The Iraqi Prisoners of War in Iran
by Nizar Assamarraei
Translated from Arabic by Wefa M. S.
Iran has exaggerated the numbers of Iraqi soldiers and officers it captured in the battles during the eight-year war, as the sources of command and control in the battles have multiplied, especially since the regular forces have compiled the numbers of all Iraqi losses in one statement, but the Revolutionary Guards have their data as well as the Basij (mobilization of guards) have their data, and each of them, due to lack of coordination, issues figures from one battle, then multiply the numbers without real change in the numbers of the prisoners.
The first major loss to Iraq in term of
killed soldiers and the number of prisoners was in the battle of Shush-Dezful,
which started on March 21, 1982, as the total numbers announced by various
Iranian forces were more than 14 thousand prisoners. After that, what happened
in the battle to restore the Iranian forces control of the city of Muhammarah
(which began on the night of April 30, 1982 by crossing the Karun River from Al-
Tahiri area to enter the Muhammarah itself on May 21 1982) was that it ended in
all its stages on day 24 / 5/1982. The
Muhammarah battle, according to the data provided by the forces participating
in the attack, resulted in the capture of 19,000 Iraqi prisoners.
The International Committee of the Red
Cross used the official numbers announced by Iran, and began operating in the
Iranian camps where Iraqi prisoners' are held, despite all restrictions imposed
on the committee, and despite the existence of secret camps, which included
thousands of punished and hidden prisoners. The committee formed a general idea
and dealt with the numbers as if they were the real numbers for Iraqi prisoners,
and estimated them to be around 85,000. That
is why the committee has been calling for their release all together, based on
the principle of all-for-all. Because of
the difficult circumstances in Iraq that accompanied his entry into Kuwait
shortly after the Iran-Iraq war, which was followed by Arab and international isolation;
Iraq was ready to show flexibility to Iran.
The exchange of prisoners between the two
countries began on August 17, 1990 and continued until September 15, 1990 when
Iran returned from the Khusrawi-Munthiriya border point a large number of Iraqi
prisoners to their camps on the pretext that there were no corresponding numbers
of Iranian prisoners released.
The number of prisoners exchanged until 9/15/1990, according to the data announced in the media, was 36 thousand prisoners from each country, meaning the total number that crossed the border points reached 72 thousand prisoners. In a single day, 17/8/1990, Iraq released seven thousand Iranian prisoners.
Negotiations, between the permanent
representative of Iraq at the European headquarters of the United Nations and
his Iranian counterpart, began to resolve this awkward file, as Iraq has
maintained that it does not keep one prisoner who meets the criteria of POWs. But following the circumstances of the
American bombing of Iraq and the failure of the Shabania uprising in 1991, Iran
accepted the status quo and began sending groups of Iraqi prisoners from 1992
until 5/5/2003
After being captured for twenty years, I
returned to Iraq from Al-Mundhiriya crossing point on 22/1/2002, with a group of
approximately 650 prisoners. Following that date, a group of Iraqi prisoners was
released on the night of the American-British aggression against Iraq in 2003, which
was the night of 19/20 March, and then was followed by the last group of Iraqi
prisoners released on 5/5/2003, in which Major General Khamis Al-Alwani (who recently
died on 15 June 2020) was released. I do not have any information about the
numbers of prisoners for these last two groups.
We can classify Iraqi prisoners as follows:
1. The
prisoners who were returned to Iraq under the rules of official exchange all
through 5/5/2003, and who were in the tens of thousands without recognizing the
total number due to inconsistency in this field.
2. A
large number of the prisoners were influenced by the Iranian sectarian and
political propaganda machine, left the national ranks and became in the
category of those who repented. In one day in November 1982 and during the
first military parade held by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, 15 thousand prisoners from those who repented were parading. Pressure continued on Iraqi prisoners with
physical and psychological torture, medical neglect, starvation, isolation from
the outside world, while blocking the media, forced so many of them to turn
from an Iraqi fighter in the Iraqi army’s ranks into a recruiter fighting
against his country on the side of the enemy.
Many of them became part of the Iranian social fabric, married to
Iranians and settled there.
3. As
a result of the numerous uprisings in the camp to protest against abuse, the
Iranian forces opened fire on the prisoners and killed large numbers of them,
and for this they don’t return their bodies because the evidence of killing is
clear on them. Added to that is the large numbers of those who lost their lives
as a result of outbreaks of infectious diseases such as bloody diarrhea.
4. Many soldiers were killed during the fighting, as their bodies remained in no man’s land* and were not evacuated, and therefore considered prisoners.
* ‘No man’s land’ is a military term that refers to the land separating between the forces of two combat countries and cannot be reached due to fighting.
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Nizar Assamaraie, a graduate from Al-Mustansiriya University, specializing in International law. He was born in Baghdad 1943. Assamarraei managed the internal press in the Ministry of Information and Cultural Affairs in the 1980s. Became a prisoner of war (POW) on 24 March 1982 during the Shush-Dezfol operations, and lingered in Iran’s prisons for 20 years at the Iranian side. He was released on 22 Jan 2002 and arrived in his home the next day, 23 Jan 2002. Assamaraei published a book detailing his diaries while a prisoner in Iran titled, “In the Palaces of Ayatollahs”