Iraq on Thursday buried the remains of 481 soldiers who died in wars decades ago but whose bodies were only recently found or returned by former enemies as they made peace with the post-Saddam government in Baghdad.

The bodies, buried in a graveyard outside the southern city of Basra, included 200 Iraqi soldiers whose bodies were handed over by Tehran in November, in an exchange of victims of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Another 63 bodies, of soldiers killed when U.S. and allied forces shattered Saddam's army in 1991 after the former dictator invaded Kuwait, were sent back to Iraq by Saudi Arabia.

The rest of the corpses were remains -- many unidentified -- of Iraqi soldiers who died on home soil in the Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf War. A million people were believed to have been killed in the war that Saddam waged against Iran alone.

"These are the victims of the previous regime," said Mehdi al-Tamimi, head of the Iraqi human rights office in Basra.

"Some of them were here ... for two years and no one came to claim them. This is the tragedy of Mesopotamia," he added, referring to the ancient name for the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern Iraq lies.

The bodies, shrouded in white cloth, were buried in a large cemetery at Zubair, just on the outskirts of Basra, before a crowd of government officials and politicians.

Muzahim al-Rubaie, a representative from the Iraqi ministry of human rights, said it had published the names of the unclaimed dead in newspapers last month but only a few people came forward to collect the remains of relatives.

"We handed over 10 remains only," Rubaie said.