Anguished Refugees From Iraq Pouring Into Jordan : Frontier: A crossing is reopened by Baghdad. Victims tell of war terror and suffering at border.

Shell-shocked and half-frozen, hundreds of war-weary refugees began pouring across the Iraqi border here Monday, after remaining nearly a week with little food and no shelter at a desert frontier crossing that Iraqi authorities had closed without explanation six days earlier.

Many of them, like Jordanian high school teacher Abdulaziz Fares, who had lived 26 years in Kuwait, brought with them credible eyewitness accounts of life inside occupied Kuwait city--human sagas that begin with the tragedy of invasion six months ago, continue with the terror of a week inside bomb shelters under continuing allied assault on Kuwait and culminate in the horror of children freezing to death at the closed Iraqi border outpost.

Others, like Indian refugee A. K. Nayak, who worked as a contract laborer on the construction of a new palace for President Saddam Hussein in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, told of nighttime allied bombing runs pounding that city and also the main highway from Baghdad to Jordan. That artery is now all but severed by bomb craters and burning trucks and buses, refugees said.

Still others, like Kheirieh Salman, expressed sheer joy at having finally reached an oasis of peace in the Gulf War. “I kissed the ground when I finally touched Jordan this morning,” said Salman, who was forced to leave the family car behind in Kuwait and pay $1,500 for herself, her husband and 6-year-old twins to share a single seat on a bus to flee Kuwait four days ago.

Salman added that two days of misery experienced while she and her family were stuck on the Iraqi side of the border had not changed her sympathies in the war: “When I got here, I said, ‘God Bless King Hussein (of Jordan) and Saddam Hussein.’ ”

Yet when she was asked what life was like in the vast and frozen parking lot at the Iraqi border crossing of Trebeil, where she and an estimated 5,000 other refugees were literally trapped between a land of war and one of peace, Salman was not so enthusiastic.

“It was awful,” she said. “It was cold. The king helped us. He sent food, water. . . . But we had to sleep in the bus, all in one seat. And the ones outside, many of them froze.”

Iraq’s reasons for closing the Trebeil border crossing remained as unclear Monday as its decision to suddenly reopen it. Iraq’s ambassador to Jordan had blamed the closure on bureaucratic technicalities. Other reports said that many refugees without exit papers were forced to return to Baghdad to obtain them.

“It’s very difficult to get an answer,” Jordanian Information Minister Ibrahim Izzeddine told reporters when they asked him why Iraqi had closed down one of its few exits to the outside world.

There was another troubling note: More than a dozen refugees here and at a nearby Red Cross transit camp said that Iraq was permitting all foreigners stranded in Trebeil to leave--Jordanians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Indians, Syrians and Sudanese--but there was no trace of hundreds of Egyptians reported to be trapped there.

Hans Einhaus, head of the U.N. Disaster Relief Organization in Amman, said there were no Egyptians among the nearly 1,000 refugees his agency had counted by late Monday. Egypt is a member of the U.S.-led allied force confronting Iraq in the war.

Einhaus also had no explanation for Iraq’s seemingly erratic policy toward keeping the vital refugee crossing open.

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen eyewitnesses showed that the allied assault and the Iraqi response is causing a rising level of human suffering that goes unreported in the official briefings and communiques of the two sides.

A poignant story was told by Fares, 53, who left besieged Kuwait city six days ago.

Fares was among the first refugees through the Ruweished checkpoint Monday morning, and he spoke as he hoisted crumpled cardboard boxes and broken suitcases that contained his life’s possessions back onto the roof of his dented van after a routine Jordanian customs check.

He talked about the latest insult to him and his family of six and worked backward to the beginning of a nightmare last Aug. 2, the day Iraq invaded Kuwait. Unlike most Jordanians, who passionately support Saddam Hussein, Fares is angry with all sides in the conflict.

“We waited for nearly one week at the (Iraqi-Jordanian) border,” he said, leaning against his overloaded van. “The children all came sick. In all, we know of two children and three women who died from no food and cold and rain.

“We were badly treated. The Iraqis are like this. Those who had no car had to wait under the rain and cold all this time.”

Still, it was better than life these days in Kuwait city.

“We were underground in a shelter from the beginning,” Fares said about the opening salvo of allied bombing runs that he and other witnesses described as confined largely to Iraqi military positions outside Kuwait city. At the time they left, he said, the runs had not caused extensive damage to the civilian side of the city.

“I went to Kuwait 26 years ago. It is my home. But when I saw life was getting too difficult, I had to leave. Everyone wants to leave Kuwait now. There is not anyone happy in Kuwait. Nobody is happy--Kuwaiti or non-Kuwaiti. There is no water, no food, no fuel. Now, there is nothing in Kuwait.”

Asked about the war that has torn his life apart, Fares shook his head sadly and said, “It’s all destruction for everyone. No one likes this war.”

Fares said that all of this came on top of the Iraqi invasion that had already changed everything in his life, even the way he taught high school. He was a history teacher, he said, and after Iraq’s invasion, Baghdad’s Ministry of Education rewrote history for him to reflect the Iraqi claim that Kuwait is and has always been a part of Iraq.

Standing nearby, Ahmad Ibrahim nodded in agreement.

“It’s true. Everything changed after August,” said Ibrahim, 28, a Palestinian from the Israeli-occupied West Bank who worked as a secretary in Kuwait’s Ministry of Justice before and after the invasion.

“But now, everyone is afraid,” Ibrahim said. “Everyone wants out. There is no food in the shops. You buy only on the black market. Twenty-four eggs cost 100 Iraqi dinars (about $300 at the official rate). There is no petrol, no fuel for anything. It cost me 500 dinars (about $1500) to get here by bus.”

Like Fares, Ibrahim was stranded for several days. He said Iraqi army guards told him 11 people had died.

“Now?” he echoed, when asked where he will go after he finally escaped the war. “Now, I will go home to my family in the West Bank. I will work in my olive field in Janin, away from this war.”

Some of the other refugees are not so lucky.

Badria, a 32-year-old Palestinian mother, was so shaken and fearful that she refused to give her family name. Standing outside a tent at a Red Cross transit camp halfway between Ruweished and the Iraqi border, Badria hugged her three children tightly as she explained her dilemma. She was born in the Gaza Strip before Israel occupied it in 1968, so she has an Egyptian passport. Her children have only Palestinian travel documents, so Jordanian law bars them entry. And her husband, also a Palestinian, remained behind in besieged Baghdad, which she and her children fled four days ago.

“It’s the children,” she said, over and over, shivering and crying. “I’m afraid what will happen to the children.”

Standing outside a nearby tent, were Mirzaee Mozafar and a dozen other Iranian citizens who are refugees twice over. They are members of dissident groups who fled fundamentalist Iran for the relative safety of an Iraqi refugee camp near Baghdad during the past year or so. But when allied bombs began to fall nearby last week, they fled from Iraq as well, paying a total of $1,200 for taxis to the border at Trebeil.

Like thousands of others, Mozafar and his fellow Iranians were stuck at Trebeil for days. But unlike the others, the fear and suspicion they now feel toward everyone forced them to take desperate measures. They sneaked across the border on foot, walking for two days across more than 20 miles of desert to reach the Red Cross camp.

“We can’t go to Iran,” Mozafar said in the relative safety of the camp. “We are enemies of Iran. The Iranian government will kill us. And we cannot go to Iraq. Me? I’d like to go to Sweden.”

A group of Indian citizens, led by contract laborer Nayak, described recent life in Basra, the key logistics and command center for Iraq’s occupation troops in Kuwait. By many accounts, Basra has been hit hardest of any Iraqi target since war began Jan. 17.

“The bombs and missiles came every night, all night,” he said, shaking from the memory and the cold as he stood among 27 compatriots, all of whom had worked until four days ago on a new palatial retreat for Hussein on the banks of the Shatt al Arab waterway.

“They fall all over--in the city, outside the city, everywhere. At night, you hide. During the day, there is no food. Everywhere is war. We could not stay.”

Nayak and several of his countrymen said they drove through intense allied bombardments that have nearly destroyed the main Baghdad-Trebeil highway. The road is the refugees’ main exit route, but several stretches of it double as auxiliary air strips, and Western military analysts in Jordan speculated that it also may have been targeted as a supply route for Iraq’s mobile Scud missile launchers.

“The road is no good now. You cannot pass,” an Indian said, adding that he had witnessed heavy bombing that cratered the highway and destroyed at least one key bridge Saturday night. “Some from Trebeil tried to go back to Baghdad but never got through.”

Jordanian accountant Talal Dib agreed. “Nobody can go from Baghdad to Trebeil now,” said Dib, who fled Kuwait Thursday and spent the weekend at Trebeil. He said he was told that seven people had died from the cold. “Some people went back and couldn’t reach Baghdad, so they had to come back to Trebeil. What will happen to them, no one knows.”

FLEEING IRAQ

Hundreds of refugees crossed into Jordan on Monday, after Iraq opened the border it had closed on Jan. 22. * NUMBERS. The Red Cross estimated 5,000-10,000 people were at one key border post, enduring frigid temperatures for days while awaiting permission to cross, with hundreds of cars waiting to get through.

* SYRIAN CAMPS. The Syrians have opened a tent town for Iraqi refugees in northeastern Syria. About 2,500 Vietnamese are expected to be among the first wave. Syria said it is prepared to host as many as 1 million refugees in existing camps and new ones being built with U.N. help.