Refugees Cite Iraqis’ Brutality : Kuwait: Friends disappear and are returned dead. A family is locked inside a house and burned to death.

In the final days and hours before the massive allied ground assault began on occupied Kuwait, Youssef Douba watched helplessly as some of his best friends simply disappeared. A few showed up a short while later, dumped at their doorsteps--with bullet holes in their head.

“It was getting worse in the final days. The Iraqis were taking everyone and everything,” said the 21-year-old ethnic Syrian, who left his native Kuwait just two hours before the land war began.

Douba arrived Monday at the Jordanian border post of Ruweished before reports circulated of a possible Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, among the handful of other refugees who had pushed their luck until the last minute.

“Nobody can get out of Kuwait anymore,” Douba said on his arrival, adding that he had stockpiled gasoline for weeks in preparation for the trip and had decided to leave only after “the last glimmer of hope was gone,” the moment when he realized the land war was just hours or minutes away.

For Douba, the decision to leave was not easy. He was born and raised in Kuwait and had a fine house on the seacoast overlooking the harbor. Also he had maintained friendships with both the Kuwaitis and their Iraqi occupiers. But Douba had been working up to leaving for weeks, as he watched the brutality of Kuwait’s occupiers intensify by the day.

“My heart is so full of these stories now, all I can feel is pain,” Douba said, as his and other accounts of Kuwait’s final days under Iraqi occupation began trickling across the border here.

The eyewitness reports formed a human mosaic of brutality, panic, desperation and sheer terror in the land the allies are going to great lengths to liberate.

On Monday, Lt. Gen. Prince Khalid ibn Sultan, commander of the Arab and Muslim forces in Saudi Arabia, said that thousands of Kuwaitis have been tortured or killed by Iraqi forces in recent days.

Douba confirmed accounts of Iraqi torture and summary execution. Iraqi forces in Kuwait engaged in a crackdown that claimed some of his friends. “I personally know of 12 people, friends of mine, who disappeared--taken by the Iraqi soldiers,” he said. “There was an 18-year-old boy, Mohammed. He was standing at the door when they took him. Two days later, we found him dead, behind the same door. There was a gunshot through his skull.

“Then there was the Busheri family,” he said. “One boy was killed, shot by soldiers right there on the spot. They took the father. He just disappeared. No one knows what happened to him.

“Another friend of mine, Sami Raqm,” Douba recalled, “he had caught some burglars breaking into a neighbor’s house. He chased them away. They went to the Iraqi intelligence people, who came and took Sami away. When they finished with him, he spent two days in the hospital before he died.

“There were four guys from the Salem family,” he added. “They’re a prominent family living in a luxury villa. The Iraqis took all four and only two came back.”

Douba said the situation deteriorated, “especially in these last days. It was getting so much worse. It’s the ground war. Right before this land war, the Iraqis became so aggressive. They were putting a lot of pressure on all the civilians. And, my God, the stories.”

Pulling through the border post right behind Douba was Salha Hussein Suleiman, an aging mother of four who had more reason than most to give the Iraqi side of the story.

She is Palestinian, among the tens of thousands of stateless, largely pro-Iraqi natives of the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They had welcomed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s Aug. 2 conquest of Kuwait, a nation that had never made the Palestinians feel quite at home.

But Suleiman’s tale was not one of Hussein worship and support.

It was one of pain, fear and tragedy that left neither side in the conflict untainted.

In the weeks that led up to her departure, she witnessed death in many forms, Suleiman said in her native Arabic through intermittent tears.

Just a week or so ago, she recalled, a group of Kuwaitis who lived near her in the Khitan section of Kuwait city had invited some Iraqis to their house for a meal. “They poisoned the food and all but one of the Iraqis died,” she said. “The one who survived told the Iraqi army about it and the next day the soldiers came and burned the house with everyone locked inside. They burned three houses in all, just on suspicion. I know. I saw it.”

Still, the Iraqis had been treating Suleiman and her four children well enough. Then early last week, when the land war appeared all but certain to everyone in Kuwait, she decided to take her two daughters out and resettle them in Jordan.

It wasn’t death that she feared--”there is death everywhere in Kuwait now,” Suleiman said. Rather, it was the Americans.

“I am a widow,” she recounted, sobbing now. “The Kuwaitis were very merciful. I was a widow--and everything came to my doorstep. But my two daughters, well, I was afraid of the American soldiers. I was told they attack women--not with airplanes, with their bodies.”

A week ago, Suleiman managed to get her daughters, Bahia and Dalal, out of Kuwait.

But last Thursday, as she was returning to Kuwait city for her sons, Suleiman and her companions met with disaster, a road accident that destroyed their car and left them stranded in war-torn Iraq just north of the Kuwaiti border.

She was picked up by Douba’s group and taken safely to the border at Ruweished, but her sons remain deep inside the Kuwaiti battle zone.

“Now, I must leave it up to God,” Suleiman said when asked about her boys.

But she added that the situation in Kuwait in the days before the allied land assault already was little short of hell on earth. “He who is not going to die from war,” she said, crying again, “they will die from thirst and hunger.”

Douba shared a similar sense of life’s desperation in Kuwait.

The Palestinians, whom he called “non-Kuwaitis,” were better off than most, he said. “In most of Kuwait, there’s nothing--no food, no gas, no water. But in the non-Kuwaiti areas, they have everything. These are people who looted supermarkets, department stores, my God, everything. So you can find it all in the markets in their areas. But the price is too high. No, it was time to go.”

In voicing his opinion of Iraq’s occupation force, Douba sounded much like several other angry refugees who have fled occupied Kuwait in the six weeks since the allies began their air war against Iraq and strategic targets in Kuwait.

“In Kuwait, you know what we were calling the Iraqis there?” he asked. “We are calling them sha’ab baqar, “ Douba said with a broad grin. “It means, ‘the cow people.’ They know nothing, these people. They’re such simple people. . . .

“I remember when they came into my house,” he recalled. “They spotted a remote control for the TV set. They picked it up, turned it upside down, sideways. They had no idea what it was. These are America’s enemies in Kuwait. So I think the war will be a short one.”

Asked his plans for the future, Douba smiled again. “I will go to my parents in Syria and stay there for a few weeks,” he said. “But then, I’ll go back home, back to my house on the seacoast, after Kuwait is freed.”

Douba was then asked if there was any possibility that the allies could not defeat Iraq.

This time, he laughed heartily.

“No way,” he said. “As far as armament is concerned, there’s just no comparison. And, believe me, after what I have seen, I don’t think Iraq really wants Kuwait anymore. Right now, the Iraqis are just trying to hang onto Iraq.”