Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 25, 1991 TAG: 9103250096
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: IN U.S.-OCCUPIED SOUTHERN IRAQ LENGTH: Long
The soldiers were the latest of scores who are again surrendering to U.S. forces deployed in the desert here.
Civilian refugees reaching American lines told the same story, and said that bloody reprisals and executions are occurring now that Saddam's forces are back in control of Basra and other major cities in the south that were centers of rebellion against the regime by Shiite Muslims.
In the past five days, occupation authorities said, U.S. troops at heavily fortified checkpoints along the Euphrates Valley demarcation line have begun accepting hundreds of deserting Iraqi troops as prisoners of war, instead of simply disarming them and sending them back to Iraq.
"They all say they want political asylum," said Sgt. Scott Dixon, an Arabic-speaking Utah National Guardsman at a U.S. checkpoint on the road to Basra. "They all say, `Take me to any country but Iraq.'
"One guy said, `If you don't take me, just shoot me. I cannot go back.' That tells you what's happening to the resistance [to Saddam]."
Many of the surrendering Iraqi soldiers claim they are resistance fighters fleeing execution squads that they say have left hundreds of civilians and soldiers dead in the streets of Basra, Nasariya, Najaf, Kerbala, Umm Qasr and other Iraqi cities now under the control of Saddam's Republican Guards.
Other developments in Iraq and Kuwait on Sunday included:
Machine-gun fire into the Kuwait City sky signaled the homecoming of another batch of Kuwaiti POWs who had spent months in Iraqi prisons. Men wept openly and women wailed as busloads of prisoners arrived at a community hall in the Kuwaiti capital. Names of returning prisoners were not made public in advance, so the welcome was all the more emotional for relatives who came not knowing whether their loved ones would arrive.
Iraqi investors acting for Saddam have purchased nearly $1 billion worth
of shares in public companies over the past 10 years, including a major media firmi, The Financial Times of London reported today. The newspaper said the stock purchases began as early as 1981 and were made by several companies with Iraqi directors, including one led by Saddam's half brother.
Baghdad Radio reported that Sadoun Hammadi, appointed prime minister Saturday in a Cabinet shuffle, toured his native city of Najaf and also Qadissiyah, another Shiite stronghold. Hammadi, 55, a Shiite himself, told the southerners that the country needs to rebuild "what was destroyed by the cliques and saboteurs who came from outside the country's borders," a veiled reference to Iran, which Baghdad now openly accuses of fueling the insurgency in the south.
Most of the newly surrendering Iraqi troops here in the U.S.-occupied zone simply drive or walk up to U.S. checkpoints, often in uniforms but rarely armed.
A four-truck U.S. convoy carried 251 Iraqi POWs south toward Kuwait on Sunday morning, headed to processing camps in Saudi Arabia. Stuffed into the trucks, many of the prisoners grinned and waved as they drove by under heavy guard.
Another truckload of POWs waited at dusk about 20 miles deeper into Iraq on the road west to Nasariya. Nearby, U.S. soldiers guarded another dozen prisoners under a highway bridge.
Some soldiers said they simply wanted to quit the army and leave the epidemics, hunger and bitter fighting that have swept much of Iraq since the the Feb. 28 provisional cease-fire in the Persian Gulf War.
One eight-year Iraqi army veteran, who sneaked around an Iraqi checkpoint in civilian clothes to surrender to U.S. troops, said he had deserted his infantry unit in Basra rather than obey orders to shoot civilians in their homes.
"I did not want to shoot at my people," said Abdul Jowad Jassim, 25, showing his yellow Iraqi military ID card. If he returned to Iraq, he said, "they will execute me immediately."
Jassim said that he and his brother and five other friends deserted Saturday and that "hundreds" are likely to follow him.
Reports from inside and outside Iraq say that there was no letup Sunday in Saddam's continuing problems with rebellions in Kurdish northern Iraq.
Syria's official SANA news agency reported that a rebel force, apparently Kurdish guerrillas, captured a full Iraqi division with heavy weapons. The SANA report says that the division was assigned to occupy the city of Khanaquin, about 100 miles northeast of Baghdad, and clashed with a rebel force between Khanaquin and the town of Jallula. Meanwhile, Iranian radio claimed insurgents had captured an Iraqi brigadier general named Jilil Hamid Muhsin, commander of the 20th Infantry Division. It was not clear whether the alleged incidents were related.
Exile and travelers' reports continued to indicate disturbances in the Baghdad area.
U.S. officials in Washington have confirmed signs of disturbances in some of the Iraqi capital's poor, Shiite-populated suburbs, but Saddam's regime has made no specific reference to insurrection in Baghdad.
U.S. troops who moved deeper into southern Iraq last week to guard against cease-fire violations also have built far stronger fortifications at checkpoints. Tall earthen berms, barbed wire and car wrecks are used to block roads, and tanks and armored vehicles are dug in along the roadsides. All traffic is banned after 6 p.m.
Some of the refugees reaching U.S.-occupied Iraq said that Iraqi troops had fired Scud missiles at resistance forces, similar to those fired at Saudi Arabia and Israel during the war, but the reports could not be confirmed from the U.S. zone. None reported seeing Iraqi warplanes or poison gas.
Overall, Shiite Muslim rebels and other resistance forces are badly outnumbered and outgunned, and are now mostly reduced to ambushes at night, refugees said. Several refugees confirmed reports of a rebel attack on Iraqi officers billeted at the Sheraton Hotel in Basra.
A 25-year-old Iraqi medical student said that Republican Guard troops armed with 60 tanks and scores of artillery pieces recaptured Mudeina, outside Basra, three days ago after 20 days of nominal rebel control.
"Anyone from resistance, they kill," he said.
The number of Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles that survived the American-led land attack that ended the war is much greater than American military authorities initially reported, and many of the weapons have been used by Saddam to quell resistance, American officials say.
On Feb. 27, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of allied forces in the Persian Gulf region, said in a briefing that the Iraqi armored forces had been trapped.
"The gate's closed," Schwarzkopf said a few hours before President Bush announced the temporary cease-fire.
But hundreds of Iraqi tanks and other armored vehicles managed to leave Kuwait and southern Iraq, many of them in effect saved by the cease-fire bell sounded by Bush.
by CNB