Armed Resistance Governs Chaotic Kuwaiti Capital

As a cessation of hostilities concluded Kuwait’s seven-month ordeal of occupation, government officials here moved swiftly Thursday to control sporadic outbreaks of urban violence in a city where basic, day-to-day government has become another casualty of war.

Two guards at the Palestine Liberation Organization embassy were shot by angry Kuwaitis, and gunfire rang out from a school and near a police station in a heavily Palestinian neighborhood of the Kuwaiti capital. A former army general from Sudan, a supporter of Iraq during its occupation of Kuwait, was dragged into a car by unidentified men and disappeared as his wife sobbed and begged for his release, witnesses said.

Kuwait city, its exiled government still miles away in a Saudi Arabian mountain retreat, is a city governed principally by young, machine-gun-toting resistance fighters--and it is a city where, in the wake of a massive military occupying force that fled almost overnight, almost everyone has a gun.

“I am afraid,” said a senior Kuwaiti army official. “I’m a military man. I will put my heart away and let my mind work. But we have the resistance here now, and everybody here has a gun. If anything happens, there will be another war.”

Kuwait, after the lightning-speed withdrawal of thousands of Iraqi troops over the weekend, was a country by mid-week where almost no one was truly in charge. Resistance leaders have taken control of the police stations and are said to be reporting to the exiled government, miles away in Taif, Saudi Arabia.

Although an interim martial-law government was decreed this week, neither Kuwait’s crown prince, who is to head it, nor Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in Kuwait, has arrived in the newly liberated emirate.

Amid fears that violent reprisals could break out among furious, frustrated Kuwaitis against those who collaborated with Iraqi occupiers, Kuwait Radio has warned Palestinians to remain in their homes, and military officials are cautioning resistance leaders against taking the law into their own hands. The PLO and many Palestinians sided with Iraq in the war.

But it is clear that in an oil sheikdom where, before Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion, few Kuwaitis knew how to run a vacuum cleaner, let alone fire a gun, the seven-month occupation has left its mark.

Kuwaiti businessmen drive around the city with guns tucked in their belts and semiautomatic rifles in their trunks.

Exuberant Kuwaiti youths regularly roam the streets firing semiautomatic rifles into the sky. Indeed, the sound of gunfire rings out over the capital from morning until night.

The gun-slinging is not confined to the citizenry. Kuwaiti resistance leaders armed with AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades climbed into a parade of Mustang convertibles and Chevrolet Suburbans on Thursday after gunshots were fired at police headquarters in the Salmiya District. Kicking down doors and bursting into living rooms, including those of several Filipino families, the squad dragged off at least two suspected Iraqis or Iraqi collaborators, handcuffed them and briefly interrogated them before taking them back to police headquarters.

Hundreds of Iraqis and an undetermined number of suspected collaborators, mostly Palestinians and Jordanians, have been taken into resistance custody since Iraqi troops began their withdrawal--and the resistance, whose members have been repeatedly beaten, tortured and murdered by the Iraqi occupiers, took charge.

“You understand why we have to do this. It is because I miss my wife,” said a resistance leader, identified only as Maj. Ali, who participated in Thursday’s roundup.

Ali said he was driving several months ago with his wife and two young daughters when Iraqi soldiers, who had long been seeking him because of his work with the resistance, rammed his car from behind and flipped it over. His daughters were both put in intensive care, and his wife, who was bleeding internally, was being treated by an Iraqi physician.

The doctor abruptly left the room, and when he returned, “I told him, ‘Please save my wife,’ ” Ali recalls. “The doctor said, ‘I forget my stethoscope.’ When he came back, it was too late . . . .”

Resistance leaders said they are rounding up Iraqi soldiers and detaining them at police stations and military prison camps for eventual repatriation to Iraq.

Saudi radio reported early today that Kuwaiti troops killed 22 Iraqi soldiers and captured eight others when they stormed two houses in a Kuwait city suburb. The report, monitored by British Broadcasting Corp., could not be immediately confirmed.

In an interview Thursday, resistance leader Abdul Radah said that most resistance leaders are too angry at the Iraqi intelligence officials who participated in the torture and murder of resistance leaders to simply arrest them.

“If he is one of the guys who has been working with intelligence, we will shoot them, sure. Because we know our government is nice, and they’ll be good with the prisoners, and they’ll go back and talk about it. We don’t want that,” he said. “If he’s one of the guys who worked with the intelligence people who tortured our people, we kill them. We don’t bother with anything else.”

Sixty to 70 such killings have taken place in the last seven months, he said. In one typical case about four months ago, he said, a Palestinian who was known to be regularly giving information to the Iraqis was captured by the resistance and briefly held.

“We wanted a couple of words with him and, you know, a couple of slaps. But we didn’t want to waste time. We shot him,” Radah said. “Shooting them is the only way because if I don’t shoot him, he will take 20, 30, 40 others.”

Resistance leaders say that by patrolling and arresting Iraqi soldiers in hiding or those who have aided them, they are protecting the population against angry Kuwaiti civilians who might otherwise take the law into their own hands.

” . . . Seven months under occupation, and our young people are so angry, they might do anything,” said Col. Ahmed Mishal.

Another Kuwaiti army official said: “Now, 90% of our houses have lost a boy or lost a girl. You don’t be surprised if you see anything. You don’t know what a man is going to do.”

There were unconfirmed reports that two Palestinians were shot dead Tuesday near a traffic circle in Kuwait city--one of a series of similar reports that has the Palestinian community here living in fear.

“There have been so many rumors around that the Palestinians are against the Kuwaitis, which is not true,” said a Palestinian medical technician, Ghazi Mahmoud.

“I do agree that some Palestinians misbehaved, and some Palestinians were pro-Iraqi. President Saddam (Hussein) said he will bring Palestine back to Palestinians, so they had to follow him.

“So, I so admit that some of us misbehaved, and we don’t blame the Kuwaiti government if they do (take) revenge, but I do believe from meeting with Kuwaiti government officers that the revenge will only be against those who misbehaved.”

Many Palestinians now are “scared,” said a Kuwaiti police official, Maj. Hani Septi. “They are scared, they don’t know which way they are going.” He paused a moment. “I think he commit a crime if he be so scared.”

Kuwaiti military and police officials say they are working to restore order in the city. Kuwait’s crown prince, Sheik Saad al Abdullah al Sabah, could arrive at any time, they say. The British Embassy reopened Thursday, and the American Embassy, after a mine scare Thursday afternoon, was scheduled to reopen today.

“No city’s secure in one day or two days,” a Kuwaiti army official admitted.

“Anything might happen because the gun is in every hand now. There are still mines, there are bombs and ammunition. The city is too dangerous for people. How can I say my country’s safe and secure if you can’t go to your beach house or the desert or the streets?

“But we will take care of these problems,” he said. “We are waiting for our emir to come back, and we’re going to work day and night to make it ready for him.”

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said U.S. civil affairs units--about 1,000 reserve military engineers, lawyers and accountants--were due in Kuwait city Thursday night to help provide law enforcement and emergency services and restore water and electric power.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, following a $48-million contract signed by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile in January, also is set to enter Kuwait to begin surveying damage to the country’s infrastructure and assess the scope of the rebuilding task ahead, Williams said.

North of Kuwait city on the road to Basra, Iraq, American and British soldiers staffed checkpoints to screen what is left of the Iraqi army that was headed north toward Baghdad. They are searching for weapons and for war criminals.

Working with members of the Kuwaiti resistance, the allied forces have drawn up lists of the battalions believed responsible for a long list of potential war crimes, including the murder, torture and rape of civilians, as well as the burning of oil wells and other destruction that has left the capital a shambles.

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this story.