News-Info-Alerts

Re: Iraqis Search for Long-Term POWs

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: May 07, 2003

"Iraqis search for MIAs from Iran war
By Christine Hauser


BAGHDAD, May 6 (Reuters) - For two decades, Ali Hassan has had little news about his uncle who went missing in action as an Iraqi soldier fighting in the 1980-88 war with Iran.

But hopes flickered on Tuesday for Hassan and many others that thousands of missing Iraqis might turn up after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) repatriated 59 of what it expects are the last captives of the Iran-Iraq war.

"We heard some Iraqi prisoners have returned and I came to see if he is here," said the 26-year-old, standing outside the ICRC office in Baghdad. "We still live in the same house as when he left. My aunt is still there. She is waiting for him."

On Tuesday, ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger said he had no knowledge of any more prisoners from the war. Spokeswoman Nada Doumani said the Iranians say it was the last batch.

The POW handover, if it was the last, would close one long chapter from the bloody war that cost one million Iranian and Iraqi lives. But there are 70,000 people still missing from both sides, the ICRC says.

That could be why Hassan and other Iraqis were turned away broken-hearted from the ICRC reception window on Tuesday. His uncle's name, Jabar Hussein, was not on the list of returnees.

Neither was that of Mohammad al-Mahdawi, missing since 1981. His sisters sobbed on the sidewalk outside the ICRC office where others waited to check for names of loved ones.

"We have had no information about him since 1983, when we heard he was in an Iranian prison in good health," Mahdawi's sister Sindus said. "But his name is not on the computer."

None of the Iraqi prisoners were met by their families when they were flown into Baghdad on Monday. Iraq's phone network broke down during the U.S.-led war so families had to be contacted by other means.

Doumani told Reuters the ICRC was now considering how to track down those still missing in action from the war. "Almost 20 years since the end of the conflict I think it will be really difficult to make progress. The chances will be slight."

"We will try to open the file again, but it will be more problematic because there is no Iraqi government," she said.

The ICRC said it has supervised the repatriation of almost 97,000 POWs from the Iran-Iraq war.

One of them was Iraqi doctor Wessam al-Sabiri, who spent 16 years in a crowded Iranian jail where he says he was beaten and given little to eat. Sabiri said new problems started when he was freed and repatriated to Iraq in 1998.

"I reached Baghdad and did not know where my family had moved to because they had no information I was freed," the 46-year-old man told Reuters. "I had no work for years, and have not been able to regain my life or find a wife.

"Thousands of us Iraqis have the same story. This is not only my suffering." (Writing by Christine Hauser, editing by Sami Aboudi)"