Iraq to Send More Troops Into Kuwait

The Iraqi government Monday ordered 250,000 more troops to Kuwait and decried American criticism of its plan to release foreign hostages over three months beginning Christmas Day.

The military command, in a statement released Monday evening, said seven more divisions will be sent to Kuwait and additional reserves will be activated.

Talking peace and preparing for war, President Saddam Hussein’s regime sent mixed signals to the Western alliance and its Arab allies.

The estimated quarter-million troops will join the reported 430,000 Iraqi troops already in Kuwait and southern Iraq.

In addition, 150,000 reservists will be sent into training, the command statement said. Western diplomats here say that Baghdad is drawing on its last reservoirs of reserves.

In Washington, Defense Department officials played down the significance of the new Iraqi deployments, noting that they will likely come from the ranks of reserve forces that are poorly trained and ill-equipped.

While Iraq’s vaunted million-member army would permit Hussein to field greater numbers of troops than the United States and its allies, only a risky decision to divert forces from the Iranian or Turkish borders would free effective new troops for a fight to keep Kuwait, the officials said.

Roughly 3,500 of Iraq’s 5,000 tanks already are committed to Kuwait and the surrounding area, and officials expect that the new influx of troops will run the remaining armored vehicles. Analysts have said that these vehicles are the oldest and least reliable of the Iraqi force and already have been raided to supply parts for front-line armored forces.

“He is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel,” said one senior defense official of the announced Iraqi increase.

The Pentagon, citing past increases and significant improvements in the Iraqi deployment, recently announced that it would dispatch a second wave of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, numbering more than 200,000.

Western forces in the Persian Gulf region, mounting steadily since the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, will total more than 430,000 once American reinforcements are in place in January.

Meanwhile, Information Minister Latif Jasim rejected American criticism of the proposed hostage release as “cynical manipulation.”

“We expect evil of all these persons and are taking precautions,” he said. “. . . We think they are in a crisis and an impasse. The only outlet is peace and a peaceful dialogue.”

The American hostages got word of the proposed Christmas holiday release from one of their colleagues who was on the telephone to his family when the report was aired Sunday night in the United States.

Roland Bergheer, 62, a traffic and logistics consultant from Las Vegas who was working on contract for the Baghdad government when Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, said the Americans sheltered in diplomatic quarters here viewed the Iraqi announcement with restraint.

“It’s nice to think about,” said Bergheer, who serves as a press liaison for the U.S. hostages. “But it really didn’t generate a great deal of excitement. It (the diplomatic shelter) was very subdued.

“A lot of things have happened here in the past that might have suggested the same thing,” he said, characterizing the mood as one of caution “so we may not get our hopes up too high, or false hopes.”

“It really didn’t generate any jumping up and down,” he said.

Another Western hostage, an unidentified physician, agreed. “Sure, if it happens, I’d go,” he said. “But how can you believe this government?”

Despite Sunday’s conditional pledge to release all hostages beginning Christmas Day, Jasim made clear Monday that the trade in foreign captives remains open in the interim.

The hostage bazaar, as some diplomats call it, is still in business for a speedy release of some of the hundreds of Westerners denied exit permits here, he disclosed at a morning press conference. “It depends on the representation made for them,” he told reporters.

Jasim denied that the Iraqi government made a political mistake in holding the foreigners hostage in the first place. “We still consider ourselves doing something appropriate and correct towards ourselves and humanity in general,” Jasim said of the government’s Aug. 17 decision to deny Westerners the right to leave Iraq, subsequently sending hundreds of them to potential military targets as so-called human shields.

Hussein’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council announced Sunday that all the hostages would be released in batches from Christmas Day to March 25.

Several tests of the starting date were on the table as Jasim spoke. A five-member Swiss delegation, led by Edgar Oehler, a member of the National Assembly here ostensibly as a private citizen, was urging Iraqi officials to free 24 Swiss hostages, 25 foreigners working for Swiss companies and 150 other foreign nationals.

Oehler said the Iraqis had told him the release was under consideration. Asked at his press conference about the prospect, Jasim said “there were several other considerations,” mentioning Oehler’s suggestion of Switzerland as the site for a peace conference on the Persian Gulf crisis and the possible shipment of Swiss medical supplies to Iraq.

Western sources, without identifying the country, said a European government, presumably Switzerland, is preparing to send a large shipment of medical goods to Baghdad. Supplies of medicine are permitted under the U.N. Security Council trade embargo of Iraq.

French and Canadian political delegations also have arrived in Baghdad. French citizens have already been given permission to leave, but the Canadian group will be seeking the release of Canada’s estimated 50 hostages in Iraq.

The Iraqi pledge was conditioned on the absence of any disturbance of what the ruling council called “the atmosphere of peace.”

Asked what development might derail the release of the hostages, Jasim responded with the obvious--war. “When the groups start to leave . . . and an attack takes place, the process would be affected,” he told reporters.

Regarding a prospective U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing military action to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, he said, “We will have to watch that.”

But he insisted that the plan means release for all hostages, even those held as human shields at military targets. “This is our policy, and nobody will be excluded from this policy,” Jasim remarked.

The information minister appeared to dodge a question on whether American men hiding from the Iraqi authorities in Kuwait would be permitted to leave. “This is a procedural thing not related to the political attitude,” he said, insisting that the hard-pressed fugitives in Kuwait are required to turn themselves in to Iraqi officials “so they can be put under the protection of the Iraqi government.”

So far, every American man in Kuwait who fell into the hands of the Iraqis has been sent out as a human shield.

Times staff writer Melissa Healy in Washington contributed to this article.