COLUMN ONE : Chronicles of Loss and Resistance : The voices of Kuwaitis are full of outrage--telling tales of rape and murder, of invaders plundering their country. But they recall acts of courage too.

It may be best to tell the seven-month agony of Kuwait in the voices of its people.

Their voices, overflowing with grief or fury, are not difficult to hear, for every Kuwaiti interviewed in the five days since their capital was liberated has some personal outrage to pour forth: a husband tortured, a son killed, a daughter raped, a neighbor abducted, a house put to the torch--all at the hands of Iraqis.

From the August night that Iraqi soldiers steamrollered into Kuwait, their tanks in arrogant possession of the coastal boulevard of hotels and palaces, up until the February night that the last of the invaders tried to scramble back north in stolen cars only to be bombed amid their cargo of ludicrous plunder, the Iraqis had savaged, terrorized and gutted this emirate of 2 million people.

Kuwaiti voices tell of Iraqi deeds that defy the vocabularies of civil men and women.

The midnight hammerings on front doors, and the people who vanished because of them. Of laughing torturers wielding electric cattle prods and electric saws. Of mass arrests and vicious executions. Of Iraqis systematically stripping the city.

They tell too of heroic resistance fighters who booby-trapped Iraqi cars and slipped poison into the Iraqis’ orange juice.

Because thousands of their relatives are yet unaccounted for, some ask that no last names be used.

The voices of Kuwait chronicle a war within a war, seven months of struggle to survive under a regime that killed people for owning a typewriter, a camera or a radio--a rich nation where food was suddenly hard to come by, and medicine almost impossible.

In this city that, until Aug. 2, had carried a reputation for sybaritic easy living, some among its citizens hastily learned the arts of subterfuge and weaponry, and aided the resistance at the risk of their lives. Others betrayed friends to save themselves.

Theirs are the voices of courage and horror. Listen to them. For theirs is the story of Kuwait, a nation ravaged and reborn.

Hisham Akbar’s premature baby had been home from the hospital only a week on Aug. 2 when the household was awakened by Akbar’s mother’s phone call.

“She said the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, but we all thought it was nothing.”

Akbar, an industrial engineer and graduate of the University of Miami, is married to an American. “We called my in-laws in Miami, and I told them, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only going to be in the north.’ Then we heard some news (the Iraqis) were on the 4th Ring Road--just 10 miles away from here.”

Othman Othman’s mother woke him that morning too, but to the sound of machine-gun fire.

Like Akbar, like hundreds of other Kuwaitis, Othman could not credit the scope of an invasion and drove to work. Reality came at what looked to be a routine Kuwaiti checkpoint. Shockingly, the soldier who stopped him spoke with an Iraqi accent.

“I didn’t know what to do. I thought, ‘My God, the Iraqis are in the city.’ The (soldier) said, ‘Go back home to your mother.’ ”

For a time that first day, Kuwait Radio broadcast nationalist songs, but by 11 a.m., it went off the air. It came back on a few hours later, then sputtered into silence for good. Just before it did, a message came from Crown Prince Sheik Saad al Abdullah al Sabah. Stick together, he said in essence. Kuwait will be liberated. It’s not going to be long.

Shortwave Radios

With Kuwait Radio gone, Kuwaitis tuned in on their shortwave radios to hear what Saudi Arabia’s response would be. Surely their southern neighbor must be coming to their rescue at any moment.

But for those two days, the Saudis were silent on the subject, hoping that a deal could be worked out with Saddam Hussein. Then they finally issued a statement condemning the invasion but taking no action against it.

The awareness of their isolation, said Akbar, was stunning: “We thought, ‘My God, we are left all alone with this madman.’ ”

Concept became fact; invasion became intrusion.

On Aug. 5, seven young Kuwaitis--a 32-year-old office manager named Adnan, his brother and five friends--bought up fish, bread and cheese to give away. “We want to help people,” said Adnan.

They did it at midnight, but Iraqi soldiers caught them anyway. Only Adnan escaped. The next day, his father went to the police station to ask after the missing young men.

“The Iraqi man says, ‘We are taking them to Baghdad.’ He says: ‘Bring me a car, a video, some food. Then we can talk.’ ”

For two weeks, they came every day with the ransom that was demanded. And “every day they say, ‘Bring us more.’ We give him a 1989 BMW. My mother, every day she cries and begs. They do not let her in.”

After two weeks, the story changed. They are no longer here, said the Iraqis. Write a letter to Saddam. Maybe he will see it.

“I write two times. I say: ‘Mr. Saddam, I ask you for God to save us. I ask for your help.’ . . . Since then, we have heard nothing. We don’t know whether they are alive or dead.”

Once the first shock of invasion had registered, reaction set in.

Kuwaitis began staging peaceful demonstrations, carrying Kuwaiti flags as they walked quietly with their children down city streets. Already, men in the resistance were being brutally punished; women and children marching peaceably, they reckoned, would not be considered a threat.

They were wrong.

Aug. 8, the day Iraq announced that it was annexing Kuwait as its 19th province, a line of women marched through the Jabriya district, carrying pictures of their exiled emir and chanting, “Saddam, people don’t want you here.” As they passed the police station, Iraqi troops opened fire. Several were killed, many more injured.

Screaming women ran off down the street. Within hours, all that was left were pools of blood drying in the heat, a few shoes, a pair of smashed eyeglasses and a Kuwaiti flag shot through with bullet holes.

Throughout the seven months of occupation, Lt. Col. Ali Saraf, who heads the Eastern Kuwait City Police District, estimates that more than 10,000 Kuwaitis were killed, and 25,000 abducted and shipped to Iraqi prisons.

By February, as allied forces closed in on Kuwait city, on two days alone--the Thursday and Friday before liberation--more than 7,000 men ages 15 to 55 were simply snatched up, abducted from streets and mosques, said Saraf. About 5,000, he said, have turned up in southern Iraq, where Saudi forces found them. The other 2,000 are still missing.

It seems astonishing that there was anyone left to arrest.

For the first six weeks after Aug. 2, Iraqis rounded up hundreds of Kuwaiti army and police officers. Even a hint that someone was in the resistance brought arrest and torture.

“You never know why,” said Anwar Sumait, the son of a money exchanger. Several of his brothers were arrested. “If you go outside and they don’t like the way you look, they can kill you. What can I say? We lived in hell.”

In ratios of retribution cruelly practiced since the Romans, the Iraqis burned nine nearby houses after a single Iraqi soldier was found murdered in the Rawda Elementary School.

Random searches were endless. Guns, pictures of the emir, typewriters and copying machines--”Any of this stuff they find, you’re like dead meat,” said Othman, who helped to organize passive resistance.

No Volunteers

For a Kuwaiti, it was just as important not to take part in Iraq’s vision of Kuwait as it was to mount active resistance.

When Iraqi officials sounded out Kuwaitis about heading a new provincial government in Kuwait, none volunteered. Very few complied with Iraqi demands that they change to Iraqi identity cards, driver’s licenses and license plates.

After Iraqi-issued plates were required to buy gas, several Kuwaitis would get together. One would show the required plate and buy gas for them all. Or families rigged electric siphons to transfer gasoline from car to car.

On Sept. 2, the first-month anniversary of the occupation, Kuwaitis began another sort of defiance. At midnight, it seemed as if all Kuwait city had gathered on their rooftops shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great) and “Long Live the Emir!”

It was a chilling, exalting moment, said Kuwaitis who heard it--thousands of voices, all over the city. Screaming. Defying the invaders.

“The people who were scared, they would hear our voices and that would give them encouragement,” said Akbar, the engineer with the new baby.

The Iraqis were enraged. But they took no action against the disembodied voices that had shouted their loyalty and their fury all around them.

A month later Kuwaitis took to the rooftops again. This time, they shouted only, “Allahu Akbar. “ The Iraqis, they thought, could not possibly object to the simple Islamic phrase.

Not so. This time, Iraqi troops opened fire randomly across the rooftops. Several people were killed.

“It’s hard to explain what your home means to you, what your country means, until you lose it,” said Fadel, a 35-year-old engineer. “And we lost everything. And the fear! Not knowing when you went out if you would ever see your family again. We lived in constant fear. It was seven months of terror.”

Kuwaitis Fought Back

Perhaps as many as 3,000 Kuwaitis actively fought back. The resistance was loosely organized, separate groups operating independently in cells.

A 30-year-old army major named Sharidah helped lead one group, called Ahrar al Kuwait, “Free Kuwait.” They began with six men, a pistol and a Kuwaiti machine gun, and grew to 312 men, a network of safehouses, an underground hospital with three doctors, and weapons stolen--sometimes bought--from cash-hungry Iraqi soldiers, he said.

Their attacks were mostly “shoot and run,” booby-trapping Iraqi military cars, and once they put poison in the orange juice at a battalion headquarters. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, apologetically. “We ran away.”

In about three months, the major moved 90 times, but he was captured in December.

His friends bribed the guard with gold for his release. But Iraqi secret police soon came looking for his brother, another resistance leader. “They come to my house and stay for three days,” he said. “I am not there, but my brother is. He hides in the cupboard in the living room. His wife locked him in, then switched the key. The police try the key, and then give up and say nothing is there.”

Yet to fight back took its own toll on the spirit.

Akbar, the father of the newborn, went from police station to station to find three friends who had been arrested. “By the third one you’re thinking, it’s like a business deal, like one plus one equals two. Go to the police station, go to the army. The emotional part is taken almost out of it.”

The same phenomenon struck those who ran checkpoints, risking their lives for a load of rice or a few guns.

“A kind of dead heart, you get,” said Saud Farhan, a Oxford graduate with a British accent who is a refinery operator. “It’s a toss of a coin,” he shrugged. “You live, you die.”

“In the beginning, you would be scared, your heart pumping, but after awhile, it becomes a fact of life,” said Akbar.

“We were like walking zombies. Really,” said Tarik Mazidi. “There was so much killing,” but after a time, “we didn’t feel it.”

From its first hours, the invasion seemed as much motivated by plunder as politics.

The rapacious looting, widespread and organized at the highest levels, began with obvious targets, like the Rolex shop. Soon, Iraqi soldiers would be pulling up carpeting and carrying off light fixtures.

The thievery was to end grotesquely seven months later, with the sorry spectacle of stolen fire trucks and police cars laden with trivial booty like the contents of a very undiscriminating pawnshop: a toy stuffed tiger, soap, a vacuum cleaner, silver spoons, underwear. It all spilled out higgledy-piggledy on the highway out of Kuwait city, as allies opened fire on the fleeing Iraqi convoys.

On Aug. 2, as soon as they hit town, the officers in Iraq’s 23rd Republican Guard brigade headed for Kuwait city’s gold shops, said Wesam N., a tank driver in the brigade.

“The soldiers started breaking the windows,” the Iraqi prisoner of war said. “Then the officers keep the soldiers away and steal the gold themselves. Even the intelligence officer, who everybody should be afraid of--he was the leader.”

Commanders rewarded their men “by letting them raid specific villas,” he said, “and letting them steal everything.”

Give Us Your Keys’

Often, “they just knock on the doors and say: ‘Give us your keys. We want your car,’ ” said Fadel, the engineer. Once in a while, before they drove off, Othman recalled, “they’d say: ‘Don’t worry. The sheik will give you another one.’ ”

Cannily, Kuwaitis learned to strip tires and batteries from their cars so they would not run. Some pulled their cars into basements. A man with a Ferrari used a truck and a winch to haul it onto his roof, and a man with a Rolls-Royce lowered it into his empty swimming pool and covered it with trash.

At the plush Kuwait Equestrian Club, Saddam Hussein’s playboy son, Odeh, came up personally to select the best Arabian horses. Other Iraqis carried off 2,000 specially bred cows from the Kuwait Dairy Co. “They came to the owner and said, ‘Sign this paper,’ ” Ali Habib Showaie, a 42-year-old school supervisor, said. “The owner says, ‘What is this?’ They say, ‘This is a thank-you letter from the Iraqi government for your donation.’ Then they took the cows.”

Over dinner Sept. 23, a 34-year-old Kuwaiti army major named Adnan and five friends were arrested on Sept. 23. The Iraqis didn’t know who they were, but someone had just shot at one of their roadblocks, and the Iraqis were out for revenge.

“They said the bullet came from this area,” the major said. “So they burned three houses. One belongs to an old lady. She cannot walk. We beg them not to burn that house. But they told her to get out and took a flame and burned all three houses.”

The men were taken to military intelligence headquarters at the Mohasazait al Asima, the Kuwaiti police headquarters downtown. It was, said the major, “the place of torture. This was a place of hell.”

“When I arrived, the intelligence chief, he tells me: ‘In six months, all Kuwait will be finished. Iraq is a superpower. We are the only country that dares to execute a foreign journalist. The only one!’ (He referred to the 1990 hanging of a British journalist.)

“He says: ‘All this what you call resistance? Give us three months. Iraq was a country of 18 million and no one dares open his mouth. You are a small country. Your people will not talk wrong.’

“He says: ‘Forget Kuwait. It’s gone. Finished. Forget America. They cannot help. Forget the United Nations. It is nothing. Iraq is everything.’ ”

They came on Sept. 8 for an administrator at Kuwait University named Ahmed. Forty soldiers led by a plainclothes police agent surrounded his house. They said his secretary, a Palestinian, had overheard him complaining about the Iraqis.

He was ultimately taken to the Naif Palace, a government office building turned interrogation center. He could hear, racketing down its corridors, the screams of women.

“I am blindfolded,” he says. “My hands are tied. They tell me, ‘Admit, admit.’ To what? They hit me with a donkey stick on the back. Again and again. They say, ‘Admit.’ I don’t know what. They say, ‘We find guns in your house.’ But I have no guns. They say what VIPs do I know, what military, what resistance? I don’t know. They stick burning cigarettes in my face.”

After several days, Ahmed was moved to another police facility, to a cell so small that only half of the 36 prisoners--one of them an 85-year-old man--could sit down or sleep at a time. The others stood and waited their turn. Food was a morsel of pita bread every three days. If one man talked, all were beaten.

For 34 days, he was blindfolded and questioned. At times, his jeering captors ordered him, “ ‘Ahmed, run!’ I am blindfolded but I run. When I hit the wall, they laugh.”

A 70-year-old man named Haji was grabbed on Oct. 25 as he left the mosque. They put a gun to his toothless, bearded face. They wanted his nephew, Khalid, an army lieutenant. “I am afraid. I say he is inside. When they enter my house, they smash all the furniture and food. And they take Khalid. Two weeks later, we hear they took him to Baghdad.”

The Iraqis who arrested Khalid also seized his military office files and told him that they would kill him if he lied. “So he does not lie,” said his nephew, Abu. “But they use electric wires on his ears, on his tongue, and sorry I must say, on his penis. They tortured him for 17 days in Kuwait. Then they put him and 22 men in the box with rats and took them to Basra. They cannot even sit. After that to Baghdad.”

The last letter they had was in January. It had been smuggled from Baghdad’s Bakuda Prison, where 600 Kuwaiti soldiers were being held. “Since then, nothing.”

During October, as the numbers of Western and Arab troops climbed toward the hundreds of thousands, the Iraqis taunted the nation they held hostage. They spoke of the Kuwaiti emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmad al Sabah: “Jabbar said he will come with the Americans,” they said mockingly. “We don’t see them coming, do you?”

Othman’s neighborhood was a center for resistance, a target for retaliation. A man who lived around the corner from Othman had been arrested and brought back to the neighborhood by several officers. He looked dazed, said Othman. The man had been beaten so much that his forehead was soft.

The officers knocked on every door in the area, summoned the neighbors into the street and put a bullet through the man’s head. “It was a bullet of mercy,” Othman said quietly.

Iraqis found a medication for cleaning wounds in the home of Dr. Hisham Obaidan, a well-known Kuwaiti obstetrician-gynecologist. “Why do you have this stuff?” they demanded.

He was a doctor, and used it in his work, he explained, according to Sumait, who knows the doctor’s family. The soldiers accused him of treating wounded resistance members.

Doctor Killed

He was arrested and held for three weeks. One night, the Iraqis telephoned Obaidan’s wife and told her to prepare for her husband’s return; he was being released. In a city of shortages, she found food for an elaborate welcome-home meal. There was a knock on the door. She opened the door, and there was her husband, accompanied by several Iraqi officers. Then, the officers shot the doctor on his doorstep.

Esra Bagandi’s family knows what became of her. Her body was dumped, naked, in front of her father’s house, on Jan. 20.

Bagandi was the friend of a woman named Noor. “She was helping get food or messages for the resistance,” said Noor, 38.

The Iraqis took Bagandi, and her father and her uncle, “They raped her many times. In front of her father and uncle. They must watch,” said Noor.

After two months, her body was left at her father’s house, where no one was allowed to touch it or cover it or move it for 24 hours. “They want people to see,” said Noor. Her father and her uncle were released, alive. “They still cannot speak.”

As the city was stripped of its goods and cut off from its supplies, Kuwaitis, the spoiled rich kids of the Persian Gulf, organized themselves, collecting garbage and distributing supplies.

For starters, there was no money. Iraqis abolished the Kuwaiti dinar as an exchange vehicle and allowed Kuwaitis to trade it in on a one-to-one exchange for Iraqi dinars, worth a tenth of the Kuwaiti dinar. Most refused, even when the rate was temporarily escalated to four-to-one. After the Kuwaiti currency was finally outlawed altogether, scores were arrested and detained with Kuwaiti currency in their pockets, homes or cars.

When the public bakery no longer allowed Kuwaitis to buy bread, young Kuwaiti men became bakers. “Now I bake four different kinds of bread,” boasted Abdul Mazidi, 26, a civil engineer. “We turned out to be survivors.”

Other Kuwaitis banded together and stockpiled rice and wheat in abandoned houses for distribution to needy families. Many, unable to buy fresh meat or store it without refrigeration, now have sheep, chickens and cows browsing around their yards.

Crossing checkpoints with loads of supplies or, in the case of resistance members, weapons, became as high an art as it was a risk. At first, Kuwaitis tried traveling checkpoints in convoys, keeping the vehicle carrying contraband goods sandwiched between two trucks.

Cigarette Trick

Another handy trick was “before you get to the checkpoint, you take a cigarette and light it up and leave the pack on the dashboard,” said Farhan.

“Then they would forget about everything else, and ask for the pack,” he said.

If the load was critical, like a large stash of cash, checkpoint runners would tuck a nice set of pens or a bottle of cologne in the glove box. “That was enough,” Farhan said. “You don’t tell them, ‘Take it.’ They just open it up and take it and smile at you. That was the whole idea, of course. Psychology war!”

Of course, there was the risk of getting caught, and those who did paid almost instantly with their lives. Nonetheless, for a few sacks of rice, or some guns, they kept on.

The supermarkets closed down almost immediately, but Kuwaitis were still able to buy food from wholesale warehouses or from merchants who brought Jordanian-smuggled goods from Iraq and sold it at grandly inflated prices in makeshift street-side markets.

The trip to Kuwait was worth it. A merchant who got two dinars for a carton of eggs in Baghdad got 30 in Kuwait. Later, the price rose to 70 Iraqi dinars, about $120, for 30 eggs.

Akbar figures it was all part of the Iraqis’ plan to force the Kuwaitis into submission. “They wanted people to die emotionally. They would be in desperate need, and anything the Iraqis asked, they would do,” he said.

“There was no work, no money. Even in the houses (Iraqis) could come and take our food, and still we were surviving. Mostly by people helping each other. A lot of (Iraqi) officers were amazed. They would say, ‘How can you survive all this time?’ ”

As the Jan. 15 deadline drew nearer, tempers and tension grew taut; retribution became more vicious.

On Jan. 9, a government housing officer named Khalid saw three women’s bodies dumped in the trash. “I saw one woman with a chain around her neck. She is in the garbage. Naked. She is a friend of my wife. She has three children. They torture her because her husband is in the resistance. They use a butcher’s knife to cut her face, her back, her arms.”

On Jan. 11, “we heard two shots at night,” said Khalid, 31. “In the morning we find two boys. Aged 16, 17. In the garbage. Shot in the head.”

On Jan. 17, someone fired at an Iraqi antiaircraft battery, killing three Iraqi soldiers. The Iraqis, enraged, attacked all the houses nearby with hand grenades and arrested all the men. Among them were Akbar’s friend, his friend’s father-in-law, and two brothers-in-law. One brother-in-law was free, one is missing, and his friend and his father-in-law were killed.

News that the allied bombing campaign had begun brought jubilation and frenzy to Kuwait city. The Iraqis “started running crazy,” Sumait said. “They start shooting anything.” After lying low for several months because of reprisals, the resistance started shooting back, thinking the war had started and wanting to join in.

House-to-house searches began again in earnest. As the ground war was launched and an Iraqi withdrawal seemed likely, troops began rounding up an estimated 7,000 young men to take with them as hostages on their retreat.

On the Saturday before liberation, Sumait’s brother was outside feeding the family sheep when Iraqi officers leaped over the outer wall and asked him how many brothers he had. Five, he replied.

Two other brothers were ordered to go with the soldiers. A third brother had already been arrested.

Sumait’s father, 65-year-old Ahmed Sumait, a dignified patriarch with three wives and 15 children who all seem to adore him, walked in. The entire family rose to its feet. The elder Sumait sat down with difficulty and broke into tears.

In God’s Hands’

“Where are my children?” he said brokenly. He sobbed, and one of his daughters comforted him. “Thank God, they didn’t take the girls. It’s all in God’s hands now,” he said.

By Tuesday night at about 11 p.m., it was clear something was afoot. Cars, tanks and trucks began rumbling down the streets, moving north. Citizens huddled in their houses, listening to Iraqi gunfire.

Horrific booming was sounding off to the north, so strong that the walls of the houses vibrated all night. At the time, many Kuwaitis assumed that an allied air strike was under way, and began to prepare for a ground campaign nearby. In fact, U.S. warplanes were pounding Iraqi troops fleeing toward Baghdad, halting a mounted caravan in its tracks as it moved north, laden with soldiers and loot.

The next day, Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corp., the only source of news to most Kuwaitis after the Iraqis went from house to house and cut off satellite dishes, announced that the withdrawal had begun. A man at the nearly abandoned Interpol station in Kuwait city went out, yanked down the Iraqi flag and raised the Kuwait banner. Kuwait was on its way to liberation.