Iraqi Forces Crush Rebels in South, Fleeing Troops Say : Persian Gulf: Deserting soldiers are again surrendering in droves to U.S. forces. Kurdish insurgents claim they still control much of the north.

Saddam Hussein’s loyalist forces have effectively crushed a three-week-old armed rebellion in southern Iraq, according to Iraqi soldiers who arrived in the American zone Sunday. The soldiers were the lastest of scores who are again surrendering to U.S. forces deployed in the desert here.

Civilian refugees reaching American lines told the same story and said that bloody reprisals and executions are occurring, now that Hussein’s forces are back in control of Basra and other major cities in the south that were centers of rebellion against the regime by Shiite Muslims.

In the last five days, occupation authorities said, U.S. troops at heavily fortified checkpoints along the Euphrates Valley demarcation line have begun accepting hundreds of deserting Iraqi troops as prisoners of war, instead of simply disarming them and sending them back to Iraq.

“They all say they want political asylum,” said Sgt. Scott Dixon, an Arabic-speaking Utah National Guardsman at a U.S. checkpoint on the road to Basra. “They all say, ‘Take me to any country but Iraq.’

“One guy said, ‘If you don’t take me, just shoot me. I cannot go back.’ That tells you what’s happening to the resistance (to Hussein),” Dixon said.

Many of the surrendering Iraqi soldiers claim they are resistance fighters fleeing execution squads that they say have left hundreds of civilians and soldiers dead in the streets of Basra, Nasiriyah, Najaf, Karbala, Umm al Qasr and other Iraqi cities now under control of Hussein’s Republican Guard.

Other developments in Iraq and Kuwait on Sunday included:

* Anti-government Kurdish rebels claim they still control a large portion of northern Iraq after two weeks of fighting. Iraq has begun shifting loyalist troops from the south into the embattled north--another signal of Hussein’s control of the south.

* Machine-gun fire into the Kuwait city sky signaled the homecoming of another batch of Kuwaiti POWs who had spent months in Iraqi prisons. Men wept openly and women wailed as busloads of prisoners arrived at a community hall in the Kuwaiti capital. Names of returning prisoners were not made public in advance, so the welcome was all the more emotional for relatives who came not knowing whether their loved ones would arrive.

* American troops, who substantially enlarged their zone of occupation in southern Iraq last week to guard against cease-fire violations, have built far stronger fortifications at checkpoints, and traffic is allowed on the roads controlled by allied troops only during daylight.

* Baghdad Radio reported that Sadoun Hammadi, appointed prime minister Saturday in a Cabinet shuffle, toured his native city of Najaf and also Qadissiyah, another Shiite stronghold. Hammadi, 55, a Shiite himself, told the southerners that the country needs to rebuild “what was destroyed by the cliques and saboteurs who came from outside the country’s borders,” a veiled reference to Iran, which Baghdad now openly accuses of fueling the insurgency in the south.

Most of the newly surrendering Iraqi troops here in the U.S.-occupied zone simply drive or walk up to U.S. checkpoints, often in uniform but rarely armed.

A four-truck U.S. convoy carried 251 Iraqi POWs south toward Kuwait on Sunday morning, headed to processing camps in Saudi Arabia. Stuffed into the trucks, many of the prisoners grinned and waved as they drove by under heavy guard.

Another truckload of POWs waited at dusk about 20 miles deeper into Iraq on the road west to Nasiriyah. Nearby, U.S. soldiers guarded another dozen prisoners under a highway bridge.

Some soldiers said they simply wanted to quit the army and leave the epidemics, hunger and bitter fighting that have swept much of Iraq since the Feb. 28 provisional cease-fire in the Persian Gulf War.

One eight-year Iraqi army veteran who sneaked around an Iraqi checkpoint in civilian clothes to surrender to U.S. troops said he had deserted his infantry unit Sunday morning in Basra rather than obey orders to shoot civilians in their homes.

“I did not want to shoot at my people,” said Abdul Jowad Jassim, 25, showing his yellow Iraqi military ID card. If he returned to Iraq, he added, “they will execute me immediately.”

Jassim said that he and his brother and five other friends deserted Saturday and that “hundreds” are likely to follow him from Iraq’s second-largest city.

Two other soldiers from Basra, who marched out of the desert in uniform moments later, told a similar story as they were marched off by four U.S. soldiers.

“I am a soldier,” said Hamad Jabar Ali, 27, who showed two bullet wounds in his abdomen. “The Republican Guard are looking for us to execute us.”

His companion, Ali Nayef Duherir, 27, merely grinned, then said, “We accept being prisoners.”

In Northern Iraq

According to the reports from inside and outside Iraq, there was no letup Sunday in Hussein’s continuing problems with rebellions in the Kurdish north.

Syria’s official SANA news agency reported that a rebel force, apparently Kurdish guerrillas, captured a full Iraqi division with heavy weapons. According to the SANA report, the division was assigned to occupy the city of Khanaqin, about 100 miles northeast of Baghdad, and clashed with a rebel force between Khanaqin and the town of Jalula. Meanwhile, Tehran Radio claimed that insurgents had captured an Iraqi brigadier general identified as Jilil Hamid Muhsin, commander of the 20th Infantry Division. It was not clear whether the alleged incidents were related.

Exile and travelers’ reports continued to indicate disturbances in the Baghdad area. A Reuters news agency dispatch from Damascus, the Syrian capital, quoted an unidentified Kurdish opposition official as saying Hussein was reinforcing security in the Baghdad with elements of Republican Guard divisions.

Another exile spokesman in Damascus, Mohammed Hussein Tajer, said rebels were gathering around Baghdad for an offensive “that would complement the uprising currently raging inside the city.”

U.S. officials in Washington have confirmed signs of disturbances in some of the Iraqi capital’s poor, Shiite-populated suburbs, but Hussein’s regime has made no specific reference to insurrection in Baghdad. Reuters quoted travelers arriving in Amman, Jordan, as saying there were riots last week in the suburb of Thawra, but they had been put down.

Other evidence of rebel victories came Saturday night on Syrian TV, which broadcast film of Kurdish guerrillas, wearing their traditional costume of baggy pants and vests, dancing in the streets of Zakhu, a strategic Iraqi town near the main border crossing into Turkey.

“We are now in Zakhu City which was liberated from the rotten clique of Saddam Hussein who destroyed the Iraqi people, army and economy for nothing,” one Kurd told the Syrian crew.

A plea for aid from the Kurdish rebellion was the main message brought back Sunday by the first Turkish reporters to visit rebel-held villages and towns along the Turkish border.

“The Kurdish guerrillas are sending an SOS,” said one of their reports headlined in the Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet.

“What they want most of all is food and medicine. Already, they can use very few vehicles because of a shortage of fuel. Nobody is hungry yet, but they are very worried that stocks will run out,” Milliyet reporter Namik Durukan said in a telephone interview.

Milliyet reporters said northern Iraq was now divided into several areas each ruled by a different Kurdish group. But they said a new order was coming to the towns.

“There were celebrations everywhere, and Kurdish guerrillas with a great deal of civilian help are now running everything from government buildings,” Durukan said.

Hospitals were still running in Zakhu where Durukan said he saw 50 men, women and children with bad serious burns injuries that guerrilla leaders said were inflicted by napalm.

In Southern Iraq

U.S. troops who moved deeper into Iraq last week to guard against cease-fire violations also have built far stronger fortifications at checkpoints. Tall earthen berms, barbed wire and wrecked cars are used to block roads, and tanks and armored vehicles are dug into revetments along the roadsides. All traffic is banned after 6 p.m.

Some of the refugees reaching U.S.-occupied Iraq said that Iraqi troops had fired Scud missiles--similar to those fired at Saudi Arabia and Israel during the war--at resistance forces, but the reports could not be confirmed from the U.S. zone. None reported seeing Iraqi warplanes or poison gas.

Overall, Shiite Muslim rebels and other resistance forces are badly outnumbered and outgunned, and are now mostly reduced to ambushes at night, refugees said. Several refugees confirmed reports of a rebel attack on Iraqi officers billeted at the Sheraton Hotel in Basra.

A 25-year-old Iraqi medical student said that Republican Guard troops supported by 60 tanks and scores of artillery pieces recaptured Mudeina, outside Basra, three days ago after 20 days of nominal rebel control.

He and his friends, a high school teacher and college student, fled after their home was destroyed by Iraqi shelling. Hundreds were camped outside Basra, while thousands of ragged refugees from Nasiriyah and other cities clogged the roads, he said.

In Tannuma, a former resistance stronghold, families are fleeing in boats across the Tigris River to head south, according to Amira Hamid, who arrived with her eight children.

“The resistance there is finished,” she said wearily.

Nasiriyah, a strategic town on the Euphrates River, is also back in government hands.

“Two days ago, the army wiped out the resistance,” said Nathir Ibrahim, 45, a government employee.

His friend, Hamad Hasan Abdi, said “hundreds” lay dead in Nasiriyah streets. He said that he picked up a 6-month-old baby from her dead mother’s arms but said the baby died before he could find medical care.

Times staff writer Nick B. Williams Jr., in Cyprus, and journalist Hugh Pope, in Turkey, contributed to this story.