Iraq to Return Remains of 14 Allied Dead

Iraq will turn over the bodies of 14 allied servicemen killed in the Persian Gulf War, U.S. military officials said Monday.

The remains were scheduled to be flown from Baghdad to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, today after Iraq hands them over to officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the military spokesmen said.

Officials of the U.S. Central Command said the bodies had not yet been identified, and they did not have a breakdown of nationalities or branches of service.

“They will attempt to identify them at Dhahran,” a spokesman said.

Other details, such as where Iraq recovered the bodies, were not available.

There are 24 people on the U.S. military’s missing-in-action list, including 14 members of a Special Operations team believed to have been killed in the Jan. 31 crash of an Air Force AC-130 off the coast of Kuwait. The American military has located the plane and spotted remains inside, but high seas prevented immediate recovery of those bodies.

Most of the other 10 people on the missing list are pilots.

Elsewhere in the region, reports from Iraqi refugees and exiles indicated that the epidemic of unrest and insurrection sweeping Iraq has been spread in part by Saddam Hussein’s returning soldiers carrying the truth of defeat northward from Kuwait.

In some instances, the returning bodies of Iraqi war dead have been enough to discredit the beleaguered president’s claims of victory over allied troops.

Accounts of what befell the Iraqi army in Kuwait will continue to spread with the planned release of more than 60,000 Iraqi POWs in coming weeks.

“They couldn’t hide this. I’m surprised they tried,” said a Western diplomat in Amman, Jordan. But he questioned whether the emotions set loose by war casualties would give lasting support to open dissidence, particularly in a country that suffered heavy losses in its 1980-88 war with Iran.

In other Persian Gulf developments:

* The scheduled return to Iraq of several hundred Iraqi prisoners of war was delayed while Red Cross envoys completed the arrangements. The POWs will be bused back to Iraq in the first of what are expected to be daily repatriations.

* A gathering of 23 Iraqi opposition groups, the widest spectrum ever assembled, began a three-day conference in Beirut to solidify their stand and offer an alternative to the defeated Hussein regime.

* According to a published report, not confirmed by the military, 11 U.S. Green Beret soldiers who entered Iraq on a sabotage-and-spy mission are missing in action.

* Allied air strikes have left Iraq’s oil production capacity reduced by two-thirds, a respected oil industry newsletter reported.

* An Iranian official dismissed reports that his country, as partial collection of its $900-billion reparations claim against Iraq, will keep Iraqi warplanes whose pilots flew them to Iran for sanctuary during the Gulf War. But First Vice President Hassan Habibi gave no indication of when the aircraft will be returned. The allies estimate that about 140 planes made the flight, but Iran has reported the arrival of only about two dozen.

* In a change of policy, Turkey’s President Turgut Ozal announced that his government has conducted secret meetings with Iraqi Kurdish leaders. At the beginning of the Gulf crisis, Turkey--which supported the allies in the air war against Iraq--adamantly opposed the idea of an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq. But its attitude has softened as the Kurds’ quest for autonomy has gathered momentum.

The Iraqi POWs

Red Cross officials in Saudi Arabia downplayed any special significance in the delay in repatriating the Iraqi prisoners, saying the operation is a monumental task that cannot be expected to proceed on an exact timetable.

“The evolution is not such that we can say, ‘At 8 o’clock, we do it,’ ” said Arthur Mattli, a Red Cross representative. “As soon as we have all the details and elements, we are proceeding.”

More than 63,000 Iraqi soldiers are being held in Saudi Arabian camps, including hundreds of deserters who have told officials that they do not want to return to Iraq.

“Some of the people are waiting and watching” events in Iraq, said Arnold Luethold, director of the Red Cross delegation.

The prisoner exchange and the return of soldiers’ remains are part of an agreement reached by the U.S. commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and Iraqi military leaders as a precursor to a permanent cease-fire formally ending the Gulf War.

The Opposition

In exile since Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1978, the 325 delegates to the Beirut gathering of Iraqi opposition leaders greeted old friends class-reunion style, some of them meeting each other for the first time since their diaspora.

When asked the chances of American support for their movement, one delegate, Salah Omar Ali, spoke pessimistically.

“The U.S. has pulled Saddam’s teeth, broken his hand and his leg,” said Ali, who was Iraq’s minister of information from 1963 to 1970 and its permanent representative to the United Nations from 1979 to 1982, when he resigned in protest against the Iran-Iraq War. “Now he’s weak, and he’ll do what they want.”

Under a theory widely circulated at the Beirut conference, Washington would much prefer a toothless Hussein to an unknown quantity.

The delegates were divided into two distinct groups, some wearing ties, the others Arab headdresses. Although unified in their call for a democratic Iraq, the 23 opposition groups are potentially divided by religion--the issue of Shiite Muslim religious power versus more secular politics.

Tehran-based Shiite cleric Nemattallah Hashemi Najad said the opposition inside Iraq does not need arms. “Our duty and yours is to make propaganda,” he said. “There is no need for weapons.”

Several Lebanese dignitaries were on hand the first morning of the conference to welcome and lend support to the cause of the Iraqi opposition. Lebanon was the first Arab country to condemn Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait but did not contribute to the Arab military coalition.

The Green Berets

The report that 11 Special Forces soldiers are missing in action in Iraq came from Newsweek magazine, which said the men’s disappearance has not been acknowledged by the military.

In its March 18 issue, the magazine said the soldiers were part of Special Operations forces that infiltrated Iraq during Operation Desert Storm to locate missile launchers, pinpoint air targets and steal enemy equipment.

The magazine also said the Pentagon had denied the existence of some covert operations even after they ended in U.S. deaths.

A senior Pentagon military official, speaking Monday on condition of anonymity, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying he had heard nothing about missing Green Berets. But he also acknowledged, “If there was some reason we thought we could get them back, we wouldn’t announce it.”

U.S. military officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, declined to discuss the report.

Iraq’s Oil

The two-thirds drop in Iraq’s oil production capacity was the result of allied air strikes that severely damaged key installations, mainly in the south, the Middle East Economic Survey reported Monday.

Before the Baghdad regime invaded Kuwait last August, Iraq’s production capacity was estimated at 4.5 million barrels a day.

The six-week U.S. and allied bombing offensive hammered oil installations, refineries and petrochemical complexes as well as military and other strategic targets.

Wilkinson reported from Riyadh and Williams from Amman. Marilyn Raschka contributed to this report from Beirut.