ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996 TAG: 9609090070
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: FROM THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
note: lede
The Iraqi military's recent takeover of a city controlled by independent Kurdish groups broke up a long-standing CIA-funded covert operation to destabilize the Iraqi government and led to the arrest and apparent execution of more than 100 Iraqis associated with the effort, according to U.S. officials and Iraqi dissidents.
The destruction of the headquarters in Irbil of the Iraqi National Congress, which Washington set up in 1992 as an alternative to the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, has fulfilled a major ambition of Saddam's security services, the officials said.
The dissident group never succeeded in posing a serious challenge to Saddam's power and had been in decline for 18 months, largely because of feuds among the Kurds, but it had repeatedly harassed the Baghdad government. The dissidents disseminated anti-Saddam leaflets, books, television programming and radio broadcasts; employed hundreds of Iraqi defectors; and collected detailed military intelligence that they passed along to Washington.
When Irbil fell, Saddam's security agents moved swiftly to exact their revenge by conducting house-to-house searches for its leaders, using a list of names and addresses of National Congress members, according to officials of the group in Sulaymaniyah inside Iraq, and in Washington and London.
The security agents looted the dissident group's headquarters, seizing high-tech communication equipment and computers purchased in part with millions of dollars in covert CIA funds.
Saddam's incursion into the enclave prompted the United States to retaliate with missile strikes against air-defense targets in southern Iraq on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Adding to the magnitude of the CIA's loss is the apparent execution of more than 100 members of the congress who were captured by the Iraqi secret police Aug. 31 near Qushtapa. They had assembled in Irbil Aug. 28 and 29 as part of a police force being created at U.S. urging to halt fighting between warring Kurdish groups.
``We have a lot of reports that [the congress] was a subject of the Iraqi effort'' to crush opponents of the regime in Irbil, a senior State Department official confirmed Friday. Two other senior U.S. officials said the group's reports of mass executions had been accepted by Washington as credible, although details of the episodes remain scarce.
In addition, according to National Congress officials in Iraq and elsewhere, hundreds of others suspected of involvement with the group were rounded up over the next several days and hauled away in trucks to Iraqi prisons in Kirkuk and Mosul. Their fate is unknown, but a U.S. defense official said Saturday, ``I don't doubt'' that many have been killed.
The absence of any U.S. protection for the members of the dissident congress in Irbil has provoked complaints from some of those associated with the group, who say that Washington essentially washed its hands of the congress once the Iraqi assault got under way.
``From my personal point of view, no one has offered us any help on the ground,'' said Gen. Talal Al-Ubaidy, the head of National Congress military forces, speaking over a satellite telephone from Sulaymaniyah, where the group is attempting to re-establish its headquarters.
``On the day of the attack, a lot of my people kept asking, `When are the Americans going to attack the Iraqi side?''' the congress officer said. Noting that Washington's military response was to attack a series of air-defense radars in southern Iraq, he added that ``a lot of our people feel extremely disappointed and bitter.''
Another well-placed Iraqi dissident who is familiar with the National Congress echoed the complaint, saying that ``we got nothing, zilch'' from Washington, even though ``everything we had built in Irbil was based on the premise that America would prevent an attack by Saddam on the city.''
The Clinton administration said Saturday it supports Turkey's plan to enter northern Iraq to retaliate against Kurdish rebels who have been staging hit-and-run attacks.
Turkey sent troops to its southeastern border region neighboring Iraq this week. Southeastern Turkey's regional governor said that troops killed 26 guerrillas in five skirmishes in the border-protection initiative.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher gave Turkey the green light to create a buffer zone against Kurdish attacks. ``We understand their reason for doing so,'' he said. He stressed the zone along the border should be very thin and temporary.
On Saturday, Turkmen refugees fled to Zakho, 185 miles north of Irbil on the Iraq-Turkey border, to escape an Iraqi offensive. Thousands of Turkmen, a semi-nomadic tribe, live among Kurds in northern Iraq under the U.S.-protected ``no-fly'' zone.
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