Conditions Go From Bad to Worse in Kuwait City

The line for lentils, sugar, cooking oil and flour begins at a small co-op in the Jabriyah neighborhood, winds down the block and trickles around the corner. The water line begins about two miles up the road, where three dozen men stand quietly waiting to fill 10-gallon jugs from a trickling pipe. Gas lines last week stretched upwards of a mile. There is no more rice. There are no vegetables, no fruit, no meat, no batteries, no milk, no cooking or heating gas.

Most Kuwaitis haven’t had a hot bath in two weeks. There is no water for laundry or washing dishes or flushing toilets. There are few telephones and no television. Families huddle together in their living rooms at night over homemade candles, or venture outside into an intimidating landscape of utter darkness.

Kuwait, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has become a land of urban refugees, and conditions have never been worse than during the two weeks since the country was liberated from its Iraqi occupiers.

“Seven months the Iraqis were here, and we find anything we want. Now, the government comes back and we have nothing,” fumed Haladi Ibrahim Manaai, who spent most of the last two days waiting in various lines without finding milk for her 3 1/2-month-old baby. “When everything is finished, I will give the Kuwaitis this ID card and I will leave the country.”

“My wife just now is pregnant,” said Khalid Saffar, a 28-year-old police officer. “I can’t find for her any food. Just she eats biscuit in the morning, biscuit in the afternoon, biscuit for dinner. Before, we had the bad man Saddam (Hussein), but at least we had food.”

Kuwait’s exiled government and its allied advisers had anticipated they would be able to restore many basic services to the 350,000 people still living in the capital with relative speed. But now, two weeks after the invaders were driven out, officials have only just begun to realize the massive scope of the damage done by Iraqi troops as they fled the city.

“From what we’ve learned, it appears that the Iraqis when they left had plans to demolish the city in a manner like Warsaw in 1944,” said Col. Randall Elliott, head of the Kuwait Task Force, a U.S. group assigned to aid the Kuwaiti government resurrect and reconstruct the country. “They were vandals with military equipment, and the destruction has been enough to seriously impair the functioning of this city.”

Power lines between Kuwait city and the closest fully functioning generating plant, 43 miles south at Ras al Zour, are broken in 93 places. Sewage treatment plants are not functioning, dumping raw sewage into the Persian Gulf, and 55-gallon barrels of toxic chemicals were placed in locations that military officials say indicate an attempt was made to poison the water supply.

Many telephone and electrical substations and switching stations were blown up, as were portions of the two major power-generating and desalination plants in Kuwait city. More than 530 oil wells are on fire, burning 5 million barrels of oil a day and sending plumes of foul smoke into the air, which has already lowered the temperature in Kuwait an average of 10 degrees. Hospitals have been stripped, television and radio facilities looted, hotels set afire. Wild cats and dogs poke through mounds of rotting garbage. Areas of southern Kuwait have been sown so heavily with land mines that it will take years to make them safe.

U.S. military officials have uncovered evidence that Iraqi forces developed plans for the systematic destruction of Kuwait city, laying huge quantities of explosives in virtually every major segment of Kuwait’s infrastructure, but they were apparently prevented from fully carrying out the plans when allied bombing raids cut communication links between Kuwait city and Baghdad.

Detailed engineering documents left by fleeing Iraqi forces indicate that field commanders were preparing plans for the systematic destruction of important facilities in virtually every section of the city, moving from east to west and destroying the city as they retreated, according to allied military officials.

“Individual Iraqi officers were told to prepare to destroy their block,” said one U.S. official familiar with the plans.

Inspectors have hauled out tens of thousands of pounds of explosives from Kuwait city, and at one point they ran out of detonators for blowing up the Iraqi explosives. About 350 pounds of plastic explosives were found on each of the main control valves at the city’s main reservoir, which, if detonated, would have left the city entirely without water for months.

Crude, napalm-like fuel bombs lined the entire road south out of Kuwait city. A huge propane tank farm southeast of the capital was rigged with enough explosives to set off an explosion half the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, said Sgt. Tony Paolini, a ballistics expert working with the Kuwait Task Force.

“It defies my imagination why they had all this stuff. I’ve been in the military more than 2 1/2 decades, and this transcends any military logic I’ve seen,” task force commander Elliott said.

“What he (Hussein) wanted to do, in my opinion,” said Paolini, “was if he couldn’t have this city, he didn’t want anybody to have this city.”

Experts from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Housing Administration, the Office of Disaster Assistance and the Federal Aviation Administration are expected to arrive this week to help hundreds of U.S. civil affairs advisers and Kuwaiti government officials take on the task of wading through the wreckage and restoring services.

But with little apparent progress so far, tensions in the capital have increased markedly, and hostility toward the returning government is building. The number of checkpoints on the roads has nearly doubled in the last few days.

“I think they’re (Kuwaiti officials) afraid, and I think they have reason to be. The frustration is growing a lot faster than the services are,” said a source close to the Kuwaiti government.

Citizens complained that during the Iraqi occupation, plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables and other foods were trucked in regularly from Basra in southern Iraq. Kuwaiti resistance workers regularly delivered packages of sugar, rice and flour to Kuwaiti homes. Water, electrical and local telephone service was for the most part normal. Palestinian merchants set up makeshift shops on street corners offering a wide variety of goods.

Now, many Kuwaitis understand that the damage was caused by the Iraqis, but they don’t understand why it’s taking the government so long to do anything about it.

Kuwaitis have been particularly adamant that water and electricity be restored by the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which begins March 17, when Muslims traditionally cook large feasts and stay up until nearly dawn. Yet officials here privately admit that it is unlikely that water and power will be available in most of the city before the end of the month.

Kuwaiti officials admit it has taken much longer to restore services than they had originally anticipated, but they say they have been delayed by trying to assess precisely where the damage is--and by the fact that in some cases the damage is worse than they had feared.

Kuwait city had about 1 million gallons of water stored in reservoirs at the time of liberation but has been unable to supply it to many homes because there is no electricity to pump it or to refill the reservoir.

Instead, the government has brought in 200 water trucks, each carrying 5,000 gallons, from which citizens with their own pumps and generators can refill rooftop storage tanks, and others can take home containers of water.

An additional 400 water trucks are scheduled to arrive in the next few days, along with four ships, each with a 45,000-ton capacity for refilling the main reservoir. A total of 1.5 million liters of bottled water for drinking arrived during the first week after liberation.

Kuwaiti officials say they also have brought in more than 1,000 tons of food and are preparing to open about half the food co-ops in the city.

Because of major damage to electrical generating stations, power is not likely to be restored to significant portions of the city until the end of the month, officials say, along with full water service. In the meantime, 245 emergency generators, some producing up to 750 kilowatts, have been brought into the city, and three 1.6-megawatt generators are en route.

The large generators will be used not to bring power to houses but to begin illuminating street lights in an attempt to restore a sense of security and alleviate the pervasive sense of doom that overlies the city at night--particularly with the street violence that has persisted despite a 10 p.m. curfew, officials said.

“All of these problems are going to have a strong impact on the government’s image,” said one diplomat here. “They have to be seen as getting basic services back to the people as soon as possible.”

Mohammed Montasser, a garbage company employee, said bitterly: “They told us when the government of Kuwait came back, we will have everything. The fact is, they came here and nobody can do anything.

“You feel happy, habibi (my friend)?” he said to his cousin, Khaled, who shook his head. “I’m telling you, we don’t deserve the Americans to fight for us. Because what we are doing now is the same as the Iraqis. We don’t deserve to get our freedom, I tell you that.”