Refugees Carry Tales of Terror From Baghdad : Escape: As they reach Jordan, some curse America and tell of bombs hitting homes in poorer suburbs.

The human face of war rolled into Jordan’s no-man’s-land Tuesday in battered buses and broken taxis, with eyes drawn from horror and wet with fury. And with it came the first credible accounts of widespread civilian damage and casualties from allied bombing raids on military targets in Baghdad.

Most of the refugees were Egyptians who had lived in Baghdad, where, before the war, they were among the harshest and most vocal critics of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his ruthless regime. But then, as they tell it, the allied bombs began to fall around their homes a week ago, occasionally crushing children, maiming adults and paralyzing all of them with fear.

And now, angry young men like Majid Mohammed, a car mechanic whose government in Cairo is a key Arab member of the anti-Iraq alliance, curses the Americans even more than he does Hussein.

“This is not a war. This is an annihilation of a people,” he shouted at two American journalists as he tugged angrily at his red-checkered kaffiyeh, or head scarf, in a crowd of nodding heads at the Red Cross transit camp for war refugees here. “Yes, I am Egyptian, but, please, take your hands off of Iraq. This is an Arab problem now.

“You are taking revenge on Iraq, on its children. . . . The revenge should not be taken on us, not on the Arabs. It should be taken on Saddam. What is the sin of all these people?”

Majid Mohammed was among more than 1,500 Egyptians to arrive Monday and Tuesday in the 43-mile-wide strip of desert between Iraq and Jordan known as the No-Man’s-Land, and his was clearly the opinion of the others.

They are among the first of the tens of thousands of war refugees who are expected to flee in the coming days across this, the only real exit from a nation under siege and bombardment. And they told how some of the bombs aimed at military targets around the Iraqi capital are striking nearby homes in Baghdad’s poorer suburbs.

But the anger and hatred voiced by the Egyptians here on the border signaled something far more ominous for the delicate international military alliance assembled to drive Hussein and his occupation force out of Kuwait. They were the first human hints that, at the grass-roots level in the Middle East, Hussein may ultimately succeed in transforming the Persian Gulf War into a confrontation between the West and the Arab world.

As one analyst in Jordan phrased it, “These Egyptians are going home now to their villages and cities, where the word will spread fast. Before you know it, (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak is going to have a real problem on his hands.”

The accounts from the Egyptians, who detailed specific neighborhoods, streets and houses that had been hit in suburban Baghdad, were considered far more credible than stories from their Palestinian and Jordanian counterparts, who are passionate partisans of Hussein. The Palestinians and Jordanians, interviewed Tuesday at the Jordanian border crossing of Ruweished west of here, said allied agents were poisoning the Tigris River in Baghdad and distributing toxins in anti-chemical warfare syringes in Kuwait.

Ahmed Said, an Egyptian who stood in the transit camp with his hand on the shoulder of his 13-year-old son, Hamad, described the scene in Baghdad’s Doura district when allied bombers began hitting a nearby oil refinery and power station in the poor, residential neighborhood.

“When the planes would come, there were no lights in the house,” he said. “So we’d run out of our houses and go out on the street, afraid the house would fall on us. Then we would run to the (bomb) shelters. But there was no room in the shelters. So we would sit beside the door. We felt safer there.

“But, of course, many civilians were hit.”

Masbah Said, another Egyptian, interrupted, adding his own version of the third, fourth and fifth nights of bombing, when Western journalists who were confined to the downtown Al Rashid Hotel could see dozens of bright, crescent-shaped flashes on the horizon, the apparent result of B-52 bombing runs on Baghdad’s outskirts.

“In the five days (we were there), the bombing was concentrated on the (military) installations,” Masbah Said said. “But there are some residential areas near these installations. . . . There were civilian casualties, including Egyptians, Iraqis, Jordanians and Palestinians.

“It was because of the intensity of the bombing--it was after five days--that we left. Certainly we were afraid.”

It was then that Majid Mohammed, his eyes watering with rage, joined the conversation, shouting at the two Westerners as others soon joined in.

“People are dying in the streets. I have seen it. They are bombing both civilian and military places. In Faloojha Street, I myself saw corpses lying. I took some wounded and dead people to Faloojha General Hospital. There were many children--some 5 and 6 years old.

“The claim that they (allied bombers) are not hitting civilian targets is propaganda. It is wrong. Believe me, if it was just military installations, we would not have left.

“People are screaming in the streets,” he said. “It is destruction. It is not war. . . . The skies are red above us. . . . We are choking on the cordite in the air. . . .

“They (the Iraqis) have been saying that anyone who delivers a captured pilot alive gets $20,000. But, if I am in need of even $1, if I could see such a man, I will now drink his blood.

“They should punish one man--not a whole people.”

Beyond such spontaneous outbursts, the Egyptians also provided the starkest glimpse yet of life inside Iraq’s embattled capital, where all but one of the several dozen foreign journalists who were in Baghdad when the war began have now gone.

There is no power or running water anywhere in the city. Bottled water is running out. Bread and milk are scarce. Air raid sirens fill the air day and night, and the people who have not yet fled to the countryside are surviving on hoarded food.

“He who does not die from shelling,” concluded Majid Mohammed when he calmed down a bit, “dies from hunger and fear.”

About 15 miles to the west of the Red Cross camp, at the actual border crossing into Jordan near the town of Ruweished, there were diverse and occasionally contradictory versions of life not only in Baghdad but also in Kuwait, ranging from the credible to the fantastic.

Fervently pro-Hussein Palestinians and Jordanians spoke of piles of civilian corpses on Baghdad’s streets, of soft-drink cans exploding in the hands of Iraqi children and of pro-American Arab spies posing as Red Cross workers in Kuwait and handing out anti-chemical-weapons syringes that turned out to contain poison.

There was also a retired Indian air force fighter pilot who has been holed up in the Al Rashid Hotel’s bomb shelter with his wife, children and dog since the second day of the bombing and who spoke with eloquence and glowing admiration of the allied strikes on the opening night of the war.

“I have flown 3,000 hours. . . , and what I saw that night was the most precise and effective bombing and rocketing ever,” said Mohinder B. Singh, who has run an Indian construction company in Baghdad for the past 10 years.

Singh, whose chartered bus also carried out about a dozen of the Westerners who had been evacuated from a “peace camp” on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, added that life in Baghdad is now “very critical.” An Indian friend standing nearby stressed that, despite the propaganda and bravado, “most of the Iraqis are now just totally fed up with Saddam, and everyone else for that matter now.”

There were four American peace activists on the bus Tuesday, among them Dan Winters, 53, of Boulder, Colo., who was at the peace camp when the war began.

Winters, who said he initially joined the peace camp “because I thought it would make a difference,” indicated that he was leaving Iraq only because he had to return to his part-time jobs as computer-science instructor and bus driver. He added that about 50 other foreign activists, about 15 Americans among them, are still in Iraq deciding whether to stay or leave.

For the past several nights, Winters also has been staying at the Al Rashid bomb shelter, where a backup generator permitted the hotel to show Baghdad Television’s footage of beaten and bruised American prisoners of war Sunday night. Asked how he, as an American, reacted to the film clips, Winters said, “I didn’t see it, but any violence is terrible.

“We’re not saying one side is right and one side is wrong. We’re saying there’s a body lying dead, and the body is peace.”

The message was echoed by many of the refugees who managed to escape Kuwait and arrive at the Ruweished border crossing, a passage so grueling that refugee workers cite it as the main reason why there are so few refugees coming over a border crossing where the U.N. expected to see as many as 1 million.

Some, like a 21-year-old Palestinian barber named Mohammed Zohair Toufic, who relayed the story of the poisoned syringes, were proud political partisans in the war.

The barber said Palestine Liberation Organization fighters were policing several neighborhoods of Kuwait city. He stressed that civilians are being targeted there, and he asserted that he personally saw “three or four pilots” ejecting from aircraft and getting beaten by crowds that gathered around the allied airmen when they landed.

“There were many civilian casualties in Kuwait. I myself carried them to the hospital in my car,” Toufic added. “If this car could talk, it would tell you all about it.” But, when a Jordanian in the crowd that had formed around Toufic at the border post asked him to show the bloodstains from the wounded, he fell silent.

Somewhat more credible was Issam Mustafa, a Jordanian medical student at Baghdad’s Medical City Hospital, who said he saw and helped treat 12 civilians wounded on the first night of the bombing.

“I didn’t see any dead civilians,” he said, “but there were some who were critically wounded. On the first day, an ambulance arrived carrying a mother, two small children and a 14-year-old boy. Their house collapsed on them. The woman’s left arm had to be amputated, and the children were suffering from burns.”

Virtually everyone interviewed both at the camp and the border post concurred that ambulance sirens wail on and off throughout the day and night in Baghdad and in Kuwait city, but many suggested that some of the casualties are from the falling shrapnel of Iraq’s own antiaircraft rounds.

Perhaps the most poignant scene unfolded early Tuesday at the Ruweished border post, where Zuhair Adib, an aging Palestinian, was methodically retying onto his car roof three large, green plastic garbage bags that contained all his family’s possessions.

On Monday morning, the family had fled their seashore home in Kuwait city, where Adib has worked for many years as a maintenance foreman at Kuwait National Oil Co. He described the situation in the occupied city as desperate.

“When the war started, I refused to work,” he said. “There are curfews. People are staying inside. Everyone is in their homes.”

Then Adib was asked whether there was enough food and water in Kuwait, and suddenly his wife intruded, waving her arms in the air and shouting: “The Arabs have all what we want. The God will give all to us what we need. All the Western weapons are coming to kill us now. But we will have victory--the Arabs and the Palestinian people.”

Suddenly, Adib began crying uncontrollably. He wiped his tears, hid his face from his wife and, quietly now, began to answer the question.

“There is no bread,” he said, his voice cracking. “If you have flour at home, you can bake. There are no bakeries. They are all closed. There is no meat. We used to go to Basra (Iraq’s southernmost city) for food and vegetables, but we cannot go now.

“If you have something at home, you will eat. Otherwise, there is nothing.”

FLEEING THE WAR

A U.N. plan for disaster relief in four countries--Jordan, Iran, Syria and Turkey--in case of large numbers of refugees from Iraq, would work like this. Estimates put the number of potential refugees at up to 1.5 million.

* Each country would have two reception camps.

* Each country would have four permanent refugee camps (some located inland, away from possible border danger).

* Each country would provide facilities for up to 100,000 refugees at a time. It is expected that refugees would move out after a period of time, making room for newcomers.

Source: United Nations