Marines Flown Into N. Iraq to Protect Haven

A battalion of American Marines dropped from helicopters into northern Iraq on Saturday to protect a haven where the United States promises to build huge camps for half a million refugees now trapped on Turkey’s mountainous border. No clashes were reported with Iraqi troops.

The Marines staked out 10 tents for refugees by nightfall Saturday and were working through the night to erect more, said a spokesman at the U.S. Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

Military construction teams will follow this morning by truck and helicopter to launch the camps in earnest, U.S. military spokesmen said.

British commandos and French paratroopers are en route to join the Marines in guaranteeing safety for the builders and for the refugees who follow them.

The 400 members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, from the Marine Corps Air Station, New River, N.C., were settled in a grassy lowland valley where advance parties had found good water and solid ground for settlements that the United States has promised will be ready to receive their first refugees in about two weeks.

Military sources said the main site is a few miles south of the Turkish border and west of the nearly deserted Iraqi city of Zakhu. It is naturally protected to the south by a steep range of hills, called in Turkish the “no-good mountains.”

The sheep-rearing valley is not only easily defensible against Iraqi forces occupying positions to the south but is also readily accessible from the nearby Istanbul-Baghdad highway.

U.S. military maps shown to international aid workers here Saturday night projected a cluster of about a dozen camps with spokes leading into a central hub.

Allied combat forces, to be joined this week by Dutch marines, will patrol a large perimeter around the camps within which no Iraqi military activity or overflights will be tolerated. Numbers change almost daily as plans are modified, but most recent estimates called for the U.S.-led allied protection force to number up to 16,000 troops.

Army Lt. Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, the U.S. commander of an unprecedented humanitarian effort dubbed Operation Encourage Hope, bluntly warned Iraqi generals at a border meeting Friday to keep clear, demanding an exclusion zone of 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) south of the Turkish border.

Protected by fighter planes, gunships and an AWACS command plane, the Marines in war paint and camouflage dress jumped off for Iraq from the rapidly expanding American supply base outside the Turkish border town of Silopi.

A detachment of about 200 British commandos arrived here Saturday and were to fly into Iraq today.

Special Forces reconnaissance teams seeking the best campsites had been operating in the area, sometimes by motorcycle, since early last week when President Bush ordered the massive construction.

Refugees are still dying at alarming rates amid incredible squalor, however. An international relief specialist warned of catastrophic death tolls if epidemics strike the refugees as the weather warms.

The American relief, and the presence of small teams of American soldiers in the camps, have greatly improved both morale and nutritional levels in recent days. Water, though, remains the most critical and unsolved problem. Helicopters are unable to land in many camps because of the refugee mobs that rush them, and the plastic water containers tend to burst if dropped.

The supply level is climbing toward a goal of 400 tons per day, but deliveries slumped over the past two days, American officers acknowledge, as personnel and helicopters were diverted to prepare for moving the Marines into Iraq.

Beginning today, the aid effort and the construction program will operate simultaneously, supplied from here in Diyarbakir, the biggest airport near the border, and the grass heliport at Silopi.

Iraq has protested that the safe-haven scheme, proposed by Turkish President Turgut Ozal and endorsed by the European Community, violates its sovereignty.

The cries from Baghdad have fallen on deaf ears among allies appalled by the savagery of repression against rebellious Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq and the 4-million-member Kurdish community in the north.

Bush announced an airlift of supplies in early April and the construction project last week after it became clear that the airlift could not work over the long term.

The avowed purposes of the American effort are, first, to assure the survival of the refugees, then to move them to the new camps inside Iraq until they are able to return home.

Once the camps are well established, the United States says it will turn them over to the United Nations to be administered in collaboration with private aid groups.

Washington insists that the American intervention will be only temporary, but analysts warn that getting out of Iraq may generate greater difficulties than the Marines encountered going in Saturday.

First, refugees will have to be persuaded to move to the new camps. To a man, they told reporters, they hate Saddam Hussein, and they are frightened of him.

Given the conditions where they are now, and the pledge of American protection, the refugees will probably move willingly enough to the new camps, analysts say. But once they are there, the analysts add, it would be unthinkable for the United States to withdraw its protective shield around them until Hussein’s regime is replaced by an internationally accepted government in Baghdad.