TEHRAN, March 26: Iran said on Wednesday it would bar armed Iraqi exiles based on its soil from returning to Iraq to join the war to topple President Saddam Hussein.

“We will not allow any military movements in favour of, or against, any of the conflicting sides until the whole conflict is over,” government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh said.

“Our borders are closed to any kind of crossing.”

Tehran-based officials of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), made up of Iraqi Shia exiles, had no immediate comment.

The armed wing of SCIRI, known as the Badr Brigade, says it has several thousand fighters in southwestern Iran, close to the Iraqi border.

Iran has adopted a policy of what it calls “active neutrality” in the war. It defines this as keeping away from the conflict as much as it can but making diplomatic efforts to stop the conflict.

Analysts have speculated that Washington has warned Tehran not to meddle in the war, while assuring it that it will not be the next target of US attack in its war on terrorism.

Iranian government sources said on Wednesday another apparently stray missile from the Iraq war had landed on its territory, near the city of Qasr-i-Shirin, in western Kermanshah province. There were no reports of damage and it was not clear who had fired the rocket.

The official IRNA news agency later denied however that any missile had gone astray in Iran. Officials in Qasr-i-Shirin said they had no information to substantiate the report which IRNA called “baseless speculation”.

Since US-led forces invaded Iraq a week ago, Iranian officials have accused both US forces and Iraq of firing missiles that have landed in Iran. One smashed into an oil refinery in the city of Abadan, injuring two workers.

Washington said it was investigating the reports.

“We are stepping up our readiness in border towns in a bid to confront any probable threat in the future,” the Iranian government spokesman said. “Iran does not have a feeling that we are subject to any threat at the moment.”

In the first reported anti-war protest in Iran since Western forces invaded Iraq, about 300 people demonstrated outside the main UN building in central Tehran on Wednesday, witnesses and state television said.

“Why does America kill innocent Iraqi people for the sake of oil?” asked one demonstrator. “We don’t support Saddam, we back each single Muslim in Iraq,” said another.

Among the protesters were disabled veterans of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and relatives of the dead. The conflict killed around a million people on both sides.

In another consequence of the current conflict, negotiations between Iran and Iraq on swapping the remains of soldiers killed in the 1980-88 war have been suspended, IRNA said.

Iranian and Iraqi teams combing former war zones have found thousands of bodies since a UN-sponsored ceasefire halted the war. The International Committee of the Red Cross has supervised the repatriation of over 97,400 POWs from both sides since then.—Reuters