Iraq Frees 1,135 Kuwaiti Captives; 3,865 Still Held

Complying with a cease-fire agreement, Iraq on Thursday began releasing 5,000 Kuwaitis held captive since the end of the Persian Gulf War, a Red Cross official said.

A convoy of 30 buses carrying 1,135 Kuwaiti soldiers left Iraq on Thursday morning and began a 12-hour journey to a remote town in northern Saudi Arabia, Gabriele de Montmollin, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said by telephone from Geneva.

The remaining 3,865 are to be released in the coming days, he said. From Saudi Arabia, the Kuwaitis will be taken to Kuwait city.

In other Persian Gulf developments:

More than 90 Senegalese soldiers who fought with allied forces in the Gulf War were killed Thursday when a Saudi military transport plane crashed because of bad weather and skies made black by Kuwait’s burning oil fields.

Iraqi rebels said that civil war has spread to Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and that Saddam Hussein’s forces have dropped acid from helicopters on Kurdish civilians.

Iran accused Iraq of kidnaping the world’s most senior Shiite Muslim scholar.

Three former POWs were awarded Purple Heart and POW medals when they returned to Oceana Naval Air Station, Va. Lts. Jeffrey Zaun, Robert Wetzel and Lawrence R. Slade, 26, ended the final leg of their long journey home with their arrival at the base in Virginia Beach. The three Navy fliers, who were shot down in Iraq in the early days of the war, had been recovering at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland since their return to the United States on March 10. “These men know better than anyone the value of freedom,” Secretary of the Navy H. Lawrence Garrett III told 6,000 people at the ceremony.

Red Cross officials in Iraq have registered a total of 5,000 Kuwaitis--soldiers and civilians--who were either captured during Iraq’s seven-month occupation of Kuwait or seized as Iraqi soldiers retreated. Some Kuwaiti officials have contended that the number of their citizens carted off to Iraq is much higher.

Iraq has already released one group of 1,200 Kuwaitis. The return of the Kuwaiti captives was one of several conditions that U.S.-led allied forces have set down as prerequisite to a permanent cease-fire accord.

The 1,135 Kuwaiti soldiers who made the journey Thursday had been held in the north-central Iraqi town of Tikrit, the birthplace of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The remaining 3,865 are believed to be in different locations.

The Kuwaitis are being repatriated through Saudi Arabia, and not directly to Kuwait, because of danger of travel on Iraqi roads near Kuwait. The route southwest from Baghdad to Saudi Arabia is also used by the Red Cross to send Iraqi prisoners of war home and has been cleared of land mines by the Iraqis, De Montmollin said.

“We know there are no mines on the road,” the Red Cross spokesman said. “On the other road (from Baghdad to Kuwait), it is more difficult. We have to take the safest road.”

In addition to the mines, American officials have said anti-Hussein uprisings in southern Iraqi towns have complicated prisoner repatriations.

De Montmollin declined to discuss the Kuwaitis’ condition in detail. “I can say they are all able to travel during 12 hours in buses,” he said.

The announcement of Thursday’s release came as allied military officers met with an Iraqi delegation in the Saudi capital to discuss efforts to speed up the return of nearly 60,000 Iraqi POWs.

About 2,500 Iraqis have been repatriated. They go by bus in groups of 500, and it has been a slow process.

The meeting in Riyadh--the second here and the fourth allied-Iraqi meeting since the war ended Feb. 28--did not begin until 9 p.m. The participants waited until after a nighttime meal that breaks the daily fast observed by Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan.

The Crash

The Senegalese killed in Thursday’s plane crash were returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, aboard a Hercules C-130. The transport crashed as it tried to land at Ras al Mishab, on the Saudi coast just south of Khafji, a statement from the Saudi Defense Ministry said.

Ninety-two Senegalese soldiers and six Saudi crew members were reported killed. Three soldiers were reported to have survived.

“The plane crashed while trying to land because of bad weather and poor visibility resulting from the clouds of smoke from the oil wells set ablaze in southern Kuwait by the ruler of Iraq,” the Saudi government said.

The crash wiped out nearly 20% of the Senegalese contingent to the Gulf. The West African country contributed a 500-member force to the war effort.

The government of Senegal declared an eight-day period of mourning and said the soldiers would be buried in Saudi Arabia, which Muslims consider their holy land.

The Uprising

An Iraqi rebel radio broadcast monitored by Reuters news service in Nicosia, Cyprus, said Kurds were under siege in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. It also said Iraqi forces used helicopters, artillery, napalm and phosphorus bombs, killing hundreds of men, women and children.

The station said it was broadcasting from a rebel-held area of northern Iraq and appealed to foreign governments, the United Nations, Amnesty International and the International Red Cross to stop the “massacre.”

The northern city of Mosul, reported under rebel assault, is near vital oil fields, including that at Kirkuk, a city Kurdish rebels claimed early this week they had seized along with the rest of northeastern Kurdistan province.

Thursday’s was the first reported fighting in Mosul, which has a population of more than 1 million.

“Resistance has started in Mosul and the rebels are being severely repressed by the regime’s forces,” Bayan Jabr, spokesman for the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said in Damascus.

In the south of Iraq, rebels said battles still raged around Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, where the uprising began three weeks ago after Iraq’s defeat by U.S.-led allied forces, which drove Hussein’s army from Kuwait.

Jabr accused Hussein of atrocities, saying that 15,000 civilians had been killed during the last four days in the Shiite holy city of Najaf by government forces using napalm and phosphorous bombs.

“Many civilians were martyred when sulfuric acid was dropped on Kirkuk, which is controlled by the popular forces,” Syrian radio quoted the Supreme Council as saying.

U.S. military officials in Saudi Arabia said they had no knowledge of acid being dropped on Kirkuk. In 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein’s forces used poison gas that killed several thousand people in the Kurdish town of Halabja near the Iranian border.

There was no immediate reaction from Baghdad on the latest charges, but Iraqi authorities took reporters representing foreign news agencies on a tour of the southern holy city of Karbala, to show that it was in government hands after 10 days of strife.

Reuters correspondent Maamoun Youssef reported immense devastation, saying that he saw streets filled with debris and reeking of gunpowder and decaying bodies.

Iran and Iraq

Meanwhile, a fresh dispute flared between Iraq and Iran about an aged Muslim clergyman’s apparent declaration of support for Hussein on Baghdad television.

Shiite-ruled Iran said Iraq had kidnaped the world’s most senior Shiite Muslim scholar, the Grand Ayatollah Abul-Hassan Khoei, from his home in Najaf.

Iran warned Iraq about Khoei’s physical safety and denounced the episode. His appearance on Iraqi television with Hussein flabbergasted overseas supporters of the anti-Hussein revolt.

Khoei, who is over 90, appeared Wednesday to voice support for the president. “Thanks be to God. God has enabled the president to stamp out this sedition,” he said.

Tehran Radio said Iran had formally protested to Iraq, telling Iraq’s charge d’affaires in Tehran that it was seriously concerned about Khoei’s health and that all restrictions on him should be lifted.

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