Kurdish Rebels Said to Capture Key Iraqi Town

Iraqi rebels fighting to overthrow Saddam Hussein have captured the strategic Turkish-Iraqi border crossing town of Zakhu and are fighting their way west to the nearby Syrian border, witnesses said Friday.

The first direct reports of fighting in the area gave credence to claims of major territorial advances by a coalition of Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas fighting against forces loyal to the Iraqi dictator.

In Paris on Friday, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party said that 95% of Iraqi Kurdistan, a homeland that also spills into Turkey, Syria and Iran, was in rebel hands.

Other reports told of continued heavy fighting in southern Iraq and battle damage to Muslim holy shrines 60 miles from Baghdad.

Strafing Iraqi army helicopter gunships killed Kurdish hostages in the northern oil center of Kirkuk, according to exile leader Jalal Talabani, the Damascus-based head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which is allied with Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party guerrillas operating around Kirkuk. Talabani claimed that Iraqi troops rounded up residents of the city and strafed them with helicopters, killing or wounded hundreds of civilians.

The State Department for the first time confirmed that the rebels held areas of the Kurdish north adjacent to the Turkish border but did not say how much, although reports reaching Istanbul told of firm rebel control around the Zakhu area at the major border crossing between Iraq and Turkey.

“There is not an Iraqi soldier to be seen at their positions near the border. It’s all in guerrilla hands. They are now busy blowing up the minefields,” said Vedat Yenerer, a correspondent for Turkey’s respected Cumhuriyet newspaper.

Yenerer said in a telephone interview Friday that he watched rebel movements in Iraq while drinking tea with Turkish villagers on the bank of the Hezil tributary of the Tigris River, which forms part of the Turkish-Iraqi border. Yenerer said rebel forces clearly controlled strongpoints and former Iraqi antiaircraft batteries.

Dust and smoke billowed on mountain slopes just inside the Iraqi border during overnight artillery battles between Iraqi troops and rebels near Zakhu, nine miles from the Turkish border, Turkey’s semiofficial Anatolian News Agency said.

Severe clashes continued farther west, near the point where Syria, Iraq and Turkey meet, the news agency and Yenerer said.

The Paris Kurdish Institute said that the battle for Kirkuk, Iraq’s main oil center, was intensifying. It said that rebels had seized most of the city but that Hussein loyalists were holding out in the governor’s office and the headquarters of the intelligence services and the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party. From neighboring Iran, Tehran Radio reported that fierce battles raged in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and a dozen other Kurdish towns.

In the north, exile reports claimed, Kurdish guerrillas seized the Iraqi border station across from Habur, Turkey. In an apparent reference to the reported attack, Talabani claimed that Dohuk province on the Turkish border had been “liberated.”

Turkey’s liberal Gunes newspaper said Friday that Iraqi troops fell back on the big Habur customs area Thursday, raised a white flag and surrendered to Turkish units. Some local sources said Turkish soldiers turned them away, but Turkish officials were not available for comment on the reports.

Local sources said that rebels captured the Habur area Friday and that an Iraqi flag flying there was hauled down. Another flag with red, green and yellow was seen at some points on the border; those are the national colors of the Kurds--25 million people split between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and the Soviet Union.

Turkish officials confirm that two border bridges that carry the main Turkey-Iraq highway over a tributary of the Tigris River were blown up in midweek by mines or mortar shells. The main Turkey-Iraq oil pipeline, closed since the Persian Gulf crisis began in August, runs nearby.

Turkey opened talks with Iraqi Kurdish rebel leaders last weekend and is weighing their request to allow arms supplies through to help them in their struggle. No decision has yet been announced, but officials say humanitarian aid will be sent via international agencies.

Some reports said that Kurdish guerrillas fired guns in the air to celebrate their overnight victory in Zakhu, a town that has been largely deserted by its population since heavy allied air raids during Operation Desert Storm.

But, said Cumhuriyet reporter Yenerer: “There was not much of a mood of celebration that I could see. People are all fearful that Saddam will turn all his forces against the north after crushing the rebellion in the south.”

Iraqi insurgents have been fighting loyalist forces in both northern and southern Iraq since the U.S.-led multinational alliance routed Hussein’s occupation troops in Kuwait.

Foreign reporters have been expelled from Iraq and are systematically excluded from border areas of Turkey by the Turkish army.

The insurgence appears to be ethnically based in the Kurdish northern provinces and the Shiite south. Baghdad Radio denies reports of fighting in the capital’s working-class suburbs but concedes that the rebellion is widespread.

One report Friday spoke of damage by government shellfire to mosques at Karbala, a Shiite shrine city 60 miles south of Baghdad. Karbala’s mosques had been deliberately spared in the allied air attacks during the Gulf War.

A British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent in Tehran, the capital of neighboring Iran, said he had seen smuggled video footage showing a hole in the gilded dome of one mosque.

The correspondent did not identify the mosque, but damage to any of the Karbala shrines could inflame the insurgence among Iraq’s Shiite majority. The mosques are dedicated to early Shiite imams, religious leaders of the second-largest branch of Islam. In a statement issued in London, the Shiite Supreme Command for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq accused government forces of using napalm against the insurgents.

In detailed accounts of fighting in the south, a Tehran television report said Friday that fighting continued in Najaf, another Shiite shrine city, and that offices of Hussein’s Baath Party had been attacked by rebels.

“In Basra, Tannumah, Al Harithah, Al Amarah and Al Uzayr, many tanks have been taken by the people, and numerous soldiers have defected to the rebels,” the TV report added. Tehran Radio quoted refugees as saying that Hussein’s 802nd Infantry Brigade had joined the rebel forces.

Refugees arriving at Safwan in U.S.-held southern Iraq, however, said that three-quarters of Basra was controlled by the army after being in rebel hands at the start of the uprising two weeks ago, the British news agency Reuters reported.

In related developments:

* Hamid Said, editor of the Baghdad daily Al Baath, the ruling party newspaper, accused other Iraqi journals of “transmitting lies . . . provided by some of the government bureaucrats.” The highly unusual inter-press criticism did not mention cases, but said: “Some of those in the field do their work as if they were parts of a machine. No useful additions, no objections to mistakes, no warnings.”

* The Red Cross turned 499 prisoners of war over to Iraqi forces north of the Saudi Arabian town of Arar, resuming repatriation of more than 60,000 Iraqi POWs after a four-day suspension of the program. One prisoner changed his mind at the last moment and refused repatriation, said Pascal Daudin, a Red Cross spokesman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

* In Amman, Jordan, Princess Alia, one of King Hussein’s daughters, joined a throng of marchers carrying photos of the Jordanian monarch and Iraqi President Hussein. The demonstration was staged to raise funds for medical supplies for Iraq. In Algiers, a telethon raised $4.64 million for reconstruction work in Baghdad.

Montalbano reported from Istanbul and Williams reported from Amman. Free-lance journalist Hugh Pope, in Istanbul, contributed to this story.