Tent City Springs Up for Kurds : Refugees: Encampment erected by U.S. expects its first inhabitants within days. There are tense moments with Iraqi troops.

An American tent city being built to house tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees sprang peacefully to life in a green field of winter wheat here Sunday under the watchful eyes and guns of U.S. Marines.

There were moments of tense confrontation between the Americans and retreating Iraqi troops as the Marines secured a large area of northern Iraq with the budding camp as its focus. No shots were fired.

“Things are going better than we had expected,” said Marine Maj. Gen. Jay M. Garner, commander of the American task force charged with protecting an encampment that is expected to receive its first inhabitants within the next few days. Nearby, Garner has established his headquarters in the deserted barracks of the Iraqi army’s departed 44th Division, which was thoroughly looted by Iraqi Kurdish rebels.

For the first time, an American military convoy of 50 trucks drove from Turkey across the Khabur River into Iraq on Sunday to the campsite several miles east of the semi-deserted Iraqi town of Zakhu.

By nightfall, after a hot spring day, Marine emplacements had been established in former Iraqi army positions along a ridgeline above the camp and in the fields around it. “It’s pretty, but the bugs ain’t,” growled the first sergeant of one rifle platoon.

In other Sunday developments involving the situation in Iraq:

* Iraqi authorities in Baghdad refused to comment on Kurdish announcements that a delegation of top Kurdish political leaders were holding peace talks in the Iraqi capital at the invitation of Saddam Hussein’s government.

* Vice President Dan Quayle, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” indicated that the Bush Administration is examining whether to join European nations seeking to place Hussein on trial for war crimes. He personally favors the move, he said, but the President has not taken a position on the matter.

The camp under construction here was ordered by President Bush as a remedy for tragedy, and the Americans came into Iraq with guns aplenty, but the scene Sunday had homey touches: About 20 Marines gathered around Father William Divine, who said a Catholic Mass in camouflage vestments and read a passage from the Gospel appropriate to his worshipers’ humanitarian mission: “Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd. . . .’ ”

In one mortar pit, Marines sat writing postcards on the cardboard boxes that once contained their field rations. Rifleman Joseph Perea of Miami read a paperback thriller in the dying light. “I am pleased that we have come to help these people, but we’ve been out for four months and I’m ready to go home,” he said.

Col. James Jones, commander of an estimated 1,400 Marines in northern Iraq, said Iraqi army units were withdrawing as ordered from a zone that runs 35 miles along the border and 18 miles deep.

Jones said his men will be reinforced today by British Royal Marines, additional U.S. combat troops and the engineering and construction battalions needed to begin building the camps in earnest.

Garner spoke with reporters Sunday against the background of about three dozen bright blue-and-white 6-by-9-foot tents of the sort an American family might buy for a summer vacation.

The tents are to become new homes for an estimated half a million Iraqi refugees, most of them Kurds, who have been trapped in mountainside border camps for nearly three weeks following the collapse of an ill-fated rebellion against Hussein’s regime.

The United States and its Western allies have been supplying the camps by airdrop and helicopter and will begin truck convoys Tuesday to refugees who fled in panic and still lack adequate food, water and sanitation.

Turkish troops fired on refugees mobbing a food truck in one camp Sunday, killing one refugee and wounding five others.

U.S. officials say clan leaders of the refugees will be brought from the mountain camps to the tent city here in the expectation that, having seen the highly visible Marine perimeter, they will then return to urge their followers to settle in the camp. American officials say that the refugees will be housed by clans to avoid squabbles in the new camp.

The tent city is one mile along a road leading northeast from Zakhu that refugees took on their flight into the mountains as March ended. Former residents of Zakhu will be encouraged to return directly to their homes, since it is in the allied safe haven. Those who settle in the camp will be free to leave at any time. There will be no fences, American officials said.

“The area is secure now, and it will be secure when the refugees get here,” Garner said.

Marine Lt. Col. Tony Corwin said that by agreement between U.S. and Iraqi generals, who now meet daily, two Iraqi army battalions began moving south out of the zone Sunday morning. A few Iraqi units were reluctant to leave, U.S. officers said, and insisted that they could not go until they received orders directly from Baghdad. Some left grudgingly, but Garner said there had been “no major problems.”

The biggest unforeseen problem for the Americans on Sunday came in Zakhu itself, where about 200 Iraqi police armed with semiautomatic rifles arrived in buses, apparently to replace the departing Iraqi soldiers.

Garner said the U.S. understanding with the Iraqis was that all security forces would be withdrawn from the zone and that the allies would take responsibility for policing the city itself. By road from Turkey, American convoys must drive about 10 miles to the camp, passing through Zakhu, once home to 50,000 people but now half-deserted and the scene of summary executions by Iraqi troops as recently as 10 days ago.

U.S. officials said they could not explain the Iraqi police presence, but Garner told reporters that he would ask at his meeting with Iraqi generals today that the new arrivals be removed.

According to Col. Mike Hess, a Marine civil affairs officer, about half of Zakhu’s population appeared to have fled following the successful Iraqi army counterattack against the rebels. Refugees have repeatedly spoken of great damage that the army inflicted on the town, but it was not apparent to U.S. officers there Sunday.

Mayor Daoud Hassan Soliman, who, Hess said, may have Zakhu’s last remaining portrait of Hussein, said that there is no electricity and that water is being rationed because of a shortage of fuel for the municipal purification system. One of the city’s three hospitals was functioning Sunday, and some shops were open, Hess said.

About 500 Marines spearheaded the establishment of the refugee haven in an operation that lasted about four hours Saturday afternoon. In some instances, Iraqi troops waved and said “Welcome.” American officers said their contacts with their Iraqi counterparts have been “professional.”

Iraqi soldiers helped American engineers locate explosives wired without detonators on a single-span bridge crossing the river between Turkey and Iraq. When the first American convoy crossed the bridge Sunday morning, eight Iraqi border guards watched impassively. A little while later, an officer came and drove them away, and by noon it was American Marines who watched over Iraq’s entry place from Turkey.

In the United States, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said Sunday that U.S. forces are likely to remain in northern Iraq for only “a few weeks.”

Interviewed on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Cheney stressed the “temporary” nature of the U.S.-led relief operation. “We’re eager to turn over” the effort to international organizations “as soon as possible,” he said, but he refused to predict precisely how long that would take.

Baghdad denounced as interference the presence of U.S. troops on northern Iraqi soil but kept silent on reports that four leaders of the Kurdish revolt are in Baghdad as its guests for peace talks, according to news agency reports.

The ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party’s newspaper Al Thawra accused Washington of breaking international law by sending Marines and other military forces to establish and guard havens for Kurdish refugees.

Al Thawra noted that Iraq itself has signed an agreement with the United Nations to channel aid to Kurdish refugees and said that the U.S. “camps were established illegally.”

Kurdish rebel spokesman inside and outside of Iraq reported Saturday that Jalal Talabani, Syrian-based leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, was in Baghdad at the head of a Kurdish delegation invited there for talks by Hussein and his government.

“They are discussing an Iraqi offer for expanded autonomy within the federated structure of Iraq, promising democracy, pluralism and constitutional rule in Baghdad,” said a spokesman in London for the Patriotic Union, the major organization of Iraq’s estimated 4 million Kurds. Iraqi officials on Sunday would not comment on the reports.

Times staff writer Robert C. Toth, in Washington, contributed to this story.