Iraqi Forces Giving Way to Allies at Kurdish Frontier : Refugees: Two dozen GIs arrive in Dahuk shortly after Baghdad’s appointed governor.

Abdel Wahed Atroushy, Baghdad’s newly appointed governor for Dahuk province, arrived three days ago at the crumbling edge of Iraqi authority in the Kurdish north.

His caravan of Mercedes-Benz sedans squealed to a stop in front of the bullet-pocked capitol building, disgorging the governor and his uniformed bodyguards, submachine guns at the ready.

A squad of Iraqi soldiers armed with rifles and grenade launchers rimmed a raised garden overlooking the street below. Two truck-mounted machine guns covered the driveway entrance.

Atroushy’s party moved quickly into the building, passing the wall where a portrait of President Saddam Hussein once stood. It had been shot up by Kurdish insurgents in March, plastered over and now bore the legend: “Iraq Loves the Kurdish People.”

Clearly, in Dahuk the feeling is not mutual.

The largest Iraqi city north of Mosul, Dahuk sits at the frontier of American-led allied power in the 80-mile-wide-by-30-mile-deep haven for Kurdish refugees along the Turkish border. U.S. troops are encamped just outside the city on the east and west. On the day of Atroushy’s arrival, American jet fighters and helicopters patrolled a clouded sky in a steady parade over the rocky ridges outside the city.

This is the place where Hussein has tried to block the creeping allied occupation in the north. He rejected a Western proposal to send U.N. troops into Dahuk. Under pressure from the Americans, he pulled Iraqi troops out of the city, but he clung to authority with a force of uniformed cops and what Kurds on the streets say is a legion of civilian-clothed secret police.

“Everywhere, that man and that man,” a turbaned old man whispered to a reporter in the downtown market, the only active area in the largely deserted city.

Inch by inch, however, Hussein’s beleaguered government has given ground when the allies push.

On Friday, a contingent of U.S. troops entered Dahuk itself. A contingent of two dozen Americans entered the city at the head of what is planned to be a 170-member task force and a small security team of military police, according to a U.S. spokesman in Incirlik, Turkey.

The task force will consist of 87 U.S., British and Dutch specialist troops, 77 civilian relief and medical workers and several State Department disaster aid experts, U.S. officers said.

The group will bring bulldozers and trucks to clear the rubble of the Kurdish rebellion in March from the streets, repair the water system, clear out stocks of unexploded ammunition and establish reception centers for refugees.

Encouraged, several hundred refugees camped outside Dahuk came in as well. Reporters who visited the city said the market was already humming with activity, that U.S. officers had taken over the town’s main hotel and that Kurdish guerrillas had taken over the police headquarters.

“Our role is solely humanitarian assistance, to make Dahuk work again and integrate Kurds back into their hometown,” U.S. Lt. Col. Gary Goff told reporters after what he said was a cordial meeting with Atroushy, the new governor. “He even gave us the keys to our hotel.”

In talks with U.S. commanders Wednesday, the Iraqis agreed to withdraw troops and security police at least four miles from the town. Goff said a three-week stay would be enough. But other allied military and relief sources say elements of the force plan to remain in Dahuk for up to two months.

U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar said talks are progressing with Baghdad on the deployment of U.N. security guards to take the place of allied soldiers. U.N. officials in the Iraqi capital said Friday that 35 U.N. guards will arrive in Baghdad on Monday for deployment in Iraqi Kurdistan. joining 10 guards in Dahuk since Sunday. U.N. sources say 400 to 500 guards may be sent in.

Kurdish leaders say the U.N. plan is inadequate. But the allies want to withdraw quickly and avoid entanglement in civilian affairs in the security zone they started to create in northern Iraq a month ago.

The allies have already experienced growing trouble in the northwest Iraqi town of Zakhu, where mobs of angry Kurds have attacked the offices representing the Baghdad government three times in the last 10 days.

On Tuesday, U.S. military police were forced to fire shots in the air to drive back a crowd that manhandled the senior Iraqi liaison officer, Gen. Nushwan Danoon, bruising his arm.

In other regional developments Friday:

* A chartered Bulgarian transport plane carrying relief supplies to Kurdish refugees crashed into a mountain in western Iran while attempting to land after running out of fuel. Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency said four aboard the Ilyushin-76 were killed and six were injured. An official of the Geneva-based company Mexair, which chartered the jet to the German Red Cross Society, said all 10 aboard were Soviets.

* British marines searching for a missing three-person British Broadcasting Corp. news crew have found two bodies in northern Iraq, the British Defense Ministry said. A spokesman said the bodies were being flown back to Britain for identification.

* Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on behalf of the Third World’s sick and poor, will fly to Baghdad on Monday at the invitation of Hussein’s government, a U.N. spokesman said. The purpose of her visit was not immediately known.

In Turkey, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ferhat Ataman, offered some evidence that the allied move to Dahuk was successful in persuading refugees to return, saying that 18,000 had headed back to Iraq in the last 24 hours.

Nearly 500,000 Iraqi refugees fled to Turkey in early April after the collapse of the Kurdish rebellion, sheltering in squalid mountain camps. Now several of the camps in Turkey have closed. But 50,000 refugees, mostly from the Dahuk area, still remain in one Turkish camp at Cukurca.

More than 100,000 Kurds are camping in valleys inside northern Iraq or in allied-made camps near Zakhu, also waiting to return to Dahuk.

The American aim, like that of a U.N. security operation established earlier this week, is to induce all the refugees to return to their homes without fear of Iraqi retribution. But quick results seemed unlikely to a handful of Western reporters who reached Dahuk from Baghdad at midweek.

In the marketplace, where Kurdish vendors were peddling cigarettes, vegetables and sandals, tension was palpable. There were few women in the crowded two-block area, and not many men agreed to talk.

At one point, when an Iraqi official from Baghdad broke into a conversation, the situation became explosive. About 30 angry Kurds pushed toward him, demanding that he let the interview proceed unimpeded. The Iraqi was rattled, and the Kurd who was speaking with the reporters was even more shaken. “I’m afraid. Can you get me out of here?” he asked. “Can you take me in your car and drop me off in a rural area?”

This was a man who, before the Iraqi broke in, was telling reporters: “Speaking freely is thinking freely. Speaking freely is a sign that the new era is beginning.” Not yet.

In this atmosphere, it appeared that it would take some time before the rest of Dahuk’s 150,000 residents would join the U.N.-estimated 25,000 refugees who have already returned from the north.

Atroushy painted a more optimistic picture of the situation. Dahuk, he said, has made an almost complete recovery from the insurgency. He claimed that half the city’s population has returned, despite shuttered shops that indicated otherwise. Only the presence of foreign troops have prevented the return of the rest, the governor insisted.

But Iraqi authority is tenuous here and nonexistent in the north of the province, which stretches to the Turkish border and includes the town of Zakhu. Baghdad fears that armed peshmergas-- Kurdish guerrillas--will join the return, and some people in Dahuk said they are already there.

The Kurds appeared equally uncertain. “They (the others) will not come back unless the Americans are here,” said one man in the marketplace. On the ground in Dahuk, the political talks between Kurdish leaders and Hussein’s officials in Baghdad seemed almost irrelevant. Here in the north, the confrontation is immediate.

The U.N. operation is designed to ease the tension, but the first, 10-member contingent of U.N. security guards can do little more than show the flag. They are showing it aggressively, however--large blue-and-white U.N. banners attached to flagstaffs on their white patrol vans. They cruise the city constantly, hollering greetings to people on the streets. “We love you,” a Swiss guard told a little Kurdish boy with a big slingshot.

Stafan d’Mistura, the top official in the area representing the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, claimed progress in just the few days that his men have been deployed. “Overall, an enormous difference,” he said, “not least because we are here.

“There’s an atmosphere of reassurance, and that’s what we want to achieve. We are here to stay, and we are here to be in the streets with them.”

On Wednesday, D’Mistura led the first caravan of returning Kurds back to Dahuk from the American relief camp outside Zakhu to the north. The others had made their way on their own.

It was the first trip of what he termed the Blue Shuttle program--six families, all volunteers, who decided to risk the return under U.N. auspices.

It was a test case, the U.N. official said, and it worked. The refugees, most of them women and children, traveled in the open beds of two large trucks. At an Iraqi military checkpoint outside the city, they were waved through.

Special correspondent Hugh Pope in Istanbul contributed to this article.