An Iraqi official says Iraq and Iran have exchanged the bodies of 111 soldiers killed during the two countries’ 1980-1988 war.

Mahdi al-Tamimi, an official in Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry, says the remains of 98 Iranians and 13 Iraqis were returned to their native countries during a ceremony on Tuesday.

Al-Tamimi says the swap at a border checkpoint near the southern Iraqi city of Basra brings the number of Iraqi bodies received since 1996 to 2,262. Iranians have received 1,597 bodies of their fallen.

More than 1 million people from both sides were killed or went missing during the eight-year war.

Source: the Associated Press