Abbas used to work in his own Internet communications store, and deal with his customers, who frequented him to benefit from his experiences in this field. One day a woman initiated him with a request he was not familiar with from others, to contact the United Nations organizations through websites that she wrote in a paper that she carried in her own bag, and took it out very carefully.
Odeh, 33, says, "After the woman sat and was looking at the end of her fourth decade with her son, I asked her about her strange request, and she answered with regret as she took out two pictures, the first is an old personal photo and the other looks reproduced, saying," I lost my father in 1982 in the Iran-Iraq war and was I was several months old at the time, and I learned after I grew up that he was missing in the war. "
And she continued, "I kept his personal photo that he took days before his loss, and from the intensity of my attachment to it I memorized all its details, and a few days ago I accidentally saw a picture of my father dating back to the same time, in his military clothes with a group of Iraqi soldiers on one of the Facebook pages of Iraqi prisoners and missing persons during that war, and after A group of inquiries I learned that this is a picture of Iraqi prisoners in Iran, and some of them directed me to contact international organizations specialized in searching for missing Iraqis.
A ray of hope
The result of the bloody fighting during the Iran-Iraq war that lasted 8 years (1980-1988) hundreds of thousands of dead, prisoners and missing, but the return of some prisoners from the Iranian side after the end of the war constituted a glimmer of hope for the families of the missing in the possibility of their relatives' survival.
Some of the social media pages of this file have been popularized and followed by many families of the missing, and they display pictures of Iraqi soldiers who are prisoners of the Iranian side, who have been registered as missing.
Regarding the fact that there are still missing persons in Iranian prisons, the representative of the Iraqi Human Rights Commission, Mahdi Al-Tamimi, says that the Iranian side officially announced that there were no Iraqi prisoners or missing persons alive from the war during the meeting of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2014 in Geneva, and the file was permanently closed.
Al-Tamimi added that many requests are received by the commission to determine the fate of the missing persons during the Iran-Iraq war, and they are searched for in the records of the dead missing, after completely despairing of the existence of survivors.
For its part, the Iraqi Human Rights Commission issued a statement on June 24, 2019, in which it completely denied the existence of any information about the rumors regarding the arrival of photos, videos, or names about the prisoners and the missing.
The denial statements published by the communication pages were not limited to denying the Iraqi side only, but the International Committee of the Red Cross in Iraq confirmed that the file of prisoners and missing persons between the Iraqi and Iranian sides had been officially closed by Baghdad and Tehran in 2011, indicating that the last prisoner exchange meal between the two countries Under her supervision took place in 2003.
The remains of the missing
Many of the missing are lying in the Iran-Iraq war on the border line between the two countries, which at that time witnessed bloody fighting, which prompted the Iraqi government to form a joint committee to uncover the remains of the missing, especially the unidentified ones who bury them in a special cemetery in Basra Governorate, in the south of the country. As for those who know the identity, their families are notified and sent to them.
On the same topic, the Iraqi-Iranian Parliamentary Friendship Committee held a meeting in this regard on July 21, 2017, in which the committee chairperson, Dr. Ali Al-Emara, confirmed that he would proceed in detail in this file, as it touches the lives of thousands of Iraqi families whose fate has not been known for decades. During the meeting, they discussed making more efforts to search for the remains of the missing Iraqis, and to confirm that work will continue until the file is finally settled.
In April 2019, torrents from Iran swept away the remains of Iraqi soldier Abdul Amir Jabbar al-Jadri, who had been tied as missing during the war after an absence of more than 35 years.
Abbas Odeh, the owner of the Internet shop, says that the woman who asked for his help put the two pictures on the desk, saying, "Look at the similarity between the two pictures, that he is my father who I will see and meet him after a long separation."