Oil Town Choking on Its Lifeblood : Kuwait: Billowing smoke often turns day into night in the war-ravaged town where the state-owned petroleum company is headquartered.

Even the pets in this town have turned black. The birds are being killed by cars because they cannot fly fast enough to get out of the way; they are too weighted down with soot.

“This used to be a lovely place,” resident Tareq Aliesa said, “but it has all been ruined now.”

Welcome to the home of Kuwait Oil Co. (KOC), a city that was once the most modern and graceful in Kuwait.

So close are the oil fires set by Iraqi troops more than a month ago that the heat can be felt from the road at the western edge of town. So bad is the air pollution from the billowing black smoke that day often turns to night.

On the occasional good day, when the wind is blowing from the southeast, the dense smoke from the fires stays clear of the city. On the more typical bad day, the sun is blocked from view and black particulate matter rains down.

Only the dedicated have stayed. From an estimated pre-occupation population of more than 25,000, Ahmadi has fewer than 2,000 permanent residents now, locals estimate. Among those living here temporarily are the U.S. oil firefighters who are mobilizing to combat the blazes.

Those with breathing problems have been advised to leave by local doctors. One who should go--but has not yet--is Dr. Bader K. Sultan, an asthmatic whose breathing difficulties have worsened markedly since the fires began.

A Scotch-drinking Anglophile educated in Scotland, he keeps a stiff upper lip.

“After a war and an occupation, what’s a little pollution?” asked Sultan, 54, whose eyesight is also failing. Besides, he asked, “How long do you leave for?”

It may take two years or more to extinguish the 500-plus oil fires, local experts say; only one has been put out so far.

Sultan and other select KOC employees who endured the occupation are the pillars of this town now. In war, they ran the company and the local hospital and took care of residents who had gone into hiding.

Under a threat of death, Sultan says, he operated a clandestine clinic at night out of his home when the Iraqis were around. His patients included more than a dozen British oil field workers trying to avoid detection.

Another veteran of the occupation is Ali A. Qabandi, a rugged KOC employee who ran a clandestine communications center from his home and supplied information about oil production to the Kuwaiti resistance.

His back yard still has an underground communications bunker, complete with television, telephone and even a game of Scrabble. “I did what my country deserved,” the 40-year-old accountant said.

Like most of Kuwait, Ahmadi was thoroughly trashed, looted and burned by the Iraqi troops. The town’s major landmarks, including KOC headquarters, the emir’s guest quarters--known as the White House--and the country club are in ruins.

So is the local shopping center, the fried chicken restaurant, the hamburger place. All are closed.

Well away from the road, though, behind the shopping center, Saeyd Darowsh sits in a darkened bookstore. He’s open for business and is well stocked with English-language magazines and best-sellers.

“I’m an old man now,” the 46-year-old Egyptian said, sounding and looking quite lonely. “Iraqis, they make me sick.”

Ahmadi is a company town--literally. KOC owns the houses, much of the furniture in them and many of the cars. As KOC’s head office, the town was the heart of Kuwait’s oil drilling and exploration activities. “The KOC is our cow,” said Aliesa, utility superintendent for KOC.

A graceful mix of West and Mideast, Ahmadi has English-style roundabouts, Arab-style mosques and lots of grass, plants and trees, unusual in bone-dry Kuwait.

Its past mirrors the history of oil exploration in this country, where petroleum was discovered in 1938 and first sold commercially in 1946.

The city sits atop the Greater Burgan field, whose reserves of 60 billion barrels of oil make it the second-largest in the world, according to Larry H. Flak, coordinator of the firefighting effort.

The Kuwaiti government nationalized KOC in the mid-1970s, buying out the Western owners for a reported price of nearly $163 million. At today’s market prices for oil, the Burgan field is worth more than $1 trillion.

Located on a ridge and named after a ruling sheik, Ahmadi was built by KOC in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In those days, it was owned by British Petroleum and Gulf Oil. It was a modern town well before Kuwait City, located about 25 miles north.

The Western influence is unmistakable in the north part of town, where Kuwaitis were once barred from living. In those days, the 1960s and before, that section was reserved solely for “white people,” said Sultan, who is Kuwaiti.

The social club has squash courts--where Iraqi soldiers bedded down--and a golf course, one of the first in the Middle East. The facilities are in shambles.

Going through the debris and wreckage is tough on Sultan, who spent many an enjoyable hour there. Now retired, until recently he was chief medical officer at the company-owned hospital. “Our Anglo-American heritage has been destroyed,” he said.