Kuwaiti Raids Fuel Iraq Crackdown

Michael Ross of The Times’ Washington Bureau is a member of the Pentagon press pool currently in Saudi Arabia. This report was written for the pool, whose members are not allowed to disclose their exact location.

Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait have closed mosques and sealed the border with Saudi Arabia in response to continuing hit-and-run attacks by Kuwaiti resistance cells, according to refugees arriving here.

The resistance is still relatively small and uncoordinated, but “it is growing as we become more organized,” said a Kuwaiti shopkeeper, who fought with the underground for nearly two weeks before the location of his cell was discovered and surrounded by Iraqi tanks.

The shopkeeper, an army reservist who asked to be identified only as Nasser, his first name, said resistance members were holding more than 150 Iraqi soldiers prisoner.

They were captured, he said, in night-time raids on Iraqi patrols in residential areas of the Kuwaiti capital.

Another refugee, a high school soccer coach who fled on Thursday, said Kuwaitis knew that the resistance was continuing because scattered shooting could still be heard throughout the city at night.

Abdullah Anazi, 37, said the Iraqis had imposed a curfew Wednesday because “young Kuwaitis are shooting at their soldiers in the dark.”

No formal curfew had been in effect before Wednesday, Anazi said, adding that it was but one of several security measures the Iraqis have taken this week to deal with the still small but apparently growing underground resistance.

“They also closed the mosques whose ulemas (prayer leaders) were denouncing the Iraqis and speaking out against the invasion,” Anazi said.

“It is the young people,” he added. “They are the ones who are taking up arms and fighting . . . but only at night.”

Other newly arrived refugees also confirmed reports by Saudi sources that the Iraqis have closed the border to Kuwaitis trying to enter Saudi Arabia. Until a few days ago, the Iraqis were barring foreigners from leaving but were allowing--even encouraging--Kuwaitis to go.

Saudi officials said more than 100,000 Kuwaitis were now in the kingdom but that the flow of refugees abruptly slowed to a trickle a few days ago.

Anazi and another refugee who arrived in Saudi Arabia after the border was closed said they escaped by crossing the desert at a remote spot far from the frontier post where they had been turned back by Iraqi soldiers.

The refugees, interviewed at a school, a hotel and other locations where they have been given temporary shelter by the Saudi government, gave similar accounts of the Aug. 2 invasion, which appeared to have taken their tiny country and its unprepared defense forces by complete surprise.

“We never thought they would do this to us,” said Nasser Asmi, a 32-year-old worker with the Kuwait Oil Co. “We thought, ‘How could they do this to us, a neighbor and fellow Muslim country?’ But Saddam Hussein is a bad man. We never had a chance.”

Stunned into submission by the overwhelming size of the invasion force, the Kuwaitis offered only scattered resistance for the first day.

“We woke up in the morning and found Iraqis everywhere,” said Asmi.

Even though Iraqi troops had been massing on their borders, Kuwaiti leaders apparently chose to believe Hussein’s assurances, delivered to other Arab governments, that he would not invade Kuwait.

As a result, the Kuwaiti National Guard was not on alert, and its main garrison in the capital was nearly deserted on the morning of the invasion because most of its men had been given the Thursday-Friday (Friday is the Muslim Sabbath) weekend off, according to one of the defenders who escaped.

“Normally, there are about 2,000 soldiers stationed at the garrison, but there were only about 120 on duty on the morning of the invasion,” when the Iraqis surrounded the garrison with tanks, said Cpl. Melfi Asmi, 34.

“We resisted all day, from 7 in the morning until 7 at night, but they were firing at us from all sides,” he said.

Asmi, who is Nasser Asmi’s cousin, said about half the defenders were killed or wounded before the rest chose to flee. “There was no officer there to make decisions. The highest-ranking soldier was a sergeant. We did the best we could, but at last we realized we would all be killed if we stayed,” he said.

Nasser’s garrison apparently held out longer than did the defenders at other installations in Kuwait city.

In the first eyewitness account of the storming of the emir’s palace, Mansour Mohanni, 32, said that it fell to a force of “about 70 Iraqi commandos who came over the back wall” at about 12:30 p.m., more than 10 hours after the initial invasion.

“They came over the wall firing rockets and machine guns,” said Mohanni, a clerk at the palace.

He said the palace guards killed 15 of the Iraqis before being overwhelmed.

Mohanni, who escaped after the Iraqis entered the palace to hunt down the remaining guards, said that the emir of Kuwait, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, was not there at the time of the attack. He said he knew how the emir had escaped but would not divulge it.

The Kuwaitis who were interviewed all said that the invasion appeared to have been well-planned. “They bombed the runways so our jet fighters could not take off, and they cut the communications right away,” leaving National Guard bases throughout the country isolated from one another, Cpl. Asmi said.

“The Iraqis had very good intelligence. They knew where everything was. They even knew where the foreigners lived,” added Nasser, the shopkeeper and army reservist.

While the thoroughness of their intelligence suggests that the Iraqis may have been planning the invasion for some time, every Kuwaiti interviewed over the past several days--from senior government officials to ordinary citizens--professed shock and profound disbelief at what had happened.

“I don’t know why we were so complacent, so foolish,” another refugee, who asked not to be identified, said bitterly. “As Muslims, I guess we never thought our brothers could do such a thing to us.”

As the initial shock began to wear off, some Kuwaitis using arms taken from police stations--and from the Iraqi soldiers they later killed--went underground and began ambushing Iraqi patrols at night, Nasser said.

“We would not attack large groups of Iraqis, but if we saw two or three together, we would shoot them,” he added.

In the first week after the invasion, the troops patrolling the capital were “relaxed” and undisciplined, Nasser said.

The soldiers who carried out the initial attack--Iraq’s elite Republican Guards--were withdrawn soon after the invasion and replaced by ordinary troops, many of whom had been told by their commanders that they were going to Kuwait to safeguard it from an American invasion, Nasser said.

“They did not expect us to attack them, so they were easy targets. These were also the soldiers who did the terrible things, the ones who raped our women,” he said.

“They looted everything,” another Kuwaiti said. “They made motorists stop in the street and give them their cars. They even stopped people on the street to take the watches off their wrists.”

Another witness said he saw some Iraqi soldiers shoot the plate-glass out of the window of a Mercedes-Benz dealership and drive off with the cars. “They took all the new American and European cars back to Baghdad,” he said.

As the behavior of the occupying force became worse, the resistance grew bolder, Nasser said.

He asked that his group’s method of operations and the area in which it fought not be disclosed in detail because his cell was still believed to be active.

However, he said that, on the third day following the invasion, he and his friends chased two Iraqi soldiers into a restaurant, where they shot one and captured the other.

“They tried to hide in a big refrigerator in the back of the restaurant. One resisted and we killed him. The other one surrendered,” Nasser said, adding that the resistance was holding “about 150 Iraqis as prisoners” by the time he left Kuwait last week.

Using gasoline bombs made from bottles with dates pressed into the necks to hold the wicks in place, the group also disabled an Iraqi tank one night.

“The Iraqis would stand outside their tanks. We would sneak up and shoot the men outside the tanks, then open the hatch and drop the bomb inside,” Nasser said.

He claimed that a number of tanks were disabled in this manner.

The resistance is still largely uncoordinated, “but we are getting more organized and better disciplined every day,” Nasser said.