Turks Near Air Base Back U.S. Objectives : Second front: No anti-American cries are heard at Adana, near the base that’s a platform for raids in northern Iraq.

“Afraid?” mocked the raven-haired seamstress on a balcony as a landing American warplane swept past, 200 feet above her perch. “I am a Turk!”

Saucy Rabia Sahin, who sews in a sweatshop at the head of the runway of the Incirlik Air Base near here, spoke for many Wednesday in a city unabashed by threat. In Adana, platform for repeated American raids against Iraq, blood is beginning to rise to the heat of war.

Polls universally show Turks opposed to any wider involvement in the Persian Gulf War, but in Adana on Wednesday it was as hard to find a pacifist as it was a resident satisfied with government preparations for the price that war may exact on this riverside city of 1 million in southern Turkey.

“Dead donkeys know no fear,” muttered a middle-age cab driver as he drove blithely through the first air raid warning (a false alarm) ever sounded in a city that is only a short ride from the sprawling Turkish-U.S. Incirlik Air Base--a civic institution and an inviting target for Iraqi missiles.

Daily, news reporters around the perimeter of the base count the planes the United States is hurling at Iraq--two raids of more than 100 planes Wednesday--and they are Adana’s only source of news about the role Incirlik is playing in the war: Neither the United States nor the Turkish government will comment on “operational matters” at the base.

Some Turks, fearing that they are being dragged to war with their Arab neighbor, resent the United States: In Istanbul, terrorist bombs Wednesday morning caused extensive damage at the offices of an American missionary group and a shipping company with U.S. ties. One Turkish woman was injured slightly. The attack was claimed by the same small leftist group that bombed a U.S. military warehouse in Istanbul on Tuesday.

Such anger seemed unfathomable to a tea-drinking group of the 1,700 Turks who work at the base.

“In some families, both the man and the wife are soldiers. It was heartbreaking last week to watch them send their children away,” said one worker at his union’s headquarters here.

Indeed, if there was anti-U.S. feeling in Adana on Wednesday, it was muted.

“We don’t agree with a lot about the United States, but Saddam Hussein is worse,” said a clerk taking a cigarette break from the Vakiflar Bank to watch the landing warplanes.

At a nearby warehouse, Kurdish laborer Sehmus Ozmen humping sacks of cracked wheat never even looked up at the jets on their final approach to the runway, against a backdrop of the snow-capped Taurus Mountains.

“Infidels attacking Muslims; that’s the wrong way to do it,” he said. “Better to send in some people to put a bullet through Saddam Hussein’s skull.”

At the office of the Adana provincial government Wednesday, officials evaluated Tuesday night’s inaugural air raid. The Iraqi missile that triggered the alarm went elsewhere, perhaps to Israel, but Adana was prepared: The alarm was spread by radio and television, and the city’s nine sirens, according to Gov. Recep Birsin Ozen.

“Adana has always had good relations with the American personnel. Proof is that in normal times, many of them prefer to live off the base. The threat of attack will not change our minds,” the governor said.

Still, the governor says he is trying to get Ankara to send more gas masks. Officials at the Red Crescent, Turkey’s equivalent of the Red Cross, talk vaguely of launching a just-in-case blood drive, but Adana is restless.

At the Twin Minaret Street vegetable market Wednesday, shoppers and salesmen complained of a lack of official information and preparation,

“They tell us nothing. We are not afraid. Why don’t they simply tell us what is going on? We have the right to know,” said housewife Sermin Sen across a savory tray of tomatoes--25 cents a pound.

U.S. personnel have been confined to the base since war began, and it was calm but bleak along the base-front Broadway on Wednesday where Rambo Leather vies with Golden Boys Carpets for off-duty attention in less stressful times.

Mehmet Coskun, a part-time Muslim preacher, kept his kebab shop open mostly from habit, and from a conviction that these are times when Turks should not desert their friends.

“Yes, there has been a change in the popular mood,” said Coskun. “When peaceful solutions were possible, we supported them. Now I say in my sermons we should get rid of this terrorist oppressor Saddam Hussein. He really should go. If necessary, Turkey should fight, too.”

AIR STRIKES FROM TURKEY

* As many as 100 U.S. warplanes from the Incirlik base took part in the Wednesday raid against Iraq. The Turkish government has been reluctant to acknowledge publicly that is is providing a base for U.S. operations, but a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Wednesday that Incirlik is as much-a-part of the gulf campaign against Iraq as the bases in Saudi Arabia.

* Turkey is reportedly considering permitting U.S. planes to also use bases in Diyarbakir and Malatya, which are closer to the Iraqi border.

Incirlik air base F-4E, Range: 275 miles F-16A/B, Range: 530 miles F-16C, Range: 565 miles F-15E, Range: 750 miles F-111, Range: 1,100 miles