Iran Accuses Iraq of Using Chemical Weapons

Iran accused Iraq on Wednesday of using chemical weapons on the southern front of the Persian Gulf war and threatened to retaliate in kind unless the United Nations intervenes.

Iran also reported new Iraqi air raids on Iranian cities and said more than 1,000 people had been killed in attacks on Iranian civilian centers in the past nine days.

Iraq had no immediate comment on the Iranian allegations but said its jets downed an Iranian warplane in a dogfight over northern Iran.

Both sides claimed successes in continued fighting on the southern front.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein Kazempour Ardebili told a news conference that Iraq had used artillery shells containing chemicals, causing an unspecified number of casualties.

‘Lack of a Stand’

“We think the lack of a stand by the international community against Iraq’s use of chemical weapons indeed authorizes us to use chemical weapons against Iraq, but we still hope the international community will be able to stop Iraq,” he said.

Tehran first accused Baghdad of using chemical weapons against a major Iranian offensive in the south just over a year ago. U.N.-appointed experts later reported that Iranian soldiers appeared to have been the victims of mustard gas and a nerve agent known as tabu.

In Baghdad, the Iraqi military said it had halted an Iranian invasion that had caught its border forces off guard along the 750-mile-long war front.

General Fly to Front

Top Iraqi generals were flown to the invasion area in the marshlands of Hawizah to supervise a planned massive counteroffensive.

Iran has not yet said how far its offensive had progressed, but the official Iranian news agency said Wednesday in Tehran that “over 700 Iraqi troops were either killed or wounded” and that several hundred had been taken prisoner on the fronts east of the Tigris River.

Thirty-five Iraqi tanks were destroyed, together with other military vehicles, and three helicopters carrying Iraqi troops were downed, the news agency said.

Iraq, meanwhile, said it inflicted “very heavy casualties” on the Iranians, in addition to destroying more than 120 boats and four troop-carrying helicopters. It said its air force flew 499 sorties against the Iranians on Tuesday and 336 Wednesday.

Iran said through its news agency that Iranian anti-aircraft batteries had driven away all Iraqi aircraft and that Iranian forces “have full control over the command centers of the defeated Iraqi troops in the east of the Tigris River.”