Iraqis Shelter Troops, Jets in Civilian Areas : Gulf War: Field headquarters are moved into schools and mosques to avoid air raids, a U.S. commander says. The battleship Missouri’s big guns fire on bunkers.

Battle-shocked Iraqis are moving military field headquarters into schools and mosques and hiding warplanes on residential streets to take advantage of an allied pledge not to bomb civilian targets, a U.S. commander said Monday.

The Iraqi tactic is working, said Maj. Gen. Robert B. Johnston, chief of staff for the U.S. Central Command. But he said the allied command in the Persian Gulf War will not change its bombing policy. “We’ll continue,” Johnston said, “to scrupulously adhere to our policy that we will not target civilian areas.”

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of allied forces in the Gulf, stood firmly against civilian targeting. “It gives them (the Iraqis) an advantage,” he declared in remarks to a small group of reporters. “But we are not going to reduce ourselves to that level of moral conduct just to even the score. . . . Guys in white hats don’t do that.” (Story, A7)

The Iraqi tactic, Gen. Johnston said, can have only limited success. “I’m not sure he (Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein) can somehow put half a million troops and 5,000 tanks in a residential area,” Johnston said. “I’m not being flip about it. He can hide a select part, I guess, of his military capability. But he can’t hide it all.”

There were these additional developments:

* On yet another day of relentless allied bombing, the U.S. battleship Missouri opened up with its 16-inch guns. It demolished prefabricated bunkers that the Iraqis were moving into place in Kuwait. It was the first time the Missouri has fired its big guns in anger since the Korean War.

* Possible terrorism began behind allied lines. In Jidda, Saudi Arabia, hundreds of miles from the battlefront, a sniper with a 9-millimeter pistol or rifle fired at a shuttle bus carrying three U.S. soldiers. Two were only slightly hurt by flying glass, but Johnston said that no serviceman is ever “totally safe.”

* Saudi and American experts cautioned that the huge Persian Gulf oil spill is growing dramatically. Two jumbo jets full of oil spill-fighting equipment were scheduled to arrive today to help contain it. But an oil official said that cleanup crews were “completely and utterly frustrated.”

The Iraqis warned that they would fight with “the hit-and-run tactics formulated by our ancestors”--the Arab raiders of old. Baghdad Radio said Iraqi troops were awaiting a signal to launch a “crushing offensive.”

The broadcast included cryptic messages from a so-called “command center”--one of which was repeated three times. It said: “It’s the decisive day . . . implement the program of the last gathering.”

But no Iraqi forces crossed from occupied Kuwait into Saudi Arabia.

Instead, Johnston said, Iraqi officers tried to hide their headquarters as well as some of their planes in civilian areas.

“We find they are moving into residential neighborhoods,” he said. “I think they are simply trying to protect their assets.” He cited intelligence reports noting that the hiding places included both mosques and schools. Asked if the tactic was working at mosques, Johnston replied:

“Yes. We have avoided anything that has any religious significance, and we’ll continue to do so.”

Schwarzkopf said the Iraqi tactic was working at schools and other civilian sites as well. “They know,” he said, “we’re not going to attack civilian targets.”

Battleship Missouri

The Missouri, which last fired its big guns in combat in 1953, joined the battle shortly before midnight Sunday, firing its massive shells at concrete reinforced Iraqi bunkers. Johnston declined to pinpoint their locations, but he said they were in Kuwait and that the shells destroyed some of them.

The ship, on whose deck the Japanese signed surrender documents ending World War II, is half a century old. In recent days, it had steamed far up into the Gulf and launched cruise missiles at Iraqi targets. But on Sunday it pulled to within 23 miles of Kuwait to fire off a salvo from its big guns that shuddered the nighttime skies.

It was necessary to position the battleship close to Kuwait to move it within range of the Iraqi bunkers, Johnston said. But he said the vessel and its 1,600-member crew were not placed at unnecessary risk.

Although Iraqis have anti-ship missiles, both ground-based and air-to-sea, the Missouri, Johnston said, is “a pretty sturdy ship.”

The Ground War

On the ground, 25 Iraqi tanks were reported damaged or destroyed and front-line U.S. Marines traded fire with Iraqis across the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.

The tanks were hit by four AV-8 Harriers--vertical takeoff “jump jets” flown by Marine pilots who struck with Rockeye anti-tank bombs. The pilots had spotted between 25 and 30 Iraqi tanks moving on the Kuwaiti side of the border before they attacked.

“The results,” Gen. Johnston said, “were 25 Iraqi tanks destroyed, or at least burning.”

Marine officers also reported that two of their Hornet fighter-bombers destroyed an Iraqi rocket site that had fired on allied positions.

In one cross-border exchange, a battalion-size Marine task force opened up with 155-millimeter artillery on Iraqi ground radar and infantry positions near the Umm Gudair oil field in southwestern Kuwait.

In another, Marine light armored vehicles exchanged cannon and small-arms fire with Iraqi soldiers just over the Kuwaiti border.

No U.S. casualties were reported.

The Air War

As allied bombs fell for the 19th straight day, Iraqi troops appeared to have reduced the size of their supply convoys. Gen. Johnston attributed the change to the beating they were taking.

Now, he said, the convoys were down to four or five trucks. But Johnston said the move is not likely to safeguard them from detection. He noted that one smaller Iraqi convoy had been bombed late Sunday while it was on the move in Kuwait.

Allied warplanes struck at Iraqi positions with more than 2,700 sorties on Monday.

The flights targeted chemical and biological weapons storage facilities, Johnston said, and included more than 250 air strikes against the elite Iraqi Republican Guard troops entrenched in occupied Kuwait and southern Iraq.

With six more bombing runs by B-52s, the war-long attack rate was now a mission a minute.

“I wouldn’t want to be in the Republican Guard these days,” Gen. Schwarzkopf said. He reported that during raids a few nights ago, the B-52s had triggered a huge secondary explosion, indicating they had hit a fuel or ammo dump.

It was the second such secondary blast in a week of raids on Republican Guard positions.

In Tel Aviv, Brig. Gen. Nachman Shai, the Israeli army spokesman, offered statistics that seemed to indicate the effectiveness of the bombing. They included damage estimates that U.S. military officials have been reluctant to give.

Shai said that 20% of the Iraqi air force, said to number more than 700 planes, has been destroyed in the air or on the ground. The figure does not include the 90 or so Iraqi planes that have fled to refuge in Iran.

He estimated that allied air strikes have destroyed 10% of Iraq’s armor and another 10% of its artillery. That estimate seemed in line with U.S. assessments that it will take another two weeks or so to destroy 50% of Iraq’s armor and artillery.

Of some 36 Scud missile launchers said to be located in western Iraq, Shai said, half have been destroyed or damaged, and seven or eight are still operating. Shai suggested that a reduction in Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel “speaks for itself”--meaning that the Iraqi capability had been fractured.

Attack Timetable

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney told reporters that President Bush will decide when the United States will begin a ground attack in the Gulf War, but he emphasized that there was no deadline for such action.

“We have from the very beginning assumed . . . that at some point we would have to send in ground forces in order to liberate Kuwait,” Cheney said. “(But) we do not want to do that until we’ve taken maximum advantage of our capability to use our air forces against (Iraq’s) ground forces.

“We think we are doing very effective work at present in that regard.”

Cheney said that when Schwarzkopf and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, determine that a ground war should begin, he will take the recommendation to President Bush.

“He (Bush) will make the basic decision. That’s a presidential-level decision. We have not established any sort of artificial timetable,” Cheney said.

“There is no drop-dead date by which we feel we have to act.”

Speaking to the National Governors Assn. at the White House, Bush said the war is “going according to plan” and that the United States will “set the timetable for what lies ahead, and not Saddam Hussein.”

“There have been no surprises,” Bush said, “and there will not be any quick changes.”

Oil Trucks

At the State Department, spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said allied planes are not targeting oil trucks on the road from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, even though they are almost certainly carrying oil from Iraq to Jordan in defiance of the U.N. economic embargo against Iraq.

However, she added, civilian vehicles may be inadvertently hit if they are traveling in convoys with trucks carrying war materiel.

“Coalition military operations in the Kuwait-Iraq theater are not designed to enforce the embargo,” Tutwiler said. “Though these oil exports do violate the sanctions, it is not coalition policy to attack civilian trucks exporting petroleum to Jordan.

“On the other hand, these vehicles are traveling through a war zone, and specifically through an area that has been the source of Scud (missile) attacks against neighboring states. Moreover, we have credible information that war materiel, including some related to Scud missiles, has been transported in convoy with civilian oil trucks. Such materiel contributes to Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait and is a legitimate military target.”

Medical Evacuation

The first American battle casualty to be evacuated to Europe for medical care arrived in Frankfurt and was taken to Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center, the U.S. military’s largest and most sophisticated hospital in Germany.

The wounded Marine, whose identity and condition were not made public, landed at Ramstein Air Base and was taken to the adjacent hospital. A military spokesman said the Marine had not yet given the permission required for his name and injuries to be released.

The severity of the man’s condition made it unlikely that he would be able to grant permission in the near future, said a source involved with the case. The source indicated the Marine was evacuated to Germany because of the extent of his injuries and the extensive treatment required.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Mark Fineman in Amman, Jordan; Daniel Williams in Jerusalem; Janny Scott in Frankfurt, and Norman Kempster and James Gerstenzang in Washington.