Neighboring Iran and Iraq have agreed to launch a joint search operation for their MIAs, an Iranian official told reporters in the Dehloran border region Saturday, according to IRNA.
Colonel Feysal Baqerzadeh, the Iranian officer in charge of the Missing in Action combatants committee of the Joint Staff Command, who supervised the exchange of 75 Iranian “martyr” bodies with the bodies of 59 Iraqi soldiers, stated that a joint Iranian-Iraqi search committee would start searching for the remains of the two countries' MIAs in the near future.
The joint operation is due to be launched in Iran's Meymak and Iraq's Mandali region. Colonel Baqerzadeh added, "meanwhile the search operations for finding the MIAs bodies in Fili, Al Imara, Zeyd and Shalamcheh axis have been accelerated during the recent months."
Appreciating the selfless efforts by the MIA search committee, Baqerzadeh said, "so far 52 officers working for the said committee have been martyred during their … operations." He added that since the onset of the exchange program of the Iranian and Iraqi MIA bodies, Iran has received the corpses of 3,998 martyrs and delivered those of 5,323 Iraqi soldiers to that country's officials.
In addition, the Iranian military official said that the bodies of the unidentified Iranian MIAs are being buried at a graveyard in the Talaiyyeh region of Khuzestan Province, however some of them were transferred to Zahedan and Kerman, to be buried in those cities, so that families, whose beloved ones have still not been found, too, could have a place to mourn. (Albawaba.com)
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