Iran-Iraq fighting goes on as peace team pays call

April 13, 1981

Iranian and Iraqi forces continued battling along their 300-mile frontier Saturday as a peace mission of nonaligned nations was meeting with Iranian President Abolhassan BaniSadr in Tehran. The peace mission, which includes the foreign ministers of India, Cuba, and the Zambia and a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, arrived from Baghdad to try to negotiate an end to the nearly seven-month-old war.

Iran's state-run Pars News Agency said Mr. Bani-Sadr repeated his country's view that peace was possible only if Iraqi troops withdrew from Iranian territory occupied in an Iraqi bid to gain control of the Shatt al Arab waterway , wh ich is Iraq's only access to the Persian Gulf.