Uprising Spreads Anarchy in South Iraq, Refugees Report : Rebellion: Seven cities are said to be under control of fundamentalist Muslims and other foes of Hussein. The Pentagon says there may be fighting between military units.

Rebelling civilians have emptied political prisons and executed loyalists of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in a popular fundamentalist Islamic uprising that has spread anarchy across southern Iraq in the last four days, according to refugees who reached here Monday.

Foes of the Iraqi president have taken control of seven major cities south of Baghdad in a growing threat to Iraq’s dictatorial regime, the refugees said.

Pentagon officials also reported that their reconnaissance shows evidence of considerable unrest in southern Iraq, with the possibility of conflict between different Iraqi army units.

Refugees fleeing Iraq to the east, across the border with Iran, said that dissident Iraqi troops had joined civilian protesters in destroying the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party headquarters in Basra, fighting Republican Guard units in urban clashes and killing two regime officials there, among them Udai Hussein, the president’s son.

The accounts of unrest are incomplete and have not been independently confirmed, and it remained unclear Monday whether the revolt sweeping the south was capable of challenging Iraq’s well-entrenched dictatorship.

The reports, however, represent the biggest, most public opposition to Hussein’s rule since he assumed power more than a decade ago. And they clearly suggest a breakdown of Hussein’s police state and a growing opposition within the army in the wake of his Gulf War debacle.

Descriptions of disturbances in Iraqi cities have come from various sources, some of whom have a clear stake in Iraq’s political future. Developments reported include the following:

* Mobs chanting, “No Saddam! Death to Saddam!” broke into prisons and torture centers in Basra and Nasiriyah, releasing more than 1,500 kidnaped Kuwaitis and other political prisoners, refugees said. Basra’s mayor, chief of police and 17 army officers were killed, according to Iraqi political exiles in Iran.

* A Kuwaiti released from prison by protesters said civilians had executed the mayor, intelligence chief and the head of the Baath Party in Nasiriyah.

* Iraqi exiles in Iran said they had unconfirmed reports that Hussein had personally executed two of his top deputies, both members of the Revolutionary Command Council.

* In a press release issued in Tehran, Mohammed Bakr Hakim, leader of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, said southern Iraq is undergoing an intifada-- an uprising of the people. He also said a division of 15,000 dissident soldiers joined the uprising in Amarah and helped appoint a new mayor.

* Iraqi exiles in Iran also said they sent a formal request to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, asking for an international fact-finding mission to investigate the killings of civilians they said Hussein’s troops had committed in Basra.

Accelerating Violence

“The people came and killed the police and the friends of Saddam,” said Saleh Karkan, 21, a Kuwaiti student freed from the Nasiriyah prison on Friday, six weeks after he was arrested by Iraqi troops in Kuwait city. “All the prisoners run away. When I go, I see they have a big picture of Saddam on fire.”

Mowaffak Rubaie, a spokesman for the exiled Shiite Muslim Al Dawaa Party, said in London: “This is the moment we have been waiting for. There are chinks in Hussein’s wall of fear.”

The Pentagon said it has seen large gatherings of civilians, possibly protesters; government buildings and vehicles were burning.

Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday that allied intelligence has spotted Soviet-made tanks in southern Iraq--both T-55s, apparently in the hands of regular Iraqi army units, and T-72s in the hands of the Republican Guard.

“They’re both apparently trying to exert an influence on the situation, and we don’t know who’s on what side,” he said. “Surmise would be probably the Republican Guard is loyal to the regime and the army is not.”

Kelly said U.S. forces, now occupying the southern part of Iraq behind a demarcation line established Sunday, probably would not intervene in the fighting “unless it became very serious. . . . We never have had any desire to take over Iraq.”

About 400 refugees arrived in Safwan in about two hours Monday, most in heavily loaded cars crammed with a dozen or more people. U.S. troops fed them “meals ready to eat,” the military’s field rations.

Nearby, several Iraqi tanks and trucks still burned, and hundreds of scorched skeletons of bombed or burned-out military and civilian vehicles littered the road and surrounding desert.

Ade Karim, 29, a Kuwaiti released from prison after the uprisings began, claimed that he saw “many hundreds of people killed in Nasiriyah. In the streets . . . all people kill the police. And army killed the police.”

In all, the refugees reported, anti-Hussein forces have effectively taken control of the largest cities in southern Iraq, including Basra, Nasiriyah, Amarah, Samawa, Diwaniya, Kut and Karbala.

“The people now control these places,” asserted Sabah Abid, 35, an Iraqi also fleeing to Kuwait. “All the Baath people are leaving these areas and going to Baghdad. Saddam is finished now in these areas.”

Al Dawaa Party spokesman Rubaie said hundreds of exiled party members based in Iran have begun to slip across the border through remote crossings into southern Iraq in the last few days, hoping to link up with underground leaders in cities there.

Refugees reported that Hakim, the Shiite Muslim cleric who heads the Islamic Revolutionary Council of Iraq, had come from Iran to lead the revolt. But sources in Tehran said Hakim was still in the Iranian capital on Monday.

Hint of Trouble

Deserting Iraqi soldiers have been arming the populace with rifles and hand grenades, Rubaie said. Some soldiers, he claimed, joined Shiite rebels in attacking Republican Guard units in the north Basra district of Ashar. Facing strong resistance, the guard units “inflicted heavy casualties on the people,” he asserted, but were driven out of the city.

“There is a deep concern they may return and sweep the whole city,” he said. “We are asking for help, but we do not know quite how to go about it. We are not professional politicians.”

Iraq’s official Baghdad Radio has made no specific mention of the turmoil building in the aftermath of Iraq’s bitter defeat in Kuwait. But it gave the regime’s first strong hint of trouble in the ranks of its armed forces Monday, announcing an unprecedented decree granting blanket amnesty to all army deserters, draft dodgers and soldiers who are absent without leave.

Kelly said the Iraqi unrest could slow the release of allied hostages and prisoners of war and will probably increase as the coalition releases more than 60,000 prisoners of war to Iraq.

“I don’t think there would be very many happy soldiers going back that would continue to support the regime,” Kelly said. “What you have on your hands returning to Iraq is a beaten army, and beaten armies can be politically dangerous.

“They were subjected to eight years of battle in the Iran-Iraq War and lost 200,000 (soldiers). Most of the same people were dragged into this after they gave Iran back everything--forced into a caldron which they could never understand--and were rapidly defeated, taking a lot of casualties. They’re thinking they got stabbed in the back by the regime, and they present a threat to the regime.”

Several Iraqi soldiers were interviewed by the British Broadcasting Corp. on the highway leading to Basra through allied positions in southern Iraq. They confirmed that, for the first time since Hussein took sole control of his nation 12 years ago, his own army now harbors open resentment toward him.

“He’s a big loser,” said an Iraqi soldier driving his armored personnel carrier north to lend his hand to the Basra revolt. “A lot of soldiers are joining in this rebellion.”

Another soldier on the road said angrily that the Iraqis had lost “because we didn’t fight. We have nothing now, and we want a new regime.”

In issuing the new edict, which ordered all deserters to return to their units within seven days, Hussein’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council waived one of Iraq’s strictest, most consistently enforced laws, requiring that all draft dodgers and deserters be executed on the spot.

Thousands of Iraqi men were killed under that standing law during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran, and military analysts said the blanket pardon was clearly an attempt by Hussein’s regime to close ranks militarily amid unprecedented dissent after the regime’s bitter defeat in Kuwait last week.

The hints of trouble were underscored in another Baghdad Radio broadcast late Monday reporting on a visit to towns in eastern Iraq by the ruling Command Council’s vice chairman, Izzat Ibrahim, reportedly Hussein’s handpicked future successor. Ibrahim was quoted as telling local leaders that their loyalty to Baghdad was essential now “in the face of unprecedented challenges” to the ruling regime.

U.S. Intelligence

U.S. intelligence reports on Monday said the regime’s order for two mechanized brigades to leave the Turkish border for Baghdad was further evidence that Hussein was trying to consolidate his position in the Iraqi capital.

“The revolution has started,” said an Arabic-speaking U.S. military intelligence officer who has interviewed scores of refugees in the last two days in Safwan, about two miles across Iraq’s border from Kuwait. “People are shooting each other. It’s anarchy.”

He asserted that thousands of Kuwaiti, Egyptian, Syrian, Turkish and other refugees have fled Iraq since Friday, including a mass exodus of Kuwaitis on Sunday night after Basra’s prison was emptied.

A U.S. Army major said the refugees complained of Republican Guard units, ostensibly loyal to Hussein, firing on civilians in Basra and Zubayr. “The Republican Guard is leveling the place,” he said. “Women, children, everyone.”

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, which was untouched by allied bombing, a crowd reportedly tied a length of rope around the head of a statue of Hussein, said Rubaie of the Al Dawaa Party. Yelling, “Death to Saddam!” the crowd then “pulled the statue down and demolished it,” he said.

On Thursday night, several refugees said, loyalist police fired into a crowd of soldiers and civilians who began to chant and wave shirts in an anti-Hussein rally after holy day prayers at the Hussein and Abas mosques in Karbala.

“At first they shoot in the air,” said Salim Mesfer, 23, a Kuwaiti engineering student who went to Baghdad in January to search for two brothers he said were abducted by Iraqi troops. “Then the intelligence men shoot the soldiers and the people. I myself saw one woman and two kids dead.”

The incident has political and religious significance since Karbala is a holy city for Shiite Muslims. More than half of Iraq’s 18 million people are Shiites, and their clerics long have demanded a stricter Islamic society similar to Iran’s.

The Iraqi Opposition

Although Tehran has remained officially neutral in the Gulf War, the Islamic Republic has long sought to dislodge Hussein, whose Baathist ideology of secularism and science is a bane to Iran’s fundamentalist religious leadership.

What is more, Hussein’s inner ruling circle, which consists largely of Iraq’s minority Sunni Islamic sect, has systematically sought to oppress and subjugate the nation’s majority Shiites, also the predominant community in neighboring Iran.

Much of the revolt raging in southern Iraq on Monday appeared to be originating from that Shiite community, the majority in southern Iraq. It has always looked to Tehran for spiritual and political guidance.

Among the first group of refugees to emerge from war-torn Basra on Sunday were Iraqi Shiites carrying a letter appealing to allied forces to help them force Hussein from power. (In Washington, officials said the United States has not been formally contacted by any rebel groups.) The emerging Iraqis told reporters they were loyal to exiled religious leader Hakim.

Hakim has led one of Iraq’s largest opposition groups from his headquarters in exile in Tehran, where he fled in 1983 after Hussein ordered that six members of his family be executed in front of more than 80 others.

The rest of the family has remained either in exile or in Iraqi prisons ever since, and the Hakims’ home village of Dujayl in southern Iraq, a hotbed of dissent, was destroyed by the regime and then rebuilt in the Baathist image.

Hussein, through such systematic arrest, execution and destruction, had largely crushed the Shiites and their underground Al Dawaa Party, but Hakim’s following remained strong. Among the family members killed by the regime during the early days of its Shiite purge in 1980 was Mohammed Bakir Sadr, a religious leader so powerful and influential he was considered senior even to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the Shiite hierarchy.

Sadr remains a martyr throughout southern Iraq even today, a martyrdom that was fueled and financed into a underground network of dissidents throughout Iraq’s Shiite regions by Khomeini himself during the Iran-Iraq War.

Since the death of Khomeini, who consistently demanded Hussein’s ouster as an irreversible condition for ending the eight-year war, the Iraqi Shiites’ clandestine network had fallen into disarray, and the Al Dawaa Party was no longer considered credible opposition to Hussein’s rule.

But the chaotic aftermath of his failed adventure in Kuwait apparently has reignited the simmering hatred that had endured beneath the surface in Shiite-dominated Basra and throughout the south, and the breakdown in civilian authority there apparently emboldened the public show of anger and dissent.

Drogin reported from Safwan and Fineman from Amman, Jordan. Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Melissa Healy in Washington and Stephen Braun and Laurie Becklund in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

IRAQ’S RELIGIOUS GROUPS

The mounting unrest against President Saddam Hussein in southern Iraq is being fueled by Shia Muslims, who are asking for allied help in overthrowing the government. The Islamic doctrine of the Shiites, who make up about 55% of Iraq’s prewar population of 18 million, is very similar to that of the rival Sunnis. But the more Westernized Sunnis, with only 20% to 25% of the population, are the dominant force in Hussein’s Baath party and the Iraqi government. Here is a description of Iraq’s religious populations, including non-Muslims: * SUNNIS: The Sunni Arabs believe that Muslim leadership passed to the caliphs after the death of the Prophet Mohammed.

* SHIITES: The Shiite Arabs believe that leadership is limited to descendants of Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed. Shiites invest more authority in their imams, or spiritual leaders, than do the Sunnis. Shiites also adhere to a messianic tradition that one day a leader--a descendant of Ali-- will return to restore Islamic justice.

* KURDS: The non-Arab Kurds make up 15% to 20% of the Iraqi population. They are mostly Sunni Muslim, but the mountain-dwellers of Persian origin have intermittently fought with the Iraqi government for political autonomy. During the Iran-Iraq War, thousands of Kurds were killed by Iraqi forces.

* CHRISTIANS: Christian Arabs are less than 5% of the population. About 400,000 are Chaldeans, Catholics who are loyal to Rome but who have their own rite. There are also Syrian, Latin and Armenian churches among the so-called Eastern Rite Catholics.

* TURKOMAN: These communities, related to Turkish peoples to the north (including the Soviet Union) are a small minority with a Muslim heritage.

* JEWS: Before World War II, Jews had a thriving community in Iraq. That number has since dwindled to a few thousand.