First Kurds Fly to New U.S. Camp : Refugees: The 250 are the vanguard of an expected half a million awaiting settlement in northern Iraq. An Air Force jet carrying aid lands in Tehran.

American helicopters whisked a first group of Kurdish refugees from mountain squalor to a spanking new camp in a wheat field here Saturday to launch the decisive end phase of a massive international rescue mission.

“This is a good first step, a very solid foundation,” said Lt. Col. Mike Hess, an Army reservist from New York, as the refugees arrived.

The first 250 Kurds, spearhead of up to half a million behind them, emerged from U.S. military helicopters on a crystal, see-forever morning looking dazed but happy. They smiled. One or two kissed the ground. Others tore up clumps of calf-high weeds and sniffed with satisfaction.

“I must have shook 300 hands. They ran over and said ‘Thank you, Bush, thank you, Bush,’ and I said, ‘No, no, my name is Jordan,’ ” said Master Sgt. Frank Jordan of Bangor, Me.

In other developments Saturday:

* The first overt U.S. Air Force flight into Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution there arrived in Tehran carrying 15 tons of blankets for the refugees. The Air Force transport jet from Charleston, S.C., was unloaded almost immediately. Its cargo had been donated by private American charities.

* France called for a meeting of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to examine the situation in Iraq in light of the talks between President Saddam Hussein’s government and Kurdish rebel leaders. These leaders have been meeting in Baghdad with Hussein and other Iraqi officials in search of a political solution to the crisis. Hussein reportedly has promised the Kurds the resurrection of a 1970 accord for Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq that was never implemented.

The Kurds arriving at the camp here Saturday--all men, all grizzled and dirty after weeks in the mountains--wandered with unabashed amazement through thickets of new blue-and-white tents laboriously erected by U.S. Marines. They wolfed down field rations, drank warm pineapple juice straight from the can, found bits of shade and proclaimed themselves well pleased.

“I feel safe here. I’m afraid of Saddam Hussein, but the American Army is not afraid,” said Obaid Ali, a 21-year-old student who spent nearly four weeks in the mountains with his extended family of 26 people, including 16 children, nearly all of whom are sick, he said, with diarrhea and other illnesses.

“I never want to see another tent. When I go to sleep at night all I see is blue,” said Lance Cpl. Mark Palmer, a Marine engineer and soon-to-be civilian with job applications pending at the Los Angeles and San Diego police departments.

A 27-man Marine detachment erected nearly all of the 700 tents in what will grow to become a community of 20,000 refugees. The first 250, to be joined quickly by another 750, will work as volunteers to help expand the camp. In return, their families will be among the first to be reunited here.

In addition to the workers, another 110 Kurds walked in out of the mountains unannounced to join the camp on its opening day, according to Marine Sgt. Maj. Bill Thatcher of Humboldt, Iowa. A number of them later continued on to their homes in Zakhu. The United States hopes that only a limited number of refugees will find their own way back to this camp on foot in the next few days. Large numbers would overwhelm the still-fledgling facilities here.

British Marines said Saturday that they had seen torch-lit processions Friday night winding down the sides of snow-capped mountains jammed with refugees in misery since the collapse of a Kurdish rebellion against Hussein at the end of March.

About half a million refugees wound up in camps on the Turkish-Iraqi border, but more than a million others crossed from Iraq into Iran, where conditions are described as even worse than those on the Iraqi-Turkish frontier.

The Zakhu camp, on the outskirts of a town by the same name a few miles from the Turkish border, is the first of about 10 whose construction is planned in a 600-square-mile region in northern Iraq controlled by American, British, Dutch and French combat troops.

The so-called “safe-haven” camps were ordered by President Bush when it became clear that refugees fleeing Hussein’s troops could not be effectively cared for in their inaccessible mountain encampments along the Iraqi-Turkish border which lack adequate water and sanitation.

Most Iraqi troops have left this area at U.S. insistence, but armed Kurdish rebels are still in the region, and nights around Zakhu camp tend to be lively, according to the American Marines who live here.

Friday night, the Marines witnessed what they presumed was a firefight between guerrillas and Iraqi forces in the mountains above the new valley camp. When Marine howitzers illuminated the valley with star shells, the shooting stopped.

During the day Saturday, the valley echoed to the rumble of heavy military traffic as French paratroopers and British Marines drove to positions farther east. The lead elements of an 800-man, Italy-based unit of American paratroopers arrived Saturday, their officers saying they had been told to expect to remain for up to a year.

The allies reported no clashes with the Iraqis in a valley bright and green Saturday and looking as if it had been borrowed from Montana. The half-empty town of Zakhu drowsed peacefully following the departure of all but 50 of around 300 Iraqi policemen who had been intimidating local residents.

Arriving refugees expressed satisfaction that the police had withdrawn from Zakhu, but a number said they would feel more confident about returning to their homes if the remaining 50 left as well from a town that is now patrolled by British and American Marines.

While allied troops enforced a haven, the United Nations has agreed to take over operation of the camps themselves. A U.N. delegation arrives for its first visit here today and may run up the blue-and-white U.N. flag over the camp, according to an American spokesman, Maj. Ron Gahagan of Spartanburg, S.C.

In their appalling mountain camps, many refugees have expressed reservations about returning to Iraq while Hussein remains in power. He has worked ferociously against Iraq’s 3.5 million Kurds for almost a decade.

The United States expects the refugees will come down off the mountains once they are convinced that the new camps are better than their own makeshift camps in the mountains and, critically, that allied troops will guarantee their safety from Hussein’s forces.

In that context, the initial 1,000 Kurdish volunteers arriving here are intended to become salesmen for the camps to their families and the rest of the mountain populations. Many of the first 250 came from the Zakhu area. Planners hope that large numbers of returning refugees will eventually bypass the camps entirely and return directly to the homes they fled in panic at the prospect of Hussein’s likely reprisal for their postwar uprising.

Early returns Saturday show that the American soft-sell seems to be working.

“Saddam is a one-man devil, but here conditions are good, and the Americans are strong,” said Jasim Said, a 21-year-old barber from Zakhu who reached the new camp after 25 days in the mountains.

Said Sabah Hamid, a 24-year-old university student: “What we want is not a camp but to go home. But people stay here to see what Americans can tell them. I very, very thank you this army.”

In Iran

The American Air Force plane bringing aid for the refugees in Iran had earlier landed at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, where it received clearance to land in Tehran from Iranian air controllers, the Associated Press reported.

“It’s good to be back here after all this time. I notice a lot of changes,” said the aircraft’s commander, Lt. Col. Pryor Timmons, who said he often flew into Tehran in the 1970s.

He said his seven-man crew “was very proud to be able to help with this humanitarian aid” for the 1 million-plus Kurdish refugees who have flooded into Iran from Iraq since early March.

It was the first such overt U.S. flight since the overthrow of pro-Western Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi by Islamic fundamentalists in 1979. Diplomatic ties between the two countries collapsed when revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy and held 52 people hostage for 444 days.

AP said that Iranian authorities sought to play down the significance of the American aid, which has drawn fire from some radicals in Parliament. The official Islamic Republic News Agency described the arrival of the aid as “ordinary practice” and stressed that the plane would “return immediately after unloading its cargo.”

Timmons described the flight as a “test case,” AP reported. “If it works, others may follow.”

Reuters news agency reported from Damascus that Iran’s President Hashemi Rafsanjani appealed there for more world aid Saturday for the Iraqi refugees now in his country.

Rafsanjani, paying an official visit to Syrian President Hafez Assad, declared at a banquet in his honor:

“The Iranian government hosts over a million people who have no shelter. Thousands of them are Kurds who walked through rugged mountains and valleys to take refuge in Iran.

“The size of the catastrophe is so great Iran alone could not deal with it. This makes the dispatch of aid from international organizations and world countries a necessity to minimize the pain of those homeless people.”