COLUMN ONE : Gunfire in the Garden of Eden : Hard-pressed Shiite rebels battle Saddam Hussein in the marshes of southern Iraq. Reeds hide the fighters, but troops ‘know from our voice in the night where we are.’

The wind slicing across the top of the reeds sends an uneasy murmur through the hot afternoon. Half a mile away, clouds of smoke from the morning’s artillery barrage feed a gray pall that hangs low over the marsh. A long canoe makes its way along a narrow sliver of water, gliding between impenetrable walls of green reeds.

Suddenly, behind one of the reed walls, those in the canoe can see a flash of white and hear the shuffling of feet. “ Salaam aleikum (Peace be with you),” says a voice from the reed forest, and a man with a white headdress, a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder, emerges to greet the boat. Five more men follow him.

As the canoe shoves its way onto the small island, a clearing in the reeds emerges, and inside it can be seen nine more automatic assault rifles, a BKC 60-millimeter light mortar, a pile of cucumbers and tomatoes and a pot of tea.

Mohsen, a 33-year-old former television executive, seats himself on a blanket on the soggy ground in the clearing and fingers the small machete at his side. “We know about Vietnam, we know about Cuba. In Iraq, we study that, and we use it to fight Saddam. Our fighting has a system. It isn’t by these 10 brothers we fight Saddam. It’s impossible. But with other brothers, we become tens, and hundreds.”

He surveys his comrades, a primary school teacher, a high school student, a former Iraqi air force officer and several farmers, one of them with a leg that has been dribbling blood and fluids from a bullet wound for nearly 30 days. “This is the way that we love,” Mohsen says finally. “We love death.”

Here, hundreds of miles from Baghdad in one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth, lie the fabled marshlands of Iraq, the legendary home of the Garden of Eden and the refuge of some of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s most troublesome opponents, the Shiite Muslim moujahedeen.

Although Iraq has tightly restricted access to the southern marshes since the Shiites’ ill-fated uprising at the end of the Persian Gulf War, interviews with refugees from the region and an unofficial trip into the marsh with the moujahedeen this week gave indications that the Iraqi army has dramatically stepped up its ground operations in the south since the allies began banning flights over the region on Aug. 27.

Artillery attacks against villages in the marshlands are killing and wounding dozens, according to refugee and moujahedeen reports, and the Iraqi regime appears to have launched a clean-out effort in the major cities of the south, one chillingly similar to what happened before Iraq’s pullout from Kuwait City in 1991.

Between Aug. 26 and Sept. 9, an estimated 1,500 young men were taken into custody from Karbala, Nasiriyah, Madayna and the villages of Nahar Antar, Beni Mansour and Baheleh, according to rebel leaders, who believe that the prisoners are being held at Al Rezazeh prison near Karbala.

“They have been taken hostage. They are held alive and in prison, so if there is an attack of the moujahedeen , they will be shot--and publicly,” said a rebel leader named Assadi.

Food deliveries from the north have been cut off, and money has been transferred from banks in the south to Baghdad. Since the end of August, major equipment and facilities have been removed from most factories, including the sugar, paper, plastic and cola factories at Amarah and Nasiriyah, and there are reports that some government facilities and oil wells have been mined.

Iraqi opposition leaders, whose reports cannot be independently verified, say there was a large explosion at a textile factory in Nasiriyah on Sept. 3 that reportedly killed many of the 2,000 workers there.

“They’re taking the factories apart and taking them piece by piece to Baghdad,” said an Iraqi doctor on the Iran-Iraq border who treats refugees from the marshes. “They have put explosives in important government buildings so that if the regime elements have to leave, they will blow it up first.”

At the same time, the Iraqi moujahedeen --the word is usually translated as “holy warriors”--appear to have stepped up their attacks, launching furtive hit-and-run strikes against units of the estimated 60,000 Iraqi troops stationed in southern Iraq and executing prominent southern citizens suspected of collaborating with the Sunni Muslim-led regime.

In a post-midnight strike against Iraqi forces in Adel on Aug. 25, Shiite rebels rushed into the town and took over the local office of the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party, the mayor’s office and the police station until dusk of the next day, executing 150 officials of the regime, according to unconfirmed reports from several moujahedeen leaders.

Two weeks before the “no-fly” zone took effect, rebel leaders said they scored a victory against Iraqi forces in the Nasiriyah marshes, capturing 120 prisoners and at least 10 military speedboats.

Sayed Yassin Musavi, a Shiite cleric who witnessed the attack, said Iraqi warplanes dropped cluster bombs on the towns and villages of the marsh, then entered the marsh in speedboats, only to run into strong resistance from young rebels hiding among the reeds.

“The attack was spearheaded by the youth. They fought fiercely. And our line of defense could not be broken because the women played an important role, bringing ammunition to the moujahedeen ,” said the turbaned mullah, laying his prayer beads in a line on a coffee table to demonstrate the position of the incoming Iraqi forces. The fighting lasted three days, from sunrise to sunset, and Musavi said hundreds of Iraqis were killed in the operation.

“The Iraqis left their dead,” he said. “We buried some. We also returned some to their families, when their families approached us. They came all the way from Baghdad to get the bodies.

“Praise God,” he added, “with the geography, our casualties were very little. Only a few got killed.”

Although there is no way of confirming such reports, rebel leaders have videotapes depicting victims horribly wounded in artillery attacks and also showing Iraqi soldiers captured by the moujahedeen. One such film, reportedly shot after an Aug. 14 battle in Adel, shows a group of 44 glum-faced prisoners from the Iraqis’ 426th Brigade. “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, the moujahedeen of the Islamic Front greet you,” says a voice on the videotape, talking to the captured soldiers. “We are innocent. What have we done to you that you are bombarding us, hitting us with artillery, and killing us? We want to live like everyone else. We are Muslims. You are Muslims. Saddam tells you we are not Iraqis. You will now find out whether we are Iraqis or not!”

Next, several of the soldiers are filmed making statements.

“The moujahedeen attacked us. We tried to get away, but we were not successful. We got caught,” says an officer who identifies himself as Col. Jamal Jassim Dayeh. “We couldn’t find any other way out but to surrender ourselves to the moujahedeen. It was unexpected, because their treatment of us was human and Islamic. Now that we have seen what you are like, we pray for the moujahedeen , and we hope the moujahedeen will free us from the oppression of Saddam.”

Copies of the videotape have been smuggled out and duplicated and will be distributed around the world. The Shiite rebels are also publishing a newspaper, Al Nabaa, photocopied, folded into small squares and distributed to up to 8,000 people all over Iraq.

“We pass it from hand to hand to annoy the regime,” explained one opposition leader. “We mail it to high officials, we sometimes put it in their cars, or if we have the audacity, we sometimes put it in the pockets of their coats.” A radio station, Iraq al Thaer, or Iraq in Revolt, broadcasts two hours a day from just across the border in the marshlands of Iran.

In a safehouse across the border, outside the Iranian city of Ahwaz, Iraqi rebels wounded in the fighting convalesce and prepare to return to the marshes, an hour’s drive away. There are bottles of medicine on a table and an automatic rifle in the corner. As evening falls, two dozen young men gather in the empty living room around a television set, watching intently an old speech by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, once Iran’s supreme leader and the senior Shiite cleric of the Middle East. Not a word is spoken.

Wasn’t this man, they are asked, Iraq’s bitter enemy for eight years?

“He did not fight Iraq. He fought the Iraqi oppressor regime,” said Assadi, a former government clerk who was arrested and tortured for Islamic activities in Iraq before joining the moujahedeen.

Iran shields more than 30,000 refugees from the south of Iraq in United Nations-run camps and also hosts one of the principal Iraqi Islamic opposition factions, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq. Control of southern Iraq’s holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and an Islamic state in Iraq were a dream of Khomeini throughout the bitter Iran-Iraq War, but Iran has been careful to play an understated role in supporting the Iraqi moujahedeen since the ill-fated 1991 uprising.

While Iran has publicly declined to provide arms or even extensive food and medical aid to the rebels, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards routinely prowl the marshes along the border and have contacts with rebel leaders inside the marsh.

“We want to see an Islamic state in Iraq,” said Assadi in the safehouse. “All of the moujahedeen are fighting for this. Not most of them, but all of them.”

One of the men in the room has no arm. Another has an arm in a cast. An 18-year-old farmer, Mohammed Saad, pulls a bloody bandage off his arm to show that three of his fingers have been blown off. He was wounded in a Sept. 14 artillery attack on his village, Agar, and walked for two days with three other injured men to safety in Iran.

“Every night, about 100 mortars were being fired into the village,” he said. “A lot were killed. Saddam has even cut the drinking water in the village.”

In July, he said, Iraqi planes dropped incendiary bombs on the village. “The planes came, there were rockets, and then the houses went on fire. The bombs made the fire. How can I describe it? It was like they dropped a large round suitcase, and when it hit the ground, it burst into a huge fire. More than 100 houses went up in flames. The ones who were in the houses were set on fire. Also, sparks from the bomb set people on fire who were running away.”

In the marshlands, there is a sense of bravado. The rebels eat fish and rice bread baked on burning reeds and fight with old weapons captured during the Shiite uprising that followed the end of the Gulf War, when rebels held most of the major cities of the south before the regime’s forces moved in and forced as many as 10,000 of them into the swamps along the border.

The punishing strikes from MIG-23 warplanes and helicopter gunships that preceded the declaration of the no-fly zone killed many of them. The artillery strikes that Iranian border guards say can be heard booming every day and every night above the marshes have killed more. Small reed fires apparently set by the shelling sporadically obscure the horizon. And Iraqi engineers are damming the tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, part of Hussein’s new “Third River” irrigation project that is drying up large portions of what is left of this 3,000-year-old homeland.

This is a land unchanged through the millennia of history, a civilization that remains as British explorer Wilfrid Thesiger captured it in the 1950s. “Memories of that first visit to the marshes have never left me,” he wrote. “Firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flighting in to feed, a boy’s voice singing somewhere in the dark . . . canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine.”

On an afternoon last week, the sound of distant mortar fire split the midday stillness, and as Mohsen’s canoe pushed through a narrow waterway, a burst of machine-gun fire from the reeds just ahead sent the passengers dropping to the bottom of the boat.

Mohsen ran to the bow and screamed into the reeds, “Ahmed, Ahmed, I am Mohsen! Don’t shoot! Come by your boat to see me! Why are you shooting?”

He turned back apologetically, explaining that the fighters hiding in the marsh are suspicious of a motorboat plying so narrow a channel. Moments before, he said, an unidentified boat had sped through the adjacent channel; the rebels had given chase but could not find it.

“We have lived here since 10 days, and now we change place,” he said. “The Iraqi intelligence comes sometimes in boats and to fight us with bombs. They know from our voice in the night where we are. They find us and shoot us.”

As the sun sets, nervous bursts of gunfire sing out from all over the marsh, most of it, Mohsen says, rebels firing into the air. An occasional bird flits down among the reeds. Fleets of mosquitoes claim the dusk air.

“I think we are capable of toppling Saddam,” says one of the moujahedeen as twilight shrouds the marsh. “I think we are now showing you. We have liberated the marshes. We have well-organized hit-and-run operations in all the cities of Iraq, and it’s happening very frequently.

“We are not a cell or a little group. We are a movement. And time is not a problem for us. A year, two years, 10 years, we will eventually pull him down.”

Marsh Hide-Out

The marshlands of southern Iraq are the legendary home of the Garden of Eden and the refuge of some of Saddam Hussein’s most troublesome opponents. The Iraqi president appears to have stepped up ground operations in the south since the allies began banning flights over the region.