Mubarak Sends Troops, Sees ‘No Hope’ for Averting Clash : Gulf crisis: The Egyptian leader says Iraqis are inflexible and military option may be inevitable. Syrian and Moroccan forces are also likely to be deployed.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, declaring that there is “no hope” for a peaceful solution to the crisis in Kuwait, dispatched the first of several thousand troops to Saudi Arabia on Saturday to serve alongside a growing multinational force poised to defend against further Iraqi incursions.

An Egyptian presidential spokesman said the first troops left early Saturday morning, and other officials said it was likely that Syrian and Moroccan forces would also be deployed as part of a pan-Arab force endorsed by a majority of the Arab League’s 21 members Friday night in an emergency summit meeting.

“I called for a summit hoping we could find a way out, but they sat and exchanged accusations,” Mubarak told reporters, adding that prospects for a peaceful resolution of Iraq’s 9-day-old occupation of Kuwait were not promising.

“I want to tell you honestly--and note that I am always optimistic--there is no hope for that,” the president said.

An Egyptian Foreign Ministry official said the planned deployment of what other sources said could be up to 5,000 Egyptian troops to an Arab force in the region reflects Egypt’s view that a military option may be inevitable if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s troops are to be dislodged from Kuwait.

“We are on the brink of a major crisis in the gulf and in the Arab world,” the official said. “We hoped the Iraqis would show flexibility, understanding, maturity, reasonableness in the Arab summit. But the summit has proved that the Iraqis had completely different designs. They’re not flexible, and they don’t want to help us find a way out of the present crisis.

“God only knows how this will be over,” the official added. “They are playing with fire.”

The Egyptian announcement came as Britain announced that 12 of its Tornado fighter jets had reached Saudi Arabia and that 12 anti-tank Jaguar aircraft had left for Oman, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.

Though Britain is the only other nation to commit troops to the U.S.-backed force, deploying more than 1,000 British soldiers to the gulf, Australia, France, Canada and West Germany have all committed warships to the region in recent days in response to U.S. requests. The Soviet Union has two warships in the Persian Gulf which it said are to protect Soviet shipping.

But a defiant Iraq accused Arab leaders of bowing to American demands with its recommendation for dispatching troops to the region. “The oil emirs and their servant, Hosni Mubarak, insisted on what America demanded of them,” said a Baghdad Radio commentary.

Communication lines to both Iraq and Kuwait have been shut off since shortly after the Aug. 2 invasion, and foreigners have been prevented from leaving. But nearly 120 refugees managed to flee Iraq and Kuwait on Friday and Saturday through the desert into Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Among them were 10 U.S. diplomats and embassy dependents from Iraq who traveled overland from Baghdad to Jordan with a 10-year-old California girl, who had been traveling alone and was stranded with fellow passengers in Kuwait after the invasion. She was subsequently transferred to Baghdad.

In the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, news agencies reported that Saudi anti-aircraft batteries had fired at two Iraqi reconnaissance planes in the Khafji region near the Kuwaiti border. That report, quoting unidentified diplomatic sources, said the planes turned back without actually crossing the border, but both Iraqi and Saudi officials denied that the incident took place.

“None of our aircraft conducted any sortie over Saudi territory,” an Iraqi spokesman said over Baghdad Radio, and a Saudi official declared that “the first bullet will not be from Saudi Arabia.” Pentagon officials said they had no information on the report.

In Cairo, presidential spokesman Mohammed Abdel Moneim refused to disclose the size or composition of the Egyptian force, saying only that it had been dispatched to Saudi Arabia early Saturday morning. But Mubarak appeared to leave the door open to deploying Egyptian troops in other gulf countries as well.

“We are on our way to sending some units to some Arab countries,” he said. “If anyone starts attacking, we are ready to confront him.”

Mubarak told British Broadcasting Corp. television that Syria would also commit troops to the Arab force, “and maybe Morocco also.” A source close to the Egyptian government said Morocco had expressed some last-minute doubts. “You send your people to places where there is war and one Arab against another. This is a problem,” he said.

Another Egyptian official who asked not to be identified said Egyptian troops were “practically in the planes” when the Arab League acted late Friday night, reflecting Mubarak’s despair at negotiating a compromise for the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

Egypt has had a large corps of technical advisers in Saudi Arabia for the past several days, and was awaiting the Arab League resolution before sending “the troops in full regalia,” the official said. The technical advisers were preparing communications and points of cooperation with Saudi officials in anticipation of a full deployment, he said.

Egyptian Foreign Ministry officials said the Egyptian and other Arab troops would not officially join a U.S.-sponsored multinational force currently being deployed near Saudi Arabia’s border with Kuwait, where an estimated 120,000 Iraqi soldiers are massed following Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait.

Public sentiment against the American intervention has run high in many parts of the Arab world, and Arab leaders emphasized that their resolution endorsing the deployment of troops in the gulf was designed to provide an “Arab umbrella” for defending the oil-rich region against further Iraqi aggression.

But diplomats here said it is expected that the operations of the Arab force and the U.S.-backed force will be coordinated. In any case, they said, the relatively few troops expected to be sent by the Arabs--about 10,000, according to one report, compared to as many as 50,000 that observers here expect to be deployed over the next several weeks by the United States--will be more important symbolically than militarily.

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