14 Generals Reported Dead in Hussein Purge : Iraq: U.S., Kurdish sources say the executions followed coup bids. An Arab cautions against ‘wishful thinking.’

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, demonstrating increasing concern about opposition within his armed forces, has begun a purge of senior officers, executing 14--and possibly as many as 18--generals and other senior military leaders after a series of coup attempts, according to U.S. officials and Kurdish opposition sources.

Within the past month, at least 14 generals were summoned to Baghdad, according to one report.

“They thought they were going to get medals,” one official source said. Instead, they were hanged.

“It was a very ‘Saddamic’ way of playing around,” said a Capitol Hill source. He said he had heard of purges and executions, following three coup attempts, from contacts within the Kurdish opposition.

Information reaching officials in Washington from within Iraq has been extremely sketchy, but officials say the purge appears to be continuing and may have been accelerated, according to unconfirmed reports received by the State Department.

The reports vary in their degree of specificity, with one intelligence report asserting that “the killing of some generals may be under way,” one source said.

But one Arab ambassador, speaking on condition of anonymity, cautioned that reports of purges appear regularly from Iraq and are not necessarily accurate.

“A lot of this reporting is based on wishful thinking,” he said, adding that for confirmation from the secretive society, “one has to wait and see who turns up in public and who disappears.”

In the Middle East, reports of military purges in Baghdad have been surfacing for the last two or three weeks. Some have been attributed to Iraqi exile leaders such as Mohammed Taki Modaressi, who heads a pro-Iranian Shiite organization based in Damascus, Syria. According to one account from Modaressi late last month, President Hussein had dismissed, retired or demoted 1,500 senior officers since the twin rebellions of Shiites and Kurds that racked Iraq in early March after the Persian Gulf War.

Some of the dismissals may be connected to continuing demobilization of army units in the postwar period, as the Baghdad regime struggles to deal with a burdensome government payroll under high inflation. But others appear clearly political--the June replacement of Chief of Staff Hussein Rashid Takriti by Ayyad Fatih Rawi, for instance.

Military demotions and dismissals--whether political purges or connected with demobilizations--are fairly easy to track in Baghdad. The changes are announced in circulars sent to army units. An Associated Press report said a recent list contained the names of 620 officers ranging from lieutenant colonels to major generals.

But there is normally no public record of military executions, and Hussein’s regime would withhold any confirmation of a reported coup for fear of showing weakness. But coup reports continue to surface. Early this month, the French news service Agence France-Presse, quoting unidentified sources connected to U.N. weapons inspection teams working in Iraq, said that 18 senior army officers were reportedly executed last month on charges of trying to bring down the Hussein regime.

The AFP dispatch said three coup attempts or plots had reportedly taken place since the end of the war, the latest in mid-June, just before the Eid Adha festival that marks the end of the Muslim pilgrimage season to Mecca.

Another press report claimed that Maj. Gen. Yalchin Omer, a decorated officer of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, was recently executed. He had commanded a division in the Shiite southern provinces where a bitter insurgency threatened Hussein three months ago and rebels are reportedly still holding out in the marshlands.

If the reports are borne out, they would represent a sweeping indictment of Hussein’s own military. The force’s leadership is generally picked for political loyalty, rather than military skills, and is considered crucial to Hussein’s maintaining a strong grip on power.

The depth of his apparent concern about the military’s reliability, however, was reflected in the fact that among those reported to have been executed were two high-ranking figures from Tikrit, Hussein’s own community and the center of the clan-like extended family on which he relies.

“Saddam clearly fears a coup. He’s feeling vulnerable. His government is a little unstable right now,” the Capitol Hill source said. “He’s trying to keep or limit power to people he trusts. His appointments are more and more from within the extended family. He has general concerns about disloyalty.”

Hussein, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, “has proved himself extremely effective at maintaining control.”

But, he said, if the close-knit regime “stays tough and Iraq continues to suffer because he is there, then someone or some group is likely to make a run at him.”

Gerstenzang reported from Kennebunkport, Me., and Wright reported from Washington. Times Middle East correspondent Nick B. Williams Jr. contributed to this story from Cyprus.