Iraqis Take 5,000 Civilians Hostage but Rebellion Goes On, Kurds Say : Unrest: Baghdad has threatened to massacre its captives, the rebels charge. The insurgents claim control of two more cities.

Kurdish insurgents in northern Iraq claimed further territorial gains Tuesday and accused the Baghdad regime of taking civilian hostages to stall their advances in oil-rich Kirkuk province.

Jalal Talabani, a top official of the dissident Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, told reporters in Beirut that the alleged hostage-taking has “seriously hindered the liberation” of the province from forces loyal to President Saddam Hussein.

He said 5,000 Kurdish women and children were seized by Iraqi troops Sunday. The Iraqis “threatened if there was any uprising or any attack, they will massacre them,” he said.

Nevertheless, Kurdish spokesmen in exile claimed two more northern cities under rebel control--Khanaqin and Jalulu, both within 100 miles of the Iraqi capital. And Talabani vowed that the rebellion would continue despite the hostage situation.

“Perhaps (the Kurds) will look for tactics to rescue these people,” he said, “but they will never end their revolution (even) if the Iraqis massacre 5,000 innocents.”

The rebellion of the Iraqi Kurds, 20% of the country’s population, presents the sharpest threat to Hussein’s regime, weakened in stature by its disastrous military defeat in Kuwait and facing rejection on every quarter. Their target, Kirkuk, is an oil center capable of producing half of Iraq’s crude output.

However, the strength of the popular revolt against Hussein remains impossible to determine by independent means, and exile reports were treated with caution by outside analysts.

Said Don Kerr of London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies: “It’s very difficult to give an estimate of quality to these reports. . . . Well, there is one thing to fall back on. This is the Middle East. These people are no doubt out there and fighting to achieve some sort of success.”

In related developments Tuesday:

* Egypt’s semiofficial daily newspaper Al Ahram reported that Hussein has ordered his army to kill Egyptian workers in Iraq in retaliation for Cairo’s participation in the American-led coalition that humbled his forces in Kuwait. The newspaper attributed the report to Egyptian refugees from Iraq, but it gave no details on how many Egyptians might have been killed. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians worked in Iraq before the Persian Gulf crisis.

* Syria announced Tuesday that it has freed all Palestinians held in its jails. No reason was given in the official statement, nor were any numbers disclosed. Press reports from Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis said that more than 4,000 Palestinians had been jailed in Syria since relations between President Hafez Assad and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat soured in the early 1980s.

Traveling U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III is due in Damascus today, promoting a revival of the Middle East peace process, and the release of the prisoners could be connected to his visit.

* The Iraqi ambassador to Spain, Arshad Tawfik, has sought political asylum there, the Spanish Interior Ministry announced. A spokesman said Tawfik has been given police protection. He is the first Iraqi ambassador to seek political asylum in the wake of the Gulf War.

Press reports from Madrid said Tawfik had appeared to be a strong supporter of Hussein’s policies; no explanation was offered for his defection.

* Ibrahim Ahmed Nouri, head of the Iraqi Red Crescent relief organization, said in a letter to a Madrid-based humanitarian agency that “a few days ago, cholera and typhoid started spreading in Iraq, and cases are beginning to appear.” The World Health Organization estimated that Baghdad’s water supplies are only 5% of prewar levels.

One of the most puzzling reports Tuesday surfaced in Beirut, where more than 300 Iraqi exile figures were meeting in search of political unity--or at least agreement on spoils--in the event that Hussein falls. Journalists there quoted a Lebanese radio broadcast reporting that Hussein had been wounded in an assassination attempt in Baghdad. The radio said the report came from a French television network.

Questioned by a Times reporter in Paris, the television station denied that it had broadcast the report.

Wherever it originated--and with 300 political exiles feeding information to reporters in Beirut, the general source seemed evident--the Beirut report came out in two versions:

A bodyguard fired at Hussein, wounding him and killing his close confidant, Deputy Prime Minister Taha Yassin Ramadan. Or, Ramadan fired at Hussein, wounding him, and was killed by the bodyguard.

This was not the first postwar report of an assassination attempt on the Iraqi leader, but there has been no evidence to back up any of them. Monday night, Baghdad Radio reported that Hussein had chaired a meeting of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council to hear aides’ reports on the situation in the country. One of the reporting officials, the broadcast said, was Ramadan.

Reports of the insurgencies in Iraq came from a variety of sources Tuesday, including what appeared to be well-informed reports from Iranian media. None suggested that Hussein had put down the rebels, although his troops appeared to have consolidated their positions in the cities of Karbala, Najaf and Basra.