U.S. Troops Add to Kurd Zone Again : Iraq: The third stage pushes the occupied area close to Dahuk. Hussein’s forces withdraw as the Americans arrive.

American airborne troopers again expanded the protected zone for refugees in northern Iraq on Sunday, pushing south to the outskirts of a provincial capital and driving Iraqi army units before them.

The advance, supported by jets and helicopters, came without incident, with Iraqi units withdrawing as the Americans arrived, U.S. spokesmen said.

By nightfall, troops of the 325th Airborne had arrived within a mile of Dahuk, a provincial capital that is now a ghost town but had a population approaching 300,000 before Kurdish residents fled at the end of March after a revolt against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was violently suppressed.

Dahuk, about 35 miles south of the Turkish border and a focus for all of northwestern Iraq, was the site of savage fighting during the Kurdish uprising against Hussein’s rule and the counterattack that crushed it.

The American advance Sunday along the main highway leading south from the border launched the third and final part of an occupation that began April 20 to create a sanctuary for about half a million mostly Kurdish refugees who fled into the mountains along the Turkish border when the rebellion collapsed.

In the initial phase, U.S. Marines secured the area around the border town of Zakhu and began construction of a refugee camp on its outskirts. At midweek, allied troops led by British Marines pushed about 50 miles farther east to the town of Amadiyah to expand the zone. Construction of another refugee camp nearby is planned.

Rousting Iraqi forces from the Dahuk region, planned from the outset, adds a southern dimension to a zone that will be patrolled by allied forces and in which Iraqi troops will not be allowed to operate.

In enlarging the zone, American planners hope that more of the refugees now spilling from perilous mountain camps will decide to return directly to their homes, bypassing the new and planned refugee centers.

Overall, the area secured by American, British, Dutch and French troops--to be joined this week by Italian and Spanish units--should total around 2,000 square miles, most of it empty pasture lands.

The allies say they expect that an international police force under U.N. auspices will replace their combat forces as guarantors of the safety of restive Kurds against whom Hussein has warred sporadically but ferociously for more than a decade. The Iraqi government rejects the idea of an international force, accusing the allies of trying to dismember the country, while returning refugees threaten to flee again if the allies--particularly the Americans--leave the sanctuary.

Baghdad denounces the haven as a violation of its sovereignty, and a pro-government newspaper there lambasted the refugee centers Sunday as “camps of humiliation.”

Hussein is offering Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq, and leaders of the 4 million Iraqi Kurds, recognizing that they have no international support for their dream of an independent Kurdistan, seem prepared to accept it.

A scheduled final round of negotiations, however, has been postponed because rival Kurdish leaders have thus far been unable to resolve their differences over exactly what form the autonomy should take and whether it should be internationally guaranteed.

Many of the estimated 5,000 refugees now in the refugee camp outside Zakhu come from areas farther south. If allied forces carry out their widely anticipated push into Dahuk and the nearby villages of Sumail and Shaykhan, large numbers of them are expected to leave to return home.

The refugees on the Turkish border are dwarfed by more than 1 million Iraqi Kurds now in Iran. They, too, show signs of returning home as confidence grows that the allied presence will keep them safe from Hussein.

About 2,000 per day are now returning to the Zakhu area in the original part of the sanctuary, a U.N. official said, and by now more than 20,000 have returned to the town of Zakhu itself.

Hussein has promised to build a democratic system in Iraq in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, but the Kurds, a non-Arabic Muslim people, are frankly disbelieving.