Iraqis Fire on Their Own in Basra

Iraqi paramilitary forces, firing machine guns and mortars mounted on jeeps, forced hundreds of civilians to turn back from attempts to flee the nation’s second-largest city Friday, witnesses and British officials said.

The violence and turmoil continued to prevent British troops from delivering humanitarian aid to the city, and commanders acknowledged that much of the city’s sharply curtailed water supply remained under the control of pro-Saddam Hussein forces.

Thousands of other Basra residents did manage to escape Friday, streaming south toward the Kuwaiti border and the port town of Umm al Qasr, many in agonized search of fleeing relatives, as well as water and food. Several told of the chaos they left behind.

“We’re very afraid,” said Fizal Abid Naser, 38. “They were killing children and women at the crossroads,” said Naser, referring to the Fedayeen Saddam, or “martyr” troops loyal to Hussein who he said were roaming through neighborhoods and even individual homes.

The fate of Basra has proved a difficult problem for coalition forces, who bypassed the city last week to sweep more quickly toward Baghdad. British forces had hoped a popular uprising would erupt so that they could avoid street fighting against Hussein loyalists. But the paramilitary forces have clung to control and as humanitarian concerns mounted, residents were not allowed to leave.

There has been no official estimate of casualties, either in the city at large or in the incident Friday morning in which the Fedayeen fired at a mass of civilians attempting to cross one of the southern bridges out of town and toward the relative safety of British fortifications.

Forces from Britain’s 7th Armored Brigade were in a position to attack, but leaders said they held fire because of the huge numbers of civilians who were essentially herded back into the city of 1.3 million by the Fedayeen.

“We had to watch them go,” said Squadron Leader Simon Scott, a British military spokesman.

Those who managed to flee Basra on Friday described wrenching scenes.

A retired engineer who would identify himself only by his first name, Mohammed, said Iraqi soldiers were appropriating people’s houses, then using them as bases to launch their attacks on British forces.

“Please don’t use my full name,” he said. “I have to go back to Basra. My wife and four children are still there.”

Several fleeing residents said the only attacks they’d seen by U.S. or British forces had been from aircraft or artillery fire.

“The foreigners are afraid of losing their army. There are a lot of Fedayeen,” Mohammed said, adding that there may be as many as 10,000 troops and paramilitary fighters inside the city.

Basra residents said armed soldiers dressed in civilian clothes continued to man checkpoints at major intersections.

“Some civilians have been killed by Fedayeen,” said Mohammed. “Just saying the wrong thing can get you killed.”

A modest revolt against the Iraqi military occurred in the Al Kaad neighborhood of Basra after soldiers appropriated several people’s houses, according to some residents. But most city dwellers were too loyal or afraid of reprisals to rebel, said Mohammed Abbas, 29, a farmer.

“There was no revolution,” Abbas said.

On the highway leading south from Basra, a steady parade of trucks, cars, ambulances and carts, some piled high with possessions, transported residents away from the city in an orderly manner.

“I just came from Basra,” said Mohammed Saleh, a merchant with his wife and three children jammed into the cab of a pickup loaded with bags of rice and wheat.

“It’s very dangerous,” he said, as an artillery shell exploded in the direction he had come from. “We saw a lot of cross-fire. I’m worried for my children.”

Not everyone was trying to flee Basra, however. At a checkpoint manned by British troops about 10 miles outside the city, more than 100 men waited to reenter, including several who said they were farm laborers who had been working when the war started and had not been able to get back. Many said they were concerned for their families.

“We’ve been stuck here for a week,” said one 50-year-old man who asked that he be identified only by his first name, Hamdani. “We’re reduced to sleeping in the road or at the mosque.”

“The soldiers at the checkpoint search us, but don’t let us through,” said Hamdani, who was hoping to return to Basra to look for a neighbor’s missing son. “They seem to restrict young men in particular who might go back to Basra and join the fight against them.”

Many of the trucks that were allowed to pass in the direction of the city were filled with tomatoes and vegetables.

Salem Hasson, a 47-year-old tea merchant, lugged two plastic bags of vegetables and a small sack of eggs that he was bringing to his eight children. He made the trip, he said, because food shortages in Basra had driven up prices tenfold.

As the crowd of young men lobbied the soldiers to pass, one well-dressed man in a black and white knit shirt stepped out of the crowd, identified himself as an Iraqi soldier and asked to surrender.

Under further questioning, he admitted that he held the rank of private second class and handled intelligence.

The British soldiers took an immediate interest in the man, whose identity card read: Saddam Hussein Ashour. He was taken to the side of a tank, away from the crowd to be transferred to regional headquarters for questioning.

“I decided to surrender because I had little to fight for,” Ashour said. “I don’t own any land in this country. Why should I fight anymore? My family and friends are dying over this.”

In a sign of the continued difficulty in delivering humanitarian relief, the Kuwait Red Crescent Society’s plans for an “orderly distribution” of aid for several war-struck villages elsewhere in southern Iraq quickly dissolved into bedlam Friday.

Hundreds of villagers at the first stop converged on food trucks and clawed their way past one another to pick both vehicles clean.

The trucks soon turned back, with several Iraqi teenagers hanging on the doors or riding on the roofs as the vehicles neared the border, prompting Kuwaiti soldiers to fire warning shots in the air and push the youths off as the trucks sped out of Iraq.

A teenage boy with a knife held up one of several small buses following the aid caravan, demanding that journalists aboard turn over water, food and cigarettes.

It was the second time in three days that chaos engulfed such aid donations. Although U.S. and British forces had hoped that relief efforts would help win support for their cause, most people at the scene Friday said they had far more immediate concerns, like thirst and hunger.

“Sure, I’d like freedom, sure, I’d like security,” Jaffar Lomarii, a tomato farmer and failed bookshop proprietor in the border town of Safwan, said with a plaintive glance at the crowd engulfing the aid truck.

“But most of all I’d like to drink some water,” he said.

Nasser Shami, 34, another farmer, gestured at the frenzy, which included several men punching each other and women complaining that they and their children had no chance at wresting any packages.

“If this is freedom, then we don’t want it,” Shami said.

As in Safwan on Wednesday, many residents were visibly angry at the way the food packages were handed out, accusing the Kuwaitis who brought the aid of deliberately humiliating them.

With electricity cut off, residents in Safwan and in towns to the north said they had heard little news about the wider war. And most seemed preoccupied with getting water and food.

But one man reported that he had heard that 17 Americans had recently surrendered at nearby Az Zubayr, news that drew a murmur of approval in his circle.

“Yes, that is good!” said Ahmed Jabber, who is unemployed. “We want the Iraqis to beat the Americans. We are Iraqis, after all.”

Mohammed Attul, a petrochemical worker, used an Arabic epithet to dismiss the notion that the foreign forces were here to liberate Iraq. “I don’t trust that at all,” he said. “They are coming to conquer us and take our oil. They are conquering us like Palestine.”

Some British commanders continued to express confidence that humanitarian aid would soon begin to flow more smoothly and convince Iraqis that the foreign troops were here to help.

The British supply ship Sir Galahad made its way into the port of Umm al Qasr on Friday, docking after a mine-sweeping team checked and cleared the waterway.

The ship has 100 tons of water and about 150 tons of rice, lentils, peas, cooking oil, sugar, tea and powdered milk. But one of the most important places to get the supplies to is Basra, and it was unclear Friday when that could take place.

“Basra is clearly nowhere near yet in our hands, and we have no way at the moment of getting humanitarian aid into Basra,” said Col. Chris Vernon, a British military spokesman.

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Magnier reported from the Basra airport and Verhovek from Safwan. Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Doha, Qatar, contributed to this report.