Refugees Flee Iraq, but Some Find No Escape

Adnan Mohammed stood warming his hands around a smoky fire scraped together on the floor of an abandoned bus station. Beside him, his wife cradled their toddler in a scarf splotched with the blood of their 12-year-old son, hit by American gunfire last week.

The wife stood without shoes in the swirling mud on the floor of the station. In the blind rush to flee the violence that has engulfed southern Iraq--first the waves of allied bombing attacks, then the exploding ground battles and now Iraq’s own elite troops firing on civilian demonstrators--the shoes got lost somewhere.

“All of Iraq is trying to escape,” Mohammed said glumly as a bone-chilling rainstorm howled outside, crept through the crevices of the bus shelter and attacked the meager fire. “Saddam Hussein has no conscience. If he had a conscience, he would not make war on his own citizens.”

But refugees like Mohammed and his family are finding that there is no place to escape to. They are the latest victims in the current phase of a conflict that seems to have a limitless appetite for violence.

Packed into cars, huddled shivering in the beds of pickup trucks, carrying with them children, blankets, a few sheep and the essential tools for setting up a household somewhere untouched by war, thousands of refugees began streaming south out of Iraq this week. They found that, in a region where enmity has long outlived cease-fires and pain has a lengthy memory, there is no place untouched by war.

A desperate caravan of more than 1,200 Iraqis, Kuwaitis and Egyptians fleeing the widespread civil disturbances drove into Kuwait on Tuesday along the main highway linking Kuwait city and Baghdad, completing a journey that for some had spanned up to six days. But a few miles outside the Kuwaiti capital they were turned around and pointed back toward Iraq.

To the consternation of U.S. military officials who guided the caravan, Kuwaiti military officials announced that they would not accept Iraqi refugees, or Egyptians who had not lived in Kuwait before the conflict.

Even many Kuwaitis without full citizenship were turned away Tuesday and sent back to Iraq, becoming helpless riders in a caravan seemingly bound for nowhere.

At Safwan in southern Iraq, Mohammed ushered his family into the empty bus station while Ali Khalif, a former Kuwaiti soldier, stood helplessly in the street outside his Chevrolet, where 12 of his family members huddled uncertainly.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. Ask God what I’m going to do,” Khalif said, his voice rising in desperation. “We have no food, no water, we are 13 people, we are traveling for six days. . . .”

“We’re playing Ping-Pong with these people,” complained an irate U.S. Army official who had escorted the caravan out of Iraq.

The odyssey began Monday night when U.S. Army officials, flooded with about 2,000 refugees at the Kuwait-Iraq border and expecting up to 4,000 more to arrive soon, tried to send the refugees into Kuwait but were told that the Kuwaiti government would refuse to accept Iraqi refugees. About 60% to 70% of the group were Iraqis.

Of the entire group, only about 200 Kuwaitis were allowed through, said an Army civil affairs officer heading the operation, who asked not to be identified.

With night coming on and nowhere to go, the group was herded onto an airfield near Safwan by U.S. officials, who pitched the tents used by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, for Sunday’s peace talks with Iraqi officers.

The next morning, the caravan set off south into Kuwait.

“This morning, we just said we’re heading to Kuwait,” the Army officer said. “I’m going to walk right up to a Kuwaiti official and say, ‘Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, here they are,’ and see what happens. Otherwise, what am I going to do? Leave ‘em out in the desert?”

Under skies darkened by oil well fires belching huge clouds of smoke along the Iraq-Kuwait border, Iraqi refugees moved into Kuwait on Tuesday morning and got their first view of a three-mile-long swath of destruction where allied planes had rained hellfire one night a little more than a week ago on Iraqi soldiers fleeing the Kuwaiti capital.

Hundreds of trucks, buses, tanks and cars--spilling over with last-minute booty gathered in the soldiers’ flight out of Kuwait--were blown to bits as they rushed toward Baghdad, leaving a trail of twisted, blackened wreckage that stretched for miles along either side of the highway.

So much fire had rained down on the madcap scene that the asphalt had crystallized in places, and the refugee caravan slowed to a crawl, picking its way through the wreckage as Iraqi families looked glumly out their car windows at the remnants of their fallen army.

One car cassette player in the caravan echoed the eerie strains of the Irish rock band, U2, singing of “those fighter planes” and ending on a soft, extended refrain: “These are the arms, these are the arms of America.”

The caravan waited a little less than an hour outside Jahra, west of Kuwait city, before a Kuwaiti army officer announced that most non-Kuwaitis would have to return to Iraq. Even some of the Kuwaitis who do not hold first-class citizenship in Kuwait--a longstanding underclass known as the “bidoon, “ meaning “without”--were turned back north. The caravan slowly made its way back toward the border.

Back in Safwan on Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Army Sgt. Ken Pfeiffer was distraught.

“The best we can do for them back here is if they have cars they can stay in them,” he said. “I don’t have anything for them.”

The first families began arriving at midafternoon and parked on the roadside of the abandoned border town.

Khalif, who was born in Kuwait but who does not hold full citizenship, was bitter.

“They return us back. They said, ‘Go back to Iraq,’ and they said bad words to us,” he said angrily. “I’m a soldier in the army. I was born in Kuwait. My father was born in Kuwait. If somebody is born in Kuwait, his father born in Kuwait, what nationality has he got?

“We ran to Iraq, thinking if we ran to Iraq, he’s (Saddam Hussein) not going to shoot his own country with chemical weapons,” he said.

“I left Kuwait,” he admitted. “I walked away from the mess there. The emir ran away. You blame me because I ran away?”

Najim Abdullah, an Iraqi from Basra traveling in one vehicle with his wife, seven sons and two daughters, said he was not sure how the family would survive.

Mohammed said he and his family had first fled from a small town near Basra on the back of a truck traveling near Iraqi troops. The truck, along with Iraqi military vehicles, was attacked by U.S. forces and his 12-year-old son was wounded. Sixteen people died and 13 were injured, he said.