Iraq Chemically Bombed Two Villages, Iran Says

Iran said Iraq dropped chemical bombs on two villages and occupied three towns in western Iran today. Iraq claimed it recaptured the last land seized by Iran in the eight-year war.

U.N. officials prepared to mediate a cease-fire after Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. cease-fire resolution passed one year ago.

But Iran’s revolutionary patriarch, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, urged Iranian Revolutionary Guards to continue fighting in response to this week’s battles, Tehran radio reported.

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency said Iraqi forces occupied the Iranian border towns of Khosrawi, Qasr-e Shirin and Sar-e Pol-e Zahab in the central sector of the 730-mile front. “The battle is still raging in the area,” IRNA said.

The towns are about 110 miles northeast of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and Sar-e Pol-e Zahab is 12 miles from the border.

A military communique read over Iraqi television said Iraq “retook whatever was left of our land from the Iranians.”

Iraq identified the area as the Saif Saad region, a disputed territory that Iraq claims under the terms of a 1975 agreement between the two countries.

The Iraqi report made no mention of chemical weapons, and it denied the Iranian report that 5,000 Iraqi soldiers have died in the border fighting.

Iraq has vowed not to occupy Iranian territory, which it abandoned in the first years of the war after its drive into Iran was blunted by Iranian forces.

The communique said the elite residential guards, along with the 2nd Army Corps, smashed the Iranian defenders and took thousands of Iranians “into Iraqi hospitality.”