U.S. Military Warns Iraq to Keep Its Jets Grounded

Allied commanders met with Iraqi military officers on a desert battlefield Sunday and used the third round of talks on the Persian Gulf War’s tentative cease-fire to warn Iraq against moving any of its combat aircraft.

The meeting in the U.S.-occupied southern Iraq city of Safwan followed American intelligence reports that Iraqi air force fighter jets had resumed flights within the country’s borders.

In other developments Sunday:

* Iraqi opposition leaders disputed Saddam Hussein’s assertion that his forces have crushed an uprising in the Shiite Muslim south of Iraq and said insurgents are fighting as close as 60 miles from Baghdad.

* A top U.S. official said that Americans are likely to be in the Persian Gulf region beyond midsummer.

American government officials have labeled flights of Iraqi warplanes for whatever purpose as direct violations of the tentative cease-fire accord reached by Iraqi commanders and the head of U.S. Gulf War forces, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, at an initial meeting March 3. The Americans have reportedly threatened to shoot down any Iraqi warplanes spotted in the skies.

At Sunday’s follow-up, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Robert B. Johnston, the Central Command chief of staff, headed an allied delegation that discussed cease-fire questions with a 10-member Iraqi team.

Few details of the meeting were available from military officers in Saudi Arabia. But Secretary of State James A. Baker III, speaking in Washington, said the United States had rejected an Iraqi request for permission to “reposition” its fixed-wing military aircraft, an action that could make it easier for the Iraqi military to defeat armed rebels now battling the Baghdad regime.

Baker, interviewed on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” said that Washington will enforce to the letter cease-fire terms requiring Iraq to keep its air force on the ground.

“That is a dangerous situation,” Baker said. “We have our aircraft moving around there, and we don’t want to see Iraqi aircraft.”

He conceded that U.S. restrictions on Iraq’s use of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters might have the “collateral effect” of tying President Saddam Hussein’s hands as he fights uprisings in northern and southern Iraq. But he said that Washington is not supplying the rebels with weapons or other direct assistance.

The recent movement of about six Iraqi fighter planes, coupled with reports that Hussein has also used attack helicopters to battle insurgents, could jeopardize a permanent cease-fire treaty, Bush Administration officials have said.

“Helicopters should be used for logistical purposes,” Baker said, “and not for the purpose of shooting and dropping bombs on your own people.”

The United States has also threatened to resume bombing raids in Iraq if Hussein unleashes chemical weapons against rebelling Kurds or Shiite Muslims, and troops from the U.S. 1st Cavalry and the 101st Airborne divisions were recently moved deeper into Iraq in an apparent show of force.

Schwarzkopf, at the March 3 meeting, laid down a series of conditions the Iraqis had to fulfill, including “control measures” to keep the two forces apart, before a permanent cease-fire could be prepared. A second meeting one week later in Riyadh formalized details on the release of prisoners of war and accounting for the troops missing in action.

Rebels continue to fight inside Iraq against Hussein’s forces, and opposition leaders Sunday disputed the Iraqi dictator’s assertion, made in a broadcast speech Saturday, that his army had crushed an uprising in the mainly Shiite south of Iraq.

Anti-Hussein leaders in Beirut said that rebels still held the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, Reuters news agency reported, and Bayan Jabr of the Iran-based Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq said that rebel forces were fighting less than 60 miles from the capital city of Baghdad.

Iran, whose government is dominated by high-ranking Shiite clergymen, responded with harsh words of its own Sunday to an indirect accusation by Hussein in his speech that Tehran is aiding the forces fighting against him.

President Hashemi Rafsanjani said that Iranian Muslims are becoming “disgusted over the massacre of the Iraqi people by (Hussein’s) Republican Guards,” Reuters reported. And the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, proclaimed today a day of mourning for those killed by troops loyal to Hussein and his ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party.

Reuters said that Khamenei denounced “the violation and insult against the holy shrines in Najaf and holy Karbala” and “the massacre of the Muslim and defenseless people of Iraq by the Baathist criminals.”

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted World Health Organization Director General Hiroshi Nakajima, who was visiting Tehran, as saying he had seen Iraqi refugee children “whose faces were burnt by napalm bombs.”

Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani said in Beirut that Hussein’s statements that the southern uprising has been crushed are “as true as his claim that he scored a victory against the allies in the ‘mother of battles.’ ”

Talabani reiterated his earlier assertion that more than 95% of Kurdish areas in northern Iraq were controlled by Kurdish rebels and said that fierce fighting is under way “to liberate the remaining parts.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Army Secretary Michael P. W. Stone told reporters in Kuwait that American troops will probably remain in the Gulf War theater of operations beyond July 4. He announced the arrival of new units replacing those who have gone home.

“That would be a great date if we could hit it on July 4,” Stone said after a military awards ceremony. “I don’t think we’re going to have everybody home by then.”

Stone said he was not suggesting that a permanent U.S. force was being set up in the Gulf, and he added that commanders have not decided how many U.S. troops would remain.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster, in Washington, contributed to this story.