TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- A senior defense official says Iranian explorers have recovered the remnants of 65 unidentified martyrs of the Iraqi imposed war (1980-88), some 30 years after the end of the longest battle in the 20th century.
The bodies were found recently in a mass grave in a swamp on the Bawarin island near Iraq’s Basra, said Brigadier General Muhammad Baqerzadeh, who heads the Armed Forces General Staff’s Committee for the Search of the Missing in Action.
Among the bodies were several elite frogmen martyred in operations Valfajr-8 and Karbala-4, he told Tasnim news agency Tuesday.
The operation Karbala-4 has become a familiar name for Iranians in recent years after the bodies of 175 Iranian frogmen reportedly buried alive with their hands tied were recovered inside Iraq in 2015. Their funeral ceremony gathered a large crowd in Tehran.
Baqerzadeh said a total of 115 bodies of unidentified martyrs are planned to be transferred to Iran in the coming days.
They will be first sent to Tehran for identification before being buried in different places across the country, including universities, seminaries, premises of state organizations and a number of public parks across the country.
Baqerzadeh said the bodies of over 4,000 Iranian martyrs have yet to be discovered inside Iraq.
The Iran-Iraq war, imposed on Iran by the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, left hundreds of thousands of casualties from both sides.