GENEVA - Iran and Iraq have signed an agreement to trace missing persons from the war between the two countries in the 1980s, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday.

The Red Cross said Baghdad and Tehran have agreed on how to gather and share information about the missing persons and hand over their remains.

The neutral body said its experts will help both countries jointly carry out the work.

ICRC official Beatrice Megevand-Roggo said that thousands of Iraqi and Iranian families are still waiting to learn what happened to their loved ones.

There's no generally accepted figure on the missing but estimates range into the low hundreds of thousands on both sides, many of them civilians. Mass graves from the war are still being found Iraq, many containing the bodies of Iranian prisoners.

About 1 million people died in the eight-year war that began when Saddam Hussein launched an attack on Iran in 1980. A Shiite-dominated government friendly to Iran took power after Saddam was overthrown in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

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