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Saddam to Address Nation on Iraq-Iran War Anniversary
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will deliver a nation-wide televised address Wednesday morning to commemorate the 13th anniversary of the ending of the Iraq-Iran war from 1980 to 1988, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported Tuesday.
The annual "grand victory day" speech will be broadcast live through Iraq's TV and radio stations, the INA as well as the Internet, the INA said.
The speech comes amid widespread speculations that the U.S. might launch fresh military attacks against Iraq, who remains defiant after 11 years of economic sanctions and the U.S. military pressure.
Pentagon officials have disclosed that the U.S. was drawing up plans to attack Iraq in response to its stepped-up campaign to shoot down a coalition plane overflying the two no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq.
The two air exclusion zones, set up by the U.S.-led Western allies after the 1991 Gulf War with the claimed aim of protecting the Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from the attacks of the Iraqi government troops, have been used by the U.S. to contain the Saddam regime.
Pentagon officials announced on July 26 that the Iraqi anti- aircraft artillery nearly hit a high-flying U-2 spy plane and the U.S. has since toughened the rhetoric of retaliation.
Moreover, after 13 years of the end of the Iraq-Iran war, bilateral relations between the two neighbors have improved to some extent.
But Iraq and Iran last month exchanged accusations against each other for lacking the "political will" to settle the outstanding problems between the two sides.
More than a decade after the end of their brutal war, the issue of prisoners of war (POW) and the rival governments' support for opposition groups are still stumbling blocks to the normalization of bilateral ties.
Iran says that more than 3,000 Iranian POWs are still being held in Iraq, while Iraq claims that 29,000 Iraqi soldiers are being kept in Iranian prisons.
The Iraq-Iran war, which ended on August 8, 1988, claimed some one million lives and caused severe damage to the two countries' economy.
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