Saudi Troops Mop Up After Battle for Khafji : Military: Scattered Iraqi soldiers still hide in the abandoned frontier city. They are being lured with promises of food and medicine.

Saudi armored personnel carriers rolled past fashionable seaside resort homes in this abandoned frontier city Thursday, hunting for hidden Iraqi forces more than a week after Saddam Hussein’s troops seized it for 36 hours.

Gunfire echoed through empty streets as the Saudi forces, equipped with megaphones, moved from house to house and urged any remaining Iraqi soldiers to surrender.

“Attention! Attention! Attention!” a Saudi commander shouted at the vacant luxury homes, many with windows smashed from last week’s heavy fighting.

“Iraqi brothers, give up. Your Saudi brothers are outside. The Saudi authorities will give you all the medicine and food you need. No harm will come to you. Please raise a white flag and come out.”

More gunfire rang out, and military authorities at the scene said it was unclear whether the fire came from Iraqi or Saudi weapons. Sporadic Iraqi sniper fire has nagged the city throughout the past week as Saudi authorities conducted their house-to-house searches.

A few miles farther north, a grim, shoulder-to-shoulder line of Saudi tanks was dug into defensive positions a few hundred feet back from the Kuwaiti border.

The tough defensive line was in sharp contrast to the scene at the border before the start of war Jan. 17. Then, a few scattered gun emplacements and a fence were all that marked the dividing line between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Allied military officials had never expected this lazy resort community to become a military target, and it wasn’t until the fighting began that the last of the Khafji area’s 35,000 residents were quickly shuttled out of town.

Several had stubbornly hung on. Mursi abu Bakr, manager of the Khafji Beach Hotel, known for a spectacular view of the Persian Gulf from its dining room, had announced the morning of Jan. 16 that he had no intention of leaving. Why should he? The dining room was full of paying customers, mostly journalists and official-looking Americans who refused to discuss their occupations.

When allied air raids against Iraqi targets began early the following morning, Bakr hurriedly loaded up his car and headed for Riyadh, leaving the keys to the hotel with a few determined British journalists. The journalists gleefully rewired the telephone switchboard, installed direct international telephone lines in their rooms, set up satellite dishes and broadcast tidings of the war for several days. Then the shelling of Khafji began, and even the journalists packed up and headed south, arriving in Dhahran with drawn faces.

Khafji on Thursday was a remarkably different place. The front of the Khafji Beach Hotel was pockmarked from shelling, and a huge, blackened hole gaped over the front door.

The charred skeletons of burned-out tanks and armored personnel carriers were being loaded onto tank carriers and hauled off the streets. Barely a block of the downtown shopping district was intact: windows were smashed, iron gratings twisted, signs toppled. A bony horse munched on a square of grass near Khafji’s shell-scarred welcoming arches.

A pall of thin black smoke hung high over the city, a remnant of oil fires that have raged in Kuwait since shortly after the war began.

And sporadic shelling continued, occasional Iraqi artillery barrages booming into the desert outside the city and sending new plumes of smoke wafting into the air.

“We have more forces here in Khafji now than we had before,” said U.S. Marine Col. John Noble, a liaison officer with the Saudi army in Khafji.

Explaining the seeming ease with which Iraqi forces swept into the city last week, taking over the landmark water tower as an observation post and driving the Saudis out for 36 hours, Noble said authorities had never considered Khafji a military target.

“We don’t know why the Iraqis came into Khafji. For the losses they suffered, it was a very dumb move on their part,” he said.

Saudi Lt. Col. Turki Firm, commander of a mechanized brigade based at Khafji, said Saudi forces are still going house-to-house seeking remaining Iraqi holdouts.

“They are hiding in some places,” he said. “We are searching. . . . They are saying now they are defecting.” Two Iraqis were taken into custody Thursday morning when they crossed the border near Khafji on an apparent reconnaissance mission, Noble said.

Saudi authorities reported that Iraqis launched a second attempted assault on Khafji on Tuesday night, this time from the sea, when three Sawari-4 patrol boats opened fire on the city with machine guns before they were intercepted by Saudi marine boats stationed off the coast.

One Iraqi boat was sunk, and two others apparently escaped to the north, Saudi officials said.

Saudi army forces maintained an uneasy vigil on gun emplacements outside the city and along the waterfront, the green Saudi flag flapping above camouflage tents all along the coast. “There is no God but God,” the flag says, in Arabic script etched above the image of a white sword, “and Mohammed is his prophet.”

“It is very important that we are on the border,” Lt. Firm said, eyeing the Kuwait border just a little distance to the north. “Every citizen is in charge of his country.”