Alwaght_ 29 years on, tens of thousands of Iranians carried 175 military divers on their shoulders in the country's capital Tehran. Divers whose bodies were recently dug up in a mass grave from the Iraqi side of the river border were captured during the 1980s war with Iraq.
Pictures were circulated in Iranian media showing the bodies dressed in diving gear and hands crudely tied with wire. Regarding the fact that some of the bodies bore no signs of injury, tehran believes that they had been buried alive by their Iraqi captors.
Emotional crowds packed the capital’s streets to commemorate the divers and other soldiers killed during the war.
The divers were taken prisoner in 1986, during an Iranian attempt to seize Basra. Iraq repelled the attack and thousands were killed on both sides.
"The divers were the bravest of us... they gave their lives for the independence of our country and the success of our revolution," Mohsen Rezaie, the the commander of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps IRGC, said in an address. "Iran's enemies stood by Saddam for the whole eight years of the Sacred Defence," he added,