New world for POWs from Iran conflict

They are as thin as scarecrows, men shrunk by beatings, the last of the last Iraqi prisoners from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

On their arrival on Monday night in Baghdad for a repatriation without fanfare, they said they could not believe their eyes. American tanks on the streets? Saddam Hussain toppled from power?

Some of the last 59 Iraqi soldiers to be held in Iran, out of 60,000 captured, had been imprisoned for more than two decades without communication with the outside world.

"Saddam gone?" one former prisoner asked.

He was dressed in a lime green sports jacket that hung from his thin shoulders, the new clothes a parting gift from his Iranian captors. As he stood, he swayed, and then said: "I'm sorry. I have psychological damage in my brain."

Nema Kareem Hassan was a police officer who was drafted to fight. He said he was captured near a town he called Muhamara in Iran on May 24, 1982. In the years since, Hassan said, he was moved through seven POW camps.

On his return, his thin jaws were flecked with gray stubble. He shuffled with a limp at 39 years old. He said in an interview that he could not hold down food.

Hassan's hands trembled so severely that he could not light a cigarette without help from a comrade. He said he was tortured routinely - forced to squat for hours, beaten with lengths of cable and rope, shocked by car batteries and had - what he thinks was - dirty water injected with a syringe into his private parts.

Another former prisoner said: "We have come back from the grave."

This one, an infantry rifleman, sat slack-jawed and blank-eyed, in the worn lobby of the Um Al Aura Hotel in central Baghdad, where the men had spent their first night of freedom.

Asked to give his name, the rifleman said: "It is not safe." And he looked around the room.

"I am a loyal Iraqi."

Told that Saddam Hussain was no longer in charge, he whispered: "I cannot believe."

There is no accurate accounting of casualties from the Iran-Iraq war. Human rights monitors and the U.S. government estimated that one million people were killed, including 300,000 Iranian soldiers and 375,000 Iraqi combatants.

Hassan, who was sent to the front for what his superiors in the police department promised would be a three-month tour of duty, described his daily rations: "Four spoons of rice. A half cup of water. A piece of bread."'

He said he saw hundreds of prisoners die, most from diseases like dysentery and tuberculosis, others from heart attacks. One of the camps had previously been a stable for animals, he said.

"What I have seen I cannot describe," said another former Iraqi soldier who would give only his first name, Hadi. He said he was a prisoner for 15 years.

"I am ashamed," he said, "to speak of these things."

The released prisoners wanted to know how they would be paid their military wages for their years in jail. One man asked whether the government was still giving land and cash and cars to released prisoners, as had been Saddam's practice in the early years of the Iran-Iraq war.

"We have lost our lives," one of his fellow prisoners said. They grabbed their plastic bags of belongings and made their way to a Red Cross van to go wherever home used to be.

Years ago, the former prisoners said, they assumed their wives and families had given them up for dead. None of the men said they had spoken or corresponded with their loved ones during their captivity. "They think we are gone from the earth," said one released prisoner.

The former POWs were given clean underwear, a box of food and toiletries and $200 in cash by the International Committee of the Red Cross, under whose auspices they were flown from Tehran to Baghdad.

One former prisoner sat on a couch in the hotel lobby, hugging a grandson he had never seen and weeping.

During their long twilight in captivity, the men had heard rumours and listened to dispatches from their guards' radios. They heard news of the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War in 1991, and then reports of another battle waged this year by the Americans against Iraq. They were not sure who had won, but they remembered that once the Americans had supported their war against Iran.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service