Iraq Accuses Iran of Sending ‘Saboteurs’ to Oust Hussein : Rebellion: This is the first specific high-level charge linking the Muslim-led regime in Tehran to the insurgencies.

Seven months after striking a costly political deal for Iranian neutrality in the Persian Gulf conflict, Iraq on Wednesday accused its old enemy of fueling the fires of rebellion that threaten Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Saadi Mehdi Saleh, speaker of the Iraqi National Assembly and a key member of Hussein’s leadership, told the deputies: “It has been established now that it was Iran who dispatched groups of saboteurs to do these acts. For a good time, Iran was preparing groups of saboteurs.”

Saleh’s remarks were the first specific high-level accusation tying the Muslim clergy-led regime in Tehran to the insurgencies aimed at overthrowing the 12-year rule of President Hussein. Last Saturday, in an hourlong speech on Baghdad radio and television, the Iraqi leader strongly implied an Iranian role in the rebellion, but he did not mention the country by name.

A week ago, President Hashemi Rafsanjani and other ruling clerics in Iran were calling on Hussein to give up his Arab Baath Socialist Party’s monopoly on power in Iraq and share his rule with Shiite Muslims and other dissidents.

But by the first of the week, the Tehran leadership was no longer talking of coalitions. “Saddam cannot remain in power for long, and the continuation of his rule is impossible because of the arms which have fallen into the hands of the people,” said the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader. “We hope that an Islamic and truly popular government based on the wishes of the innocent people of Iraq will come to power in that country.”

That sounded like solid backing for the various religiously based Shiite insurgent groups fighting for control of Iraq’s southern cities, where according to outside reports Hussein’s loyalist military forces have gained the upper hand against determined resistance.

The Tehran press had reported that food and medicine had been sent to Shiites in the war-torn south but has made no mention of arms shipments or what Saleh, quoted in press reports from Baghdad, referred to as sabotage teams.

The Shiites and other insurgents in the south are fighting primarily with small arms, including rocket-propelled grenades, and whatever weapons they can take from government armories. They have, however, claimed defections by units of Hussein’s army, up to brigade-size forces.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Iran clearly is sending some arms to Shiite rebels in Iraq, although he acknowledged that “the evidence is inconclusive.”

“We do know that Iran has been providing political and moral support to Shia dissidents in Iraq for some time, many years,” he said. “Regarding the question of material support, the situation is less clear. Some material, including arms, is undoubtedly crossing the border, but I really can’t provide you any conclusions on the amounts or the effect of that support.”

Meanwhile, refugees fleeing the fighting in the south said that Hussein’s Republican Guard soldiers were executing dozens of opponents in the streets of Basra after regaining control from Shiite rebels, Reuters news service reported.

The refugees, who left Iraq’s second-biggest city over the last two days, said bodies littered the streets and dogs were eating the corpses, according to the report from the Iraqi town of Safwan, north of the Kuwaiti border.

In northern Iraq, the better-equipped and -trained guerrillas of Kurdish warlord Masoud Barzani have had greater success--claiming Tuesday the fall of the oil city of Kirkuk and control of all the Kurdish provinces. In the 1970s, under the monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Iran supported the Iraqi Kurds’ struggle for autonomy from Baghdad, but the shah dropped his support when he made a political deal with the Baathists on frontier disputes.

On Wednesday, an assortment of Kurdish rebel vehicles sped along Iraq’s frontier with Turkey to the Tigris River border with Syria, apparently engaged in what Turkish officials say is a new stream of support for the Kurds from Damascus.

“They use little rubber rafts made of the inner tubes of tires to ship the supplies over,” said a senior Turkish security officer defending the strategic Tigris Valley area. “Who can say what is going in?”

In the Turkish border town of Habur, the occasional boom of artillery could be heard from Iraq.

The Kurds are getting help from more than the Syrians. Iran is already the base for the main Iraqi-Kurdish rebel group. In addition, Turkish President Turgut Ozal made a dramatic policy change this month and began to woo the Iraqi Kurdish leaders, promising to try to send them food and medicine.

“The civilians (Iraqi Kurds) are in complete control of the border area,” said the Turkish security officer, who declined to be identified. “They have commandeered tanks and are putting them to use.”

The officer said Iraqi troops have tried to escape and surrender to Turkish armed forces but have been turned away. There was no sign of any Iraqi troops Wednesday in the westernmost 10 miles of the 200-mile-long Iraqi-Turkish border.

As Kurds started celebrating their main annual festival Wednesday night, the ancient three-day New Year celebration called Now Ruz, hundreds of burning tires lit up the mountainside near the town of Habur. Celebratory gunfire could be heard from the houses. Youths danced in the streets late into the night, hung Kurdish flags from minarets, clapped and shouted, “Long live Now Ruz! Long live Kurdistan!”

It was clear Wednesday that Baghdad’s prewar claim of a unified Iraq “from Zarko to the sea” is now a shattered dream. “The sea”--Kuwait and its deepwater port--fell to Desert Storm forces nearly three weeks ago, and Zarko, a northern city on the Turkish border, was reported under the control of Kurdish rebels over the weekend.

What remains is truncated Baghdad control and a regime putting its best face on a grim situation: rebellion, shortages of food, medicine and fuel, a bomb-battered transportation system, little water or power in the cities and the specter of disease. Saleh could only tell the deputies to get on with the tasks before them, which he characterized as “reconstructing what has been destroyed by the American-Zionist aggression and the mobs who took advantage of the circumstances which followed the aggression.”

Iraq and Iran fought a devastating war from 1980 to 1988, ending in the collapse of the Iranian army and economy and a bitter concession by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to accept a truce. Last August, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait sparked an American-led military response, Hussein shocked Khomeini’s successors by offering a final peace that gave back everything Iraq had won in the war. Relations between the two adversaries, longtime rivals for power in the Gulf region, immediately warmed, and Tehran was a player in futile peace efforts to avoid the Persian Gulf ground war.

Hugh Pope in Habur, Turkey, and Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.