The missing: the eight-year Iraq conflict looms large in Iran

With 8,000 Iranian soldiers still unaccounted for, our correspondent talks to a survivor whose unit sought out the nameless dead

He grips the camera tightly as the driver slows the car along the track. He’s held a camera many times, but it has never felt rock heavy before. They are outside the city’s wheat and barley silo, but even the car feels reluctant to go forward, the tyres grating against rocks and gravel. He looks left and right as he steps out of the car, then goes inside.
“I still wake up in horror, remembering that night,” he says, his eyes hollow. The silo has been emptied of grain, and huge freezers have been brought in. Inside each lie half a dozen corpses. As the fridge doors are opened, men spray insecticide and sprinkle rose water to counter a stink penetrating every molecule of air. All he can smell is decomposed flesh, rose water and bug spray.
“A few bodies were unscathed, completely intact,” he says, “as if they had just lost life.” But most were deformed. Some looked like burned wood, others were bloated. Some were just fragments: a leg, a torso, a hand.
It was 1986, and these were Iranian soldiers killed in combat but unidentified. Mohandes (‘engineer’), as they call him, was part of a unit responsible for documenting the undocumented, and for finding a lead to their families.
The Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980 and ended in August 1988. But it remains alive in today’s Iran. Among the vast crowds who turned out for the funerals in June of 270 veterans – including 175 combat divers – whose bodies had been returned from Iraq, were thousands of young people unborn when the war ended. Thousands more circulated pictures and messages on social media.
A particular anguish is felt by the mothers, fathers and children of the 8,000 Iranian soldiers who are still “missing”. For them, the war drags on in a continuous waiting.

“We dream of a grave, a bone, anything,” one woman in Mashhad, north-eastern Iran, tells me of the loss of her brother. “We want this story to reach a conclusion, even though we know the ending is death.”
Mohandes was among those who, even as the war raged, tried to identify the missing and bring them home to their loved ones. Born in 1966 in Kermanshah, western Iran, he was neither particularly religious nor very political, and at first he felt indifferent when Iraq attacked Iran.
“Though I had no liking for the Shah, I had no fondness for the revolution either, nor for the war,” he says. “No part of me believed I should risk my life for a war I didn’t care about.”
But curiosity got the better of him while an 18-year-old undergraduate at the University of Shiraz. Without telling his family, he travelled to the western front, to Paveh, a town near the Iraq border in the mountains west of Kermanshah.
Here he found a group of Basij, the paramilitary volunteers. “Not much was going on there,” he says. “There were few operations taking place, but it gave me a new outlook on the war effort, and admiration for those leading it.”
The ‘western’ front in the mountainous borders of Iran’s Kermanshah and Kurdistan provinces, was at that stage a world away from the mass battles in southern Iran. “It was the south that led ops with tens of thousands of men,” says Mohandes. “In the west, it was mostly small operations, guerrilla warfare - there was dozens of us in small stations across the hilltops.”
Once during the two months of his stay in Paveh, he returned home to Kermanshah, telling his family he was still studying in Shiraz, and then went back to Paveh. “Nothing in that war was formal,” he says.
He could leave whenever he wanted, explaining to the head of the Basij unit that he would have to go for good the moment his parents started looking for him. Once he had word his father has called his dormitory in Shiraz a number of times, he left the base. But the experience had shed his fears of the war.
“We sat around telling jokes, and talking philosophy and politics all day, keeping watch, but there was no action, leading me to believe that I could fight a war easily, no problem.”
During September 1985, he and his dorm friends heard an announcement on the radio that all those who want to volunteer for the war should submit their papers by December. “I figured that if I went on my own will, instead of being called up later for compulsory service, there was a better chance I would get amriyeh [be stationed in a place of his choosing]. So friends and I – about 90 of us from our school – all submitted our forms that week.”
Within weeks, they were bussed to Tehran, to Azadi’s 12,000-seat volleyball stadium, where a rally was held. He remembers a speech by a man named Saeed Sadeghi, from the human resources department of the Revolutionary Guards. “He spoke about the need for educated students on the front line, and I was moved by those words.”
Mohandes still had to undergo training. A group of nearly 600 students were taken to a military base in Shiraz, which was a stable that still smelled of manure. It was also cold. Along with engineers, there were masters level and PhD students from Tehran University’s philosophy and theology schools.
“By 1985,” he says, “everyone who wanted to volunteer for the war had more or less done so. Our crowd wasn’t the devoted kind, we were willing to question everything. The officers in charge from the Revolutionary Guards didn’t know how to handle this.”
The recruits were told to grow beards and cut the hair on top of their heads, but most refused. Mohandes remembers a theology student arguing they could not by any logic be forced to keep a beard. “He himself had a very long one.”
In one incident, during a late-night exercise, students held their officers hostage, and were almost court-martialed. “We only got away because a law student argued with the commander. He told him that since we had not finished our training, we were not technically soldiers yet to be sent to military courts.”
To complete their training, they took various courses including religious studies classes taught by clerics from theology schools in Qom. There was one instructor he particularly remembers, a short, scrawny clergyman, with a soft voice, who taught basic Islamic practice.
In a session on qosl (ritual purification), which requires the body to be washed after, for example, ejaculation, the clergyman argued that just a glass of water was enough. “We all insisted he show us. So frantic was our request that he took off his clothes leaving only his boxers, and performed the qosl in front of the entire class, as we all roared with laughter.”
Upon completion of the two-month training programme, Mohandes found himself in taavoni razmi, the unit within IRGC that kept data of the dead and injured. “What lured me there was the promise of an IBM 4341 computer. At school, we could only take turns at the terminals, but voila, suddenly I had access to one all on my own.”
His first mission photographing corpses was a month later. “I photographed about 170 martyrs that night, and after the second or third time, it became normal. You can get used to anything, when it becomes routine.”
Mohandes managed to convince higher-ups in his unit to take photographers to the battle scene whenever possible, to photograph dead soldiers as soon as they were found, before their bodies began to decompose. His was soon roaming battlegrounds for bodies, and often finding the injured.
“I encountered men who were probably at their last breath. I remember every face, every utterance. They usually asked for their mothers - some wanted water, others used their last few words to ask for help or relief from pain.”
When Mohandes first arrived at taavoni razmi, the unit used carbon paper to document and copy information about each unidentified body. But some US-trained Iranian computer engineers soon designed a new computerised data system using COBOL programming language.
Each unidentified body was given a seven-digit identification code, which was recorded with details of where the body was found and what it looked like, on a form. One copy was attached to the dead soldier, when photographed.
Another copy was given if possible to the head of the battalion. One was kept for the unit’s own records. Another was sent to Tehran’s Shahid Kolahdooz military centre, where female operators sat behind monitors typing the details into the database. This information was communicated to Basij and IRGC stations across Iran, who were in contact with families waiting for news of their missing loved ones.
Mohandes says that during his time, only around half the bodies were identified: “How can you identify a head smashed to pieces?”
Amid all his memories, Mohandes cites his entrance into Halabja less than 24 hours after the chemical bombing as the most “horrible”. He was a few miles away, heading to the city with a group of three other men, when it was hit by chemical weapons by Iraq in March 1988, days after it had been captured by Iranian and allied Iraqi Kurdish forces.
“To this day, I still don’t know how I got away unscathed,” he says. On the day of the attack, Mohandes heard the explosions and noticed the white, strange haze coming from the area. He and his comrades escaped to the high mountains and spent the night at the local headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
They went back to Halabja the following day, less than 24 hours after the attack: “We witnessed Armageddon. War is full of horror, but no scene was as horrific. Bodies of children and young women were lying everywhere in doorways and on the ground.”
Over the next three days, Mohandes joined a group of volunteers helping transport nearly 2000 chemical victims to Iran for treatment. Sanandaj, capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province, had one large hotel that had been a prestigious social spot before the war. Its swimming pool was filled with water and lime for victims to be decontaminated.
A friend of his, who had been a mile away from him in Halabja, was permanently scarred by the still drifting mix of arsenic, mustard gas and nerve agents. “His lungs were damaged, and he now lies strapped to a bed, cared for by his brother and sister.”
“In a war, what defines your future life - whether you will live with your body intact, whether you are permanently scarred, whether you will live at all - is only a moment,” Mohandes reflects. “A direction of a breeze that day determined destinies.”
Mohandes recalls another close escape, when he was stationed in the mountainous region around Marivan, Kurdistan. His group noticed a dead Iranian soldier half a mile away, lying with his face down.
“It was dangerous to cross that line,” he says, “because we knew the Iraqis were watching.” But Mohandes and his comrades could not let the matter go. After days of deliberation, the tallest man in their group, a 22-year-old student with blond hair and blue eyes decided to retrieve the body. “We owe it to his parents,” he insisted. “We must bring him back.”
After a plan was agreed for covering fire, and the best time chosen, the tall soldier crept out and reached the corpse. “We were watching carefully with our binoculars to help him in case he was targeted,” says Mohandes. “As soon as he touched the body, there was an explosion. It was a booby trap.”
A week later, they retrieved both bodies, in pieces. “It could have easily been me that night. If you are alive and speaking now about what you went through in the war, well, so many times it could have been you.”
Despite all the haunting experiences, Mohandes still fondly recalls parts of his time with the war effort. He explains that for every tragedy and death, there is a story of survival, of luck, of laughter, of sacrifice. And, after all, the war began as an act of self-defense. “If it hadn’t been for those war volunteers, Iraq would have got as far as Tehran. It was their dedication that kept this country intact, be sure of that.”