Looters Spread Fear in Kuwait

During the month they spent in hiding in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, Catherine Byiers and her husband, Marshall, took long naps, played Trivial Pursuit and built a bomb shelter in the basement.

“We all got organized for the Americans to come,” she said in an interview Wednesday, the morning after she and more than 300 other British women and children arrived in Baghdad by bus from Kuwait.

“If we knew this would only go on a week,” she said, “we could cope with the idea of a bomb falling on us at the end of it. It’s the not knowing that wears you away, the endlessness of it.”

But not even that was enough to make Byiers leave her husband behind and take advantage of President Saddam Hussein’s offer of freedom for all foreign women and children in Iraq and Kuwait.

“It was the looters who really convinced me it was time to go,” she said. “They’re 18-to-20-year-old Palestinian kids roaming around in gangs of six or eight, scavenging for anything they can find. They’re breaking down doors of houses and flats they think are abandoned, and they’re stealing everything. I was nervous all the time, and my husband and I thought, well, I’d better get out while I had the chance.”

There were similarly chilling accounts from other women who were trapped when the Iraqi army swept into Kuwait on Aug. 2 and secured the country within a matter of hours.

Interviews with more than a dozen of the women--most of whom asked not to be identified by name to protect the men they left behind--produced a detailed picture of life in occupied Kuwait and of Iraq’s plans for the land it has annexed.

The women spoke of a growing underground resistance movement among the Kuwaitis, men who shoot Iraqi soldiers on the street and organize vocal rooftop protests on behalf of their former ruler, the ousted emir.

Iraqi troops reportedly are trying to stop the looting, but the women made it clear that there is little left to be looted. And they said that in the first days of the occupation there was a good bit of what they called “official looting.”

Entire government ministries, office buildings, apartment blocks, supermarkets, auto showrooms and military camps were stripped of every appliance and commodity, anything of use. The loot was loaded on Iraqi army trucks and moved north, the women said.

One woman, who lived next door to the Ministry of Water and Electricity, said the Iraqi troops cleaned out the building in a coordinated operation.

“They worked all through the night,” she said. “They came with trucks and filled them with typewriters, carpets, computers, desks, chairs, everything.”

Another woman, who lived in southern Kuwait, said the troops “cleaned out the office where my husband works,” taking “fax machines, photocopiers, freezers, filing cabinets, even a frying pan.”

Filipinos, who said they were paid by the Iraqi army to drive trucks from Kuwait to Iraq, said their cargoes have included entire stocks from department stores: clothing, toiletries and cosmetics.

“In my view, the Iraqis don’t intend to stay,” said a British woman who had to leave her Kuwaiti husband behind. “They know they won’t be staying . . . . “They’ve been taking big army trucks and filling them to the brim and taking them to Iraq. Today, as we saw, many truckloads were going with us to Iraq with office furniture, house furniture, everything you can think of. Everything has gone. Honestly. Everything has gone.”

The Iraqi government has denied any widespread looting by Iraqi troops. But technically, some Iraqis will argue, one cannot steal what one already owns.

“Kuwait is and has always been a part of Iraq,” government spokesman Naji Hadithi has said. “It is only the British colonial scissors that cut this line between us and what is us and what is ours.”

Contrary to the impressions of the fleeing women, Hadithi and other officials insist that there will be no withdrawal, that the presence of Iraqi troops is “non-negotiable.”

The government has not commented directly on the widespread allegations of Kuwaiti goods and property moving into Iraq, but Iraqis who now are trading these goods in the bazaars of Baghdad expressed disbelief when questioned on the propriety of it.

Iraqis raised on the teachings of Saddam Hussein’s Arab Socialist Baath Party deeply resent the royal family that ruled over oil-rich Kuwait. Ahmed Abdallah, a customer in a bazaar in Baghdad’s Mansour district, spoke for many others when he told a reporter that the Kuwaitis “treated other Arabs like foreigners.”

Madria Nasser Mishadani, 40, a schoolteacher, said that “for 20 years we’ve tried to get Kuwait, and now it’s ours, and we should keep it.”

Still, according to some of the people fleeing Kuwait, there are indications that Iraq may be leaving some negotiating room on the question of who owns Kuwait.

Byiers, who had lived for seven years in Fahaheel, an oil center near the border with Saudi Arabia, said there had been no attempt to establish local government there or to change any of the official signs.

“But on our way up to the (Iraqi) border,” she said, “I noticed they’d taken the signs down and were repainting them with new names.”

Western analysts here said this suggests that Iraq is consolidating its position only in northern Kuwait, along a strip that would give Iraq the rich Rumaila oil fields and the two islands in the gulf that would allow it access to the shipping lanes.

Several of the fleeing women, whose husbands have continued to work in Kuwait city, said the Iraqis appear to be making no real effort to keep the Kuwaiti infrastructure intact, except for water, power and communications for the army.

“The Iraqis appear to be just playing at it,” one woman said. “In the hospitals, for example, they’ve turned some sections into military areas for their soldiers. The rest of the hospitals are down to bare, skeleton staff.”

All the women talked about the resistance movement, which they said appears to be gaining strength. They said the sound of gunfire is heard every night, and that the Iraqis are carrying out door-to-door searches in much of the capital.

One woman, asked if she thought the Iraqis were looking for foreigners to add to the “human shield” at key installations around the country, replied: “No. They’ve been looking for arms.”

“There’s a lot of resistance,” said a woman who had lived in the Jahra district of the capital, a Bedouin area. She said a nighttime curfew had been imposed because of the growing number of sniper and firebomb incidents.

“They’re piling up bodies at hospitals every day,” she said. “A lot of soldiers are getting killed. But in other areas there doesn’t seem to be as much.”

The most frequent type of resistance attack, she said, is the “drive-by”: The Kuwaitis open fire on an Iraqi soldier or two from a passing car.

Such incidents are more often heard than seen, and even then only through a curtain crack or from a rooftop.

“They’re stuck in their flats,” Byiers said of the Westerners still in Kuwait. “They keep the curtains closed, and they’re not going out.”

Many of the women said they had been given food and other basics by Kuwaiti neighbors, who would dart in, drop off the supplies and leave with a minimum of conversation.

They said their only contact with the outside world was by radio and television from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Food is running low in the shops, they said, but many Kuwaitis and foreigners have enough stockpiled to last for weeks.

Byiers said her husband can probably hold out for another month or two, if the Iraqi troops don’t find him.

“I’ve left him plenty of food, plenty of liquor, plenty of water and plenty of cigarettes,” she said. “But he’s nervous. He’s decided that when the doorbell rings and the soldiers come for him, he’ll just go quietly.”