Iraq Has a New Roadblock to Releasing Some Hostages

In a calculated move that will delay the release of some foreign hostages, Iraq on Friday raised the ante for freeing more than 200 women and children held for weeks at strategic military installations, insisting that only Iraq’s state-owned airline can fly them home.

The Iraqi government “requested” the governments of Britain and France to allow Iraqi Airlines landing rights for the flights. At the same time, it also asked them to permit the jetliners to pick up Iraqi passengers who were “stranded” in London and Paris last month when a U.N. embargo was imposed and Iraq’s overseas assets were frozen.

Information Minister Naji Hadithi, a spokesman for President Saddam Hussein, stopped short of calling the Iraqi position a demand, repeating several times that it is merely a “request.”

But he made it clear that, for the time being, Iraq is offering no other alternatives to evacuate this group of 237 women and children, who along with hundreds of others were ordered freed this week amid great fanfare.

However, an Iraqi Airways official said early today that a Boeing 747 was preparing to leave Baghdad at 7 a.m. PDT to ferry foreign women and children out of the country, the Associated Press reported. The unidentified official said he did not know how many foreigners would be aboard the Iraqi jet but that the airliner would land in Amman, Jordan, then London, Paris and finally Washington. The plane would return to Baghdad carrying a number of Iraqis from those cities, the official said.

The group of 237 hostages, composed mostly of Americans, Britons, Japanese, French and Australians, remain prisoners of the Iraqi government, held under armed guard at Baghdad’s drab Monsour Melia Hotel.

In London, a spokesman for the British Foreign Office said Friday that his nation does not object to the Iraqi proposal.

“If a plane is coming out here with British nationals on it and is going back empty to Baghdad and Iraqi nationals want to go on it, of course they can go,” he said, declaring: “We do not have hostages.”

But French Foreign Ministry spokesman Daniel Bernard, speaking in Paris, said France “will not give ourselves over to any negotiations, to any trading with anybody.”

If permission for the flights were granted, it would technically violate the international embargo and represent a public relations victory for Baghdad, Western diplomats in Baghdad said. They added that it would be difficult to restrict the cargo that the Iraqi jets would carry on their return trips.

Hadithi stressed, however, that the “request” does not cover the release of the other foreign women and children who were not previously taken to strategic sites but who were barred from leaving the country. They may leave at any time and by any means they wish, he said, adding that the Foreign Ministry has yet to determine whether Western airliners will be allowed to pick them up.

Among the Westerners leaving Iraq on Friday were 13 Italian women and four children who arrived in Jordan after crossing the desert, as well as three Finnish women who crossed to Turkey. One Italian woman arrived in Amman, the Jordanian capital, aboard an Iraqi Airlines flight.

All the Italians had to leave their husbands and boyfriends, who are still forbidden by the Iraqi government to depart.

“My husband is still in Baghdad, so I am not so happy,” said Annamaria di Nicola, 45, of Rome. “I hope that things start to go well.”

No American women or children have yet been granted exit permits. In Washington, the State Department said five more Americans have been rounded up by Iraqi authorities, bringing the total known to be in custody to 75.

Iraqi Ambassador Mohammed Mashat insisted it is only a matter of arranging the departures in “an organized fashion.”

”. . . We are in an emergency situation, and we have our own priorities,” he said. “The priority is to protect the country.”

Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said the nearly 3,000 Americans in Iraq and Kuwait have been divided into categories, each with a different exit requirement.

“The information that we have is so convoluted and confusing that it would be unfair to put the information out at this time,” she added.

Meanwhile, more than 300 Soviet citizens left for Moscow on Friday aboard a Soviet Aeroflot plane. Aeroflot is the only foreign airline still allowed to land in Baghdad.

Britain’s Foreign Office said Iraq has issued exit visas to 139 British women and children, and the West German Foreign Ministry said it expects about 100 Germans to be among the evacuees. In Stockholm, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said some of the estimated 50 Swedish women and children in Iraq received exit visas Friday and the rest were promised theirs today.

Two dozen other Scandinavians were expected to be evacuated, along with 16 Spaniards, five Greeks and 17 Cypriots.

Independent analysts in Baghdad said Iraq’s latest “request” was an attempt by Hussein to keep his enemies off balance and, more importantly, to keep the world’s attention focused on the hostages rather than Kuwait, the tiny nation that his forces invaded Aug. 2.

Meanwhile, the U.S. ambassador in Kuwait, whose embassy has been under siege by Iraqi troops for a week, appealed for a medical evacuation of about a dozen Americans who have been hiding in the city since the Iraqi invasion.

The ambassador, C. Nathaniel Howell III, made his appeal through the embassy gates during a visit by former U.S. presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, an official guest of the Iraqi government who was taken to tour Kuwait and look into the condition of Americans trapped there.

No one has been allowed to enter or leave the embassy under Hussein’s order that all embassies close in Kuwait after he unilaterally annexed the country. The Iraqi army also cut all water, power and international phone lines to the compounds that refused the order, and Jackson said Howell reported that the Americans are rationing food and water to survive.

One of the Italians who arrived in Jordan on Friday, Regina Angelillo, said she was a singer at the Sheraton Hotel in Kuwait before the invasion. Her husband, Franco, had to stay behind in Baghdad, where they both had been taken after the Aug. 2 invasion.

“I remember the night of the invasion--in the middle of the night, I heard sounds. I said to Franco, ‘It’s funny how happy these people are, always setting off firecrackers.’ In the morning, there were soldiers everywhere,” she recalled.

The last song she sang in the Sheraton lounge was “It’s A Wonderful World.”

Times staff writers Daniel Williams, in Amman, Jordan, and Jim Mann, in Washington, contributed to this report.