ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates -- Iran warned residents of Iraqi border towns to evacuate Sunday and threatened to make 2 million people homeless. Iraq said Tehran had already begun shelling civilian targets.
The developments increased fears that indiscriminate bombing of civilian towns on both sides might be renewed, despite a U.N.-sponsored accord last June that prohibited such attacks.
An official statement by Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency said a 48-hour deadline given Iraq Friday expired Sunday, leaving Iran free to retaliate if Iraqi guns fired again on Iranian border areas.
The statement coincided with calls by the Iranian military command for residents of Iraqi border towns to leave their homes and an announcement that Iranian planes would drop flares on the Iraqi port of Basra late Sunday as 'the last ultimatum.'
'The armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while asking pardon of the people of Iraqi border towns, requests the residents of these towns to leave these areas,' official Tehran radio said.
'From today (Sunday) onward, the Iraqi regime has two paths to choose: either it becomes wise and ... will refrain from shelling Iranian cities and villages and thus prevent about 2 million Iraqi citizens from becoming homeless.
'Or else, the rulers in Baghdad will continue to carry their folly on and bomb Iranian cities and residential areas and therefore will have to bear the severe consequences of their crimes,' said the statement, monitored in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Iran's President Ali Khamenei said Friday Iran would shell Iraqi cities from the southern port city of Basra 'all the way up along the Iran-Iraq border' if Iraq did not stop shelling Iranian civilian border areas by Sunday.
But in Baghdad, the official Iraqi News Agency said Iranian guns fired for 30 minutes Sunday, destroying two buildings and wounding a 17-year-old student near Basra. It charged Iran with breaking the U.N. agreement.
A military statement also said three buildings were damaged and a boy wounded in the Shihabi area in the central sector of the 733-mile border where the two neighbors have fought since September 1980.
In an apparent response to the Iranian deadline, Iraq's Foreign Ministry warned Tehran Saturday that Baghdad would retaliate 'tit for tat' to attacks against Iraqi civilian settlements.
In Kuwait, the state-run Kuwaiti News Agency reported from Damascus that Syria would 'play a major role in halting the Iran-Iraq war in the near future in view of its close ties with the Iranian government.'
Quoting Arab diplomatic sources, KUNA said Syrian President Hafez Assad was expected to visit Tehran after he begins a third term next month.
