Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 17, 1991 TAG: 9102170104
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: EASTERN SAUDI ARABIA LENGTH: Medium
Sgt. Alan Jones, 37, an Army MP from Milwaukee, thought he recognized one of the enemy prisoners of war brought into a sprawling prisoner camp in the desert here. The prisoner, too, showed a flash of recognition.
"I know you," the young Iraqi POW said, stepping forward. "Where have we met?"
It turned out the prisoner had been studying engineering in Wheeling, Ill., where Jones belonged to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post.
The young Iraqi spoke again. He asked about the Super Bowl. He then told his story, one of bad luck. He had left the United States to visit his father in Iraq last summer and was drafted.
At the same compound, Lt. Donna Conrad, 23, of Hempstead, N.Y., took her first look at the enemy prisoners, scared boy-men. To her, pathetic.
"One guy was very young and very small. He looked like he wanted to cry," Conrad said. "I wanted to cry, too. I had to remind myself that this was the enemy."
Arabs in the anti-Iraq coalition also are finding it hard to resist a feeling of melancholy about this Iraqi enemy - fellow soldiers on the receiving end of a lopsided pummeling from the sky.
Capt. Ibrahim Hamed is commander of a Saudi reconnaissance unit on the leading edge of the coalition army. Sitting on a carpet, warmed by a pit of open coals, he spoke of the Iraqis coming across the border. They reach this Saudi outpost first.
Even as the ground rumbled from bombs falling to the north and flare-light flickered in the night, Hamed said he has come to understand how difficult it is for an enemy soldier to defect and how desperately some of them want to.
"I tell my people not to deal with them with weapons," Hamed said. "Their hearts are broke already."
Hamed has seen the defectors' bodies grow thinner over the weeks as Iraqi rations dry up. Iraqi soldiers, he said, no longer get five days off after five weeks in the front. The deserters usually cross the line according to a pattern: A combat engineer picks the way through the mines and Iraqi fortifications. Others follow single file.
As they near coalition lines, they shine a light on themselves to avoid being mistaken for a patrol. Many come carrying free-passage leaflets, dropped by the tens of thousands from coalition bombers and artillery shells. The Saudis signal safe passage with a green flag. At night, a bright light is sometimes shown to guide the defectors.
Some do not make it safely.
"Iraqi prisoners say there are many people dead in the desert, shot by the Iraqi military police," Hamed said.
At the American-run POW camp, one of four on the front lines with a combined capacity of 100,000, reporters were given their first tour. White, Bedouin-style desert tents, concrete-block mess halls and a few trailers are surrounded by sand berms. Barbed wire divides the interior of the camps into sections. At the corners are wooden guard towers where MPs are positioned with M-60 machine guns.
Salem Zafiri is a 27-year-old Kuwaiti working at the camp with a brigade of 6,000 American MPs from 27 states. He spent a month under the Iraqi occupation of his country before fleeing to Saudi Arabia and volunteering for the military. He believes his brother and other members of his family are being held behind by Iraq.
"When I am away from these prisoners, sometimes I hate them. But when I see them, it changes. They are human beings. I don't want to kill them," said Zafiri.
by CNB