestan. The war lasted until the summer of 1988. It claimed the lives of 230,000 Iranian soldiers and left 600,000 disabled for life. 43,000 Iranians were also captured by Iraqi forces and many others went missing. 

As General Baqerzadeh said, the search committee has found all bodies of the war-time martyrs in the Iranian soil, and now the country is searching for the remains of the bodies in the operation regions of Iraq.

Through search operations, so far the search committee has found the bodies of 45,000 soldiers, the general explained.

He said that the passage of time has caused changes in bodies of the martyrs and the physical conditions of the earth has also made it difficult to conduct search operations.

Sometimes the search teams dig for a depth of about five meters, and sometimes the search operation is conducted covering an area of 40 to 100 square km, the commander added.

SP/PA