Baghdad, Iraq – In a move likely to further inflame Sunni Arab resentments, the Iraqi government Thursday publicly acknowledged for the first time that Iraq was the aggressor in 1980 when it touched off a bloody eight-year war with Iran.
In a joint statement at the end of a three-day visit by Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, the new Shiite-led Iraqi government said Saddam Hussein and other officials in his government must be put on trial for committing “military aggression against the people of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait,” as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.
It was an effort to bring to a close the bitter legacy of the war in which nearly 1 million people were estimated to have died and tens of thousands more were displaced as refugees.
An Iraqi Foreign Ministry official who helped write the communique, Labeed Abbawi, said the admission was not intended as an acknowledgment of guilt on the part of the Iraqi state or people, who also suffered staggering casualties in the war.
Rather, he said, it was meant to lay the responsibility for the war squarely on Hussein and other leaders of his government, many of whom face trials this year for their roles in the killing of Iraqis.
“The file of the war, we want to put it behind us,” he said. “We want to open a new path of cooperation.”
Even so, it was a gesture of warmth toward Iran, which has long sought formal recognition of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against it during the war.
The statement is not likely to sit well with Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, who ran the country for decades but have been largely left out of the National Assembly, which will draft the new Iraqi constitution, since they boycotted national elections in January.
Shiites control the government for the first time in modern Iraqi history, and Sunni Arabs, isolated politically, have begun to chafe under their rule.
Meanwhile Thursday, three U.S. soldiers were killed, one in an attack on a U.S. base in Ramadi and two others in central Baghdad, when gunmen attacked their convoy.