Refugees Tell of Perilous Drive to Haven in Jordan

Abdel Nasser Mansour, a clothing merchant in Kuwait city, figured the Persian Gulf War might last a couple of days and he could ride it out. He was wrong--and he bolted for safety.

“I had the good luck to make it to Jordan in one day,” he said Tuesday at the border post here.

For a second day, Mansour and other war refugees crossed the Iraqi-Jordanian frontier, but the number reaching the border has diminished because of allied bombing along the road from Baghdad, refugees and relief officials said.

Iraqi authorities closed the border last Wednesday, leaving thousands stranded in the bitter cold of a desert winter for as long as six days. Although the flow resumed Monday, relief workers in Jordan estimated that 2,000 Egyptians remained on the Iraqi side Tuesday night for undisclosed reasons. Egypt is a leading Arab member of the allied coalition formed to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.

Mansour, a 33-year-old native of Aleppo, Syria, said he wasted no time leaving Kuwait once he decided that the war could last for months. In his late-model Chevrolet sedan, he covered one 120-mile stretch between the Iraqi cities of Basra and Ramadi at breakneck speed. Asked whether he heard any bombing along that part of the highway, he said wryly:

“With the windows rolled up and you’re driving 100 miles an hour, you hear nothing.”

The last leg of the drive to the Jordanian border was slow going, he said. Motorists were driving at night without lights for fear of becoming targets. When Mansour would find a crater in the divided highway, he would turn back until he found a median crossing and continue outbound on the inbound lanes. He turned back five times.

“It’s dangerous without lights,” he said. “You have your eyes only.”

It took him 18 hours to make the run from Kuwait to this border post, a trip he normally makes in 11 hours.

He and other refugees who have fled Kuwait in recent days recounted a number of travel perils.

For example, Iraqi gas stations have been closed since last Wednesday and motorists are obliged to find Iraqis with gasoline to sell. “We spent days just waiting in our cars, sleeping and looking for petrol,” said a Kuwait-born Palestinian woman. Iraqis would approach their cars and offer gasoline for sale, she said. “They’re so poor, so hungry.”

In addition, the road running from the Baghdad-Ramadi area through the town of Rutba and to the Iraqi border post of Trebeil has been heavily shelled by allied aircraft. The highway bridges at Ramadi have been knocked out, and around Rutba the road is cratered.

“Only a crazy person would leave at this time,” the Palestinian woman said. “It’s a risk. All the time you see the rockets. We’d stop and wait until everything became calm,” seeking safety in a roadside ditch.

Many are taking the risk. More than 1,000 refugees left the transit camps in the no-man’s-land between the Iraqi and Jordanian border posts on Tuesday and crossed into Ruweished. Most were Sudanese workers, who like other third-country citizens are placed in refugee camps on Jordanian soil until air transport can be arranged to take them home.

Some of the arrivals told bizarre or anguished tales of their travels.

Mohammed Khadi, a Jordanian driver from the southern city of Maan, drove to war-torn Kuwait to retrieve his Mercedes truck, abandoned there by a fellow driver four days ago. “It’s my best vehicle,” he said. “I had to go get it.”

Mohammed Ali Nasser, a Palestinian foreman for the Kuwaiti national oil company, left the beleaguered emirate last week with his wife and six children. Kuwait city had come under only light air attacks, he said, but military and industrial targets on the outskirts were bombarded daily.

Life became impossible with Iraqi soldiers and civilians competing for limited food supplies, he said.

Like most Palestinians who formed the backbone of Kuwait’s economy, Nasser lost everything in the Iraqi invasion on Aug. 2. “I haven’t worked since the Iraqis came,” he pointed out, “and the 37,000 Kuwaiti dinars (about $130,000) I had in the bank is gone.”

Most tragic are the Asian laborers who were imported by the Iraqi and Kuwaiti governments. They were brought in, put on a work site and knew little about the Arab lands in which they lived.

A group of Indians described how nearly 70 of them were recently loaded into the open bed of an Iraqi military truck, taken to the Jordanian border and dumped. “No food, no water and it was very, very cold,” one said.

The Indians said they had seen a tanker truck, three trailer-trucks and two buses rocketed by planes on their harrowing flight to Jordan. They told reporters that many people were injured when the buses were hit.