Iraq POWs Treated Royally by Their Saudi Captors : Camps: The hosts view them as the neighbors of tomorrow. U.S. officials predict a flood of prisoners.

It has become almost a morning ritual along the Saudi-Kuwaiti frontier: Three or four Iraqi soldiers creep across the border toward U.S. Marine positions, waving white T-shirts. Nearly always, they are hungry. Almost as often, they list their occupation as cooks.

“We’ve got 31 cooks and no food,” one U.S. officer said wryly.

The trickle has yet to become the flood U.S. military officials are predicting in the allied offensive against Iraq. But the nearly 900 Iraqi soldiers already in custody, combined with the high rate of captured soldiers compared to casualties, has prompted some military analysts to predict that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis may eventually be in custody, rivaling the massive Italian surrender to the Allies in the North African desert in World War II.

“What we’re presumably looking at is the possibility of having to look after as many as 300,000 or 400,000 men,” said Andrew Duncan of London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Obviously, one hopes that most of them will surrender rather than have to be killed, but it will bring about tremendous logistic problems.”

Already, U.S. forces have constructed two large holding facilities in Saudi Arabia--rakishly dubbed “Brooklyn” and “the Bronx” by U.S. military police--where prisoners will be held before final transfer to Saudi authorities.

Smaller interim holding camps, most little more than 10- by 20-foot holes surrounded by coils of razor wire, are being dug throughout forward positions in the Saudi desert. Dinner is rice and beans, or when that runs out, the U.S. soldier’s packaged staple: Meals Ready to Eat, or MREs. (Some of the first Iraqi captives were seen sniffing the food packages as if unsure exactly what to do with them.)

Those are not the conditions in the Saudi facilities, which have some U.S. officials shaking their heads. According to Saudi government and diplomatic sources, Iraqi prisoners in Saudi camps can expect television, pocket money for buying cigarettes and candy bars and meals as good as, or better than, those being served to the Saudi army.

“They have led us to believe that they’re going to sort of put on the dog for these people, to win some hearts and minds,” said one Western official.

In fact, Saudis have refused to call the Iraqi captives “prisoners,” but rather, “military refugees.”

At issue with the Iraqi prisoners is the political tightrope Saudi Arabia has walked since the day it invited Western troops into the kingdom to help fight against other Arabs. In Saudi Arabia’s view, the Iraqi prisoners of today are the kingdom’s neighbors tomorrow--and the people with whom the Saudis will have to live in peace long after the allied troops go home.

Also, a number of U.S. military officials have become convinced that playing up Saudi Arabia’s role as that of an Arab brother welcoming its neighbors could have an important impact on the outcome of the war by encouraging larger numbers of Iraqi troops to desert or defect.

Hence, a key component of the coming ground offensive is likely to be an attempt to move large numbers of Arab troops into southwestern Kuwait, encircled in a flanking maneuver by U.S. forces, thus allowing Iraqi forces to surrender to the Arab forces once they are surrounded, a U.S. Army official said.

A total of 14 million propaganda leaflets have been dropped on Iraqi forces in southern Kuwait, most promising good treatment and depicting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a common enemy of the Iraqis and the Saudis. “We are all brothers. Arab neighbors. We yearn for peace,” says one of the leaflets.

“In recognition that our battle is not with the people of Iraq, but with the present leadership of that country, we will treat the Iraqis not as prisoners but as military refugees,” Saudi military spokesman Gen. Fahd Jarbou said recently. “They are to be fed, sheltered and otherwise taken care of as though they were pilgrims in our country.”

“You always have to be generous in victory,” a high-ranking Saudi official explained. “The conflict is a political conflict, regardless of who your adversary is. POWs are human beings. There are certain norms and standards that evolve out of our Islamic and Arab tradition that in a sense impel us to be nice to these guys.”

The Saudi government is trying to stress in its handling of the prisoners that its quarrel with Iraq is not with the Iraqi people, he said. “They have the misfortune of having a ruthless dictator drag them into wars they didn’t want, and now that they’re POWs in Saudi Arabia, we will treat them with all the hospitality we have so that when they go back to Iraq, they will know that the people of Saudi Arabia are their brothers.

“At the end of the day,” he added, “we have to live with the Iraqis for the next 1,000 years.”

Some Western officials have been dubious about the Saudis’ expectations, predicting that extending traditional Arab hospitality to detainees will prove impossible if the numbers become as large as are anticipated.

“One of the problems is the word POW translates in Arabic rather hostilely,” explained a Western diplomat. “I think they’re basically using a word that is more suitable in their own mind for trying to treat these people more like guests, and not as enemies. . . . But whether all of this can really be fashioned, if you get a substantial number of people, remains to be seen. If you get tens of thousands, it will be difficult to hold up to this.”

Another Western official predicted that the Saudis’ attitude might change as the kinds of prisoners taken evolves. “The guys they’ve taken in so far, their conditions are so pitiful that it’s hard not to feel sympathy for them,” he said. “Maybe when they start taking in professional killers from the Republican Guards that will change a little bit.”

Additional friction has surfaced over the past several months because the Saudis have limited the access of U.S. military officials to Iraqi defectors, who numbered nearly 1,000 before the war even began. Saudi officials questioned the defectors and provided the U.S. military with reports, but military officials complained that they had no direct contact with the defectors. Since war broke out, a diplomat said, that situation has not markedly improved among prisoners surrendering to the Saudis.

U.S. officials have not pressed the issue publicly, in part because the Geneva Conventions strictly limit interrogation of prisoners, as opposed to defectors.

Complaints have surfaced on Capitol Hill in recent weeks that U.S. officials are not getting sufficient access to information about bomb damage in Iraq and Kuwait from Iraqi prisoners, and congressional leaders are pressuring the Pentagon to obtain additional information from detainees.

Saudi officials insist that key U.S. personnel, primarily military intelligence officers, have always been given access to Iraqi defectors.

“Your people have had access to them, your people are debriefing them, the people who are whining about not having access to them are people that should not have access to them in the first place,” a Saudi official said. “It’s usually the lower, middle-rank people that are complaining. Schwarzkopf (Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf) knows the results of the intelligence.”

Publicly, U.S. officials deny that there is any dispute between the Saudis and the Americans over access to prisoners.

“I think, based on everything I’ve heard, there’s a great deal of cooperation,” said Lt. Col. Bill Diehl, a U.S. Army spokesman in Riyadh. “I think the system is working, and from where I sit, I don’t see any great glitches or disgruntlement. I would have to believe that we as members of the coalition would share whatever valuable information would come from the debriefing of EPWs (enemy prisoners of war).”

Arnold Luethold, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross supervising POW issues in Saudi Arabia, said the committee believes that defectors should be treated as civilians, but at this point is simply insisting that the ICRC be given access to both defectors and prisoners, wherever they are being held.

“One of the questions which we are discussing is the question of the deserters: What is their position and what is their protection, what is their role,” he said. “I think a deserter is a person who refuses to continue the allegiance he owes to his own government,” Luethold said. “But somebody who simply surrenders in combat because he thinks he might get killed if he continues fighting, I don’t see any reason to consider him a deserter. I think there is a lot of uncertainty with regard to who should be considered a deserter. . . . “

The difference is crucial, since deserters or defectors could face retribution against their families in Iraq. It has already been agreed that formal prisoner notices for deserters will not be sent to Baghdad, Diehl said, and the Saudis are providing separate living facilities, though not separate eating facilities, for deserters.

Of the 817 prisoners in custody at the beginning of this week, 605 had surrendered during combat and 212 could be considered defectors or deserters, Saudi officials said. All but about 40 had been handed over by the United States to Saudi authorities by midweek.

The Red Cross also has taken the position that members of the news media should not be allowed to interview Iraqi POWs because it would violate provisions of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting public display of prisoners, Luethold said.