8,000 GIs to Be Assigned to Kurdish Relief Effort

The Bush Administration announced plans Friday to assign more than 8,000 U.S. troops to participate in the massive relief effort for Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq, and Secretary of State James A. Baker III warned that the “medium- and longer-term” solution to the refugee crisis requires a fundamental change in Iraq’s policies.

The new U.S. effort, which includes sending dozens of helicopters and tons of supplies to Turkey, is the most direct and extensive involvement by the American military in the crisis and comes despite Administration hopes to disengage U.S. forces quickly from the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War.

Already, the Administration has committed “thousands of people and hundreds of aircraft” to the relief effort along Iraq’s northern frontier, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said at a Pentagon news conference. Defense officials estimate that nearly 5,000 U.S. troops already are involved in the operation and that 3,000 more are due in Turkey by Sunday.

Cheney declined to say whether any of those troops actually would cross the border into Iraq. “We have no intention of sending any combat forces,” he said. But he left open the possibility of sending military units to handle logistics, medical care and other parts of the huge relief operation.

“I don’t think it’s useful for me to get into the business of speculating,” Cheney said. “At this point, we’ve not made that decision.”

Administration plans call for building extensive refugee aid centers inside northern Iraq and trucking or flying supplies to them through Turkey in an attempt to keep hundreds of thousands of Kurds from fleeing across Iraq’s borders into Turkey and Iran.

The Administration has warned Iraq not to mount military operations north of the 36th Parallel, creating a haven for Kurds in a large area of northern Iraq that includes several major Kurdish towns and the archeological site of the ancient city of Nineveh.

Officials say that they hope the actual work inside Iraq can be done by locally hired workers, leaving U.S. personnel on the Turkish side of the border, but they concede that may not be possible.

While officials left open the possibility that U.S. personnel might have to enter northern Iraq, Baker made clear that the Administration sees no way to fully disengage from Iraq’s problems without Saddam Hussein’s downfall.

“The solution to the (refugee) problem is for them to desire to return to their homes in Iraq,” Baker told reporters in Geneva after a tour of the Middle East. “And that,” he said, “will depend on the creation of conditions” in Iraq that will allow the Kurds to feel secure.

Baker denied that he was repeating past U.S. calls for Hussein’s overthrow. At the same time, he said, “we have no hesitancy in continuing to say that we would not shed any tears” if that happened.

Despite assertions by some Middle East experts that Hussein has strengthened his internal position by crushing the rebellions against his government, President Bush’s advisers continue to tell the him that Hussein will not last the year. The only disagreement is over how many months the Iraqi leader can last.

“There’s no long-term career track for him,” one Administration official quipped. Administration analysts, who thought Iraq’s army would rise up against Hussein after its defeat in the war, now predict that the army will rise once the last Kurdish and Shiite rebellions are crushed.

“Once the army has wiped everything up, and there’s no more resistance, they’ll turn against the person who started the mess,” the official predicted.

The scale of the relief effort and the fact that it will be carried out on Iraq’s own territory, rather than in neighboring countries, has raised concern elsewhere in the world.

In Moscow, Soviet Foreign Ministry Spokesman Vitaly I. Churkin told reporters that the Soviet government has “serious doubts” about the proposal to set up “safe havens” for the Kurds in northern Iraq.

Creating enclaves for Kurds in Iraq and deploying U.N. observers to oversee them would infringe on the sovereignty of Iraq and be a “highly undesirable approach,” Churkin said.

The Soviets, beset with their own ethnic tensions, are obviously sensitive about any talk of carving out ethnic enclaves within a country’s territory. But Administration officials say they believe that the current program will meet Soviet concerns. Although the Administration’s announced ban on Iraqi military activity north of the 36th Parallel creates a de facto partition of the country, they point out, there is no formal, legal declaration that would create a precedent applicable elsewhere.

Objections from the Soviets and many Third World countries “were why we had to move away from the notion” of a formal U.N. declaration of a Kurdish enclave that British Prime Minister John Major had pushed earlier this week, an Administration official said.

U.S. planners are hopeful that they can establish the massive refugee program on Iraqi soil without being drawn into the country’s internal wars. The military’s mandate in Turkey and northern Iraq is sharply limited, officials say.

“I suppose, in a de facto sense, we presently are controlling, certainly, the airspace over those enclaves where the Iraqis (refugees) are now located,” Cheney said. And under current plans, the Air Force will continue to fly combat missions to protect relief shipments.

On the ground, however, officials stress that the military has not been charged with protecting the refugee population against any possible Iraqi incursion.

“If there is a group of refugees and Iraq comes after them, we would certainly consider that interference,” a State Department officials said. But, he added, the military would not react “just because a Kurd points a gun at somebody or somebody points a gun at a Kurd.”

Said Cheney: “We cannot guarantee the safety of people around the world who live under regimes that from time to time violate their human rights, and we’re not in a position today to be able to guarantee the safety of people inside Iraq who live under Saddam Hussein’s rule.”

The military will, however, have considerable force on hand if needed. According to defense officials, the U.S. force being assembled for the relief effort includes a tactical airlift wing based in Britain, parts of several tactical fighter wings and a three-ship Amphibious Readiness Group with several thousand Marines expected to arrive in Turkey on Sunday. The Navy combat supply ship San Diego arrived at the Turkish port of Iskenderun on Friday, and a second supply ship, the Sirius, is due Tuesday.

In addition, an Army Reserve medical unit from Oklahoma that has been deployed in Saudi Arabia is being transferred to Turkey, and a Navy Reserve Mobile Construction Unit from Mississippi is being transferred to Turkey from Spain.

The force will also include more than 50 long-range cargo carrying helicopters and an army civil affairs unit that will “coordinate the distribution of food and water” to the refugees.

Times staff writers Doyle McManus in Geneva, Elizabeth Shogren in Moscow and Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.