Iraq Claims Pullout, But Few Believe It : Persian Gulf: Hussein says more troops will leave Kuwait this week. Others find no evidence of a major withdrawal.

Iraq said that it began pulling its troops out of Kuwait on Sunday and promised to withdraw more forces Tuesday, but officials outside the Persian Gulf emirate said there was no evidence of any significant withdrawal.

Reaction ranged from skepticism to President Bush’s flat accusation that the Baghdad government of President Saddam Hussein had “lied once again.”

Baghdad Television showed images of tanks being loaded onto flatbed trucks and a long line of tanker vehicles, jeeps and trucks said to be headed home from Kuwaiti territory. Diplomatic sources in the gulf said that northbound highways in southern Kuwait were closed, and motorists were told that the closures were to make way for Iraq-bound troops.

In a statement from the Iraqi capital, the official spokesman for Iraq’s general command gave no estimate of the number of troops claimed to have been withdrawn, but he said that the pullout began at 8 a.m.

“After military units completed their withdrawal today,” the spokesman said, “and as security is stable in Kuwait, it has been decided to withdraw other units the day after tomorrow, Tuesday.”

Baghdad Radio said that people in Iraq’s southern Basra province “lined the streets to welcome the (returning) soldiers, greeting them with the victory sign and cheers for Saddam Hussein.”

Several government officials and diplomats in the region said there was no indication that Hussein had withdrawn any major portion of his 100,000-strong invasion force. Some reports said that thousands of troops from Iraq’s newly designated Kuwaiti “popular” army spread out into the tiny sheikdom throughout the day.

“I have not seen any evidence that they are pulling out, and my personal belief is that they are not,” said an official in Cairo with access to intelligence reports. “It means for some reason they are considering other alternatives, which are legion--none of them good.”

In Washington, President Bush dismissed the new government set up by Iraq in Kuwait as a “puppet regime” and said there was no indication that Iraq’s four-day-old occupation of its tiny neighbor is nearing an end.

Amid mounting international pressure on Iraq to end the invasion, the new nine-man military government named by Iraq issued a warning to countries with citizens living in Kuwait to carefully consider any sanctions. An estimated 1 million foreigners are believed to be working in Kuwait.

“Countries that resort to punitive measures against the provisional free Kuwait government and fraternal Iraq . . . should remember that they have interests and nationals in Kuwait,” warned the new foreign minister, Walid Saud Mohammed Abdullah. “These countries should also not expect us to act honorably at a time when they are conspiring against us and our brothers in Iraq in an aggressive way.”

The Iraqi-installed government also announced that beginning today, it was easing a blanket curfew in force since the invasion to allow people to move about during daylight hours, Reuters news agency reported.

Some of the first information in several days trickled out of the Kuwaiti capital early today from a group of Arab reporters escorted to Kuwait from Baghdad by the Hussein government.

According to their reports, most Kuwaiti residents remained huddled in their homes, and abandoned cars littered the streets in some areas, some smashed by tanks seeking to clear the roadways. The Kuwaiti Ministry of Defense building and a nearby military academy showed signs of heavy fighting, and residents reported that while Iraqi troops had overrun the country in a matter of hours, scattered gunfire exchanges could still be heard at night.

Estimates of the number killed and injured in the fighting have ranged from 300 to 800, and reports on Saturday said that invading Iraqi troops had penetrated Kuwaiti territory clear to the “neutral zone” on Kuwait’s frontier with Saudi Arabia. Only a couple of parallel fences spaced about half a mile apart reportedly separate the invaders from Saudi Arabian territory at that point.

In a statement carried by Iraq’s official news agency, the new Kuwaiti government said it planned to initiate immediate negotiations with “sisterly Iraq” on such issues as the long-running border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait--one of the contentious issues cited as having provoked Iraq’s invasion before dawn Thursday.

“We hope to resolve (these issues) in the interests of ensuring and safeguarding the security of Iraq and Kuwait, who together are bound by the same fate,” said the newly appointed Kuwaiti prime minister, Col. Ala Hussein Ali.

Kuwait’s exiled emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, broke a three-day silence since he disappeared from the Kuwaiti capital and, sheltered in an undisclosed location believed to be in Saudi Arabia, broadcast an appeal over Saudi and Bahraini television.

“What makes our hearts filled with sadness is that the source of this unjustified aggression was not an enemy, but a brother and a close neighbor to whom we have lent our support during his time of difficulty,” the sheik said, referring to the billions of dollars Kuwait loaned to Iraq to support its eight-year war with Iran. “We have suffered a lot as a result of that,” he said.

A group of Kuwaiti officials, including four members of the Kuwaiti ruling family who had been secretly shuttled out of the country, arrived Sunday night in London and reported that Iraqi troops had engaged in looting, on occasions ordering people out of their cars and taking their money. Various foreign embassies in Kuwait have made similar reports.

In an interview from Amman, Jordan, acting Kuwaiti Ambassador Faisal Mukhaizem said that one or more Kuwaiti F-1 Mirage jets bombed the headquarters of the Iraqi military in Jahrah, near the Kuwaiti capital. Mukhaizem said the aircraft were among a number of planes that the Kuwaiti government still controls, but he declined to say where they are based.

“We are not going to specify from where those planes took off,” he said. “For political reasons, and strategic considerations, we would like to protect the places where they have taken off from. It could be Bahrain, it could be Saudi Arabia, it could be somewhere else. It could be from within Kuwait.”

There was no independent confirmation of the report, and most diplomatic sources were skeptical about it.

U.S. officials did not provide details about why they do not believe Iraq’s claim that it is withdrawing from Kuwait. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said there is “no independent or confirmable information” about the claim, and he added that Iraqi President Hussein’s “actions in the past raise serious skepticism about his intentions.”

Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.), Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, told ABC-TV that intelligence reports “do not indicate the Iraqis are moving out, especially along the southern border. So if they are taking anybody out, it’s probably just a few people for show.”

Iraq’s first deputy prime minister, Taha Yassin Ramadan, told reporters after a meeting with Turkish President Turgut Ozal that the troop withdrawal “will not take long. Maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks.” The two envoys presumably discussed Western requests that Turkey shut down the pipeline through which Iraq pumps more than half of its crude oil. Ramadan warned that a Turkish decision to shut down the pipeline would “create mistrust” between the two countries.

Iraq’s intentions toward Saudi Arabia remained another unanswered question Sunday, following the reports that thousands of Iraqi troops have massed near Kuwait’s southern border.

Diplomatic sources in Saudi Arabia said there was still no evidence of an imminent invasion across the Saudi border. Though there were some reports of minor cross-border incursions, an official there said: “I have not seen a single confirmed report of incursions across the border.”

An American oil technician who recently returned from the border region told the Associated Press that Saudi Arabia had deployed 200 to 300 tanks toward the Kuwaiti border on Friday. But there have been no other reports of Saudi military buildups in the region.

Jordan’s King Hussein, trying to still fears of further Iraqi expansion, told CBS News that Saddam Hussein does not intend to send troops south across the desert border into Saudi Arabia.

Appealing to the West to stay out of the Persian Gulf crisis, King Hussein said: “During the last few days there were pressures applied to bring not only the majority of the world in line but to also influence Arab logic. Please believe me . . . that intimidation does not work, that it could be counterproductive and that we could be in a far worse situation than we are facing at the moment.”

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