Kuwait: Free at Last! Free at Last!

By Bruce W. Nelan

On Feb. 27, six months and 25 days after Iraqi tanks crushed Kuwait beneath their treads, another column of armored vehicles rumbled into the capital city. This time the advancing forces were greeted with an outburst of exultation that rivaled the liberation of Paris during World War II. As columns of Kuwaiti and Saudi tanks and personnel carriers rolled up the battered, wreckage-strewn expressway into Kuwait City, civilian cars formed a convoy around them, horns honking, flags waving. Crowds along the way danced and chanted, "Allah akbar!" "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" and "Thank you, thank you!" Thousands swarmed onto the streets, embracing and kissing the arriving soldiers.

That joyful scene was staged amid the ruins of what had been a gleaming metropolis. It was backlighted by towering orange flames on the horizon where hundreds of oil wells, torched by fleeing Iraqis, continued to burn and block the midday sun with huge curtains of dense black smoke. The eerie pall was a visible symbol of the dark ordeal Kuwait had lived through during the Iraqi occupation and a final, horrifying week of murder, kidnapping and destruction.

Yet even the terrible memories could not still the celebration as the troops moved into the center of the city, where parking lots were carpeted with broken glass and scores of buildings that had been set on fire by Iraqi troops still smoldered. Members of the Kuwaiti resistance movement joined in the parade, shooting into the air with rifles from the back of pickup trucks. Saudi soldiers added to the din with bursts of machine-gun fire.

Everywhere the green-white-red-and-black Kuwaiti flag, which had been outlawed during the occupation, fluttered from buildings, bridges and hats. A baby dressed in an outfit made from the flag was held up to be kissed by the liberators. A woman in black robes blew kisses at U.S. Marine Lieut. General Walt Boomer, who rode atop one of the troop carriers. "We'll never see anything like this again in our lifetime," Boomer declared. "Makes you appreciate freedom, doesn't it?"

But with the joy came angry expressions of revenge and hatred. Newly liberated Kuwaitis began a campaign to eradicate every reminder of the occupation. They shredded, burned and even machine-gunned portraits of Saddam Hussein and Iraqi flags. A band of youths used a sledgehammer to demolish a sign marking the REPUBLIC OF IRAQ MINISTRY OF EDUCATION IN THE DISTRICT OF KUWAIT. Others spat on Iraqi bank notes, the only legal tender under Saddam's rule, and tossed them into a bonfire.

The angry mood was shared by many of the arriving soldiers and civilians. One of them, Mohammed Khayhe, a Saudi Information Ministry official, surveyed the cold, smoky darkness over the city. The electricity had gone off when the allied ground offensive began on Feb. 24, and cars were using their headlights in the choking billows from the oil fires. "It's like a nuclear winter," said Khayhe. "Now that Kuwait is free, it's not fit to live in."

That could be literally true. American specialists warn that the smoke, which is high in sulfur dioxide, can cause serious lung ailments, especially among the elderly and the very young living within 20 miles of the burning oil wells. Some scientists fear that the acrid plumes will climb into the stratosphere, darken the skies, lower temperatures and change the weather pattern of the entire gulf region. And, say oil experts, it might take until the end of 1991 to extinguish all 600 blazes.

The ferocity of the attack on the environment was matched by the depredations inflicted on the Kuwaiti people. The killing, torturing, kidnapping and theft that marked the entire occupation accelerated to an even more barbaric pace as the occupiers prepared to cut and run. The fleeing Iraqis apparently abducted thousands of Kuwaitis whose whereabouts remain unknown. Many Kuwaitis are convinced that the Iraqis dragged off the captives to use as bargaining chips in negotiations with the allies.

"My uncle was taken by the Iraqis on Thursday," Talal Attar, 29, an architectural engineer, said last week. "A lot of my friends and neighbors and cousins have disappeared." Enad al-Ban, a 24-year-old member of the resistance, said he was rounded up by the Iraqi security forces on Feb. 22 after he had finished Friday prayers at a mosque; he was one of hundreds of Kuwaitis taken almost at random by the security forces that day. "They were trying to catch any Kuwaiti they could," he said. "They put me in prison, and I was surprised to see that 3,000 others like me were also there."

Before Al-Ban managed to escape, he claimed, he witnessed a sickening display of savagery. "The Iraqis took a six-year-old girl as hostage," he said, and demanded a car and cash as ransom. "The parents gave them what they wanted. The Iraqis told them to come to the police station and asked them, 'Is this your child?' When they said yes, the Iraqis shot her dead in front of them."

Such tales strain credulity, both because they are so shocking and because every war produces stories of atrocities that are later called into question. But similar accounts were common in the liberated city, and there was no reason to doubt them. Almost everyone on the street last week spoke of losing a friend or family member. Resistance fighters who went to Adan Hospital, looking for five of their comrades who had been arrested, found their bodies. Said Tareq Ahmad, 23, a Kuwaiti air force sergeant serving in the resistance: "The Iraqis had drilled holes in their heads, and they had holes in their hands, feet and shoulders as if they had been crucified."

A Kuwaiti doctor too nervous to give his name told arriving journalists that Iraqis often dismembered prisoners before killing them. "Some of the bodies were missing noses," he said. "Some had their eyes taken out. What the Iraqis did was beyond belief."

As they began blowing up the oil wells, the Iraqis extended their scorched- earth policy throughout the city. They shelled and demolished government buildings including ministries and the parliament, the national museum, the main water-desalination plant, electrical generating plants, tank farms and water-storage towers.

A group of 40 Bangladeshis employed at the Meridien Hotel were living in its basement. On Feb. 23, they say, a squad of Iraqi troops stormed in and gave them 10 minutes to get out. "They parked two tanks in front of the hotel and shelled it," says Rafiq Islam Bulu, 29, from Dhaka. "When we came back, it was on fire." The Bangladeshis, he adds, lost everything they owned. That night the Iraqis also destroyed the offices of Air France and Saudi Arabian Airlines, the Gulf Bank and Kuwait's largest building, al-Montana complex.

Captured Iraqi soldiers try to blame the brutalities on Saddam. Last week the resistance was holding 16 of them, ages 18 to 47, at a small house in a Kuwait City suburb. An antiaircraft gun stood in the garden, and the garage was stacked with grenades and ammunition boxes, one of which bore the logo of the Jordanian armed forces.

The prisoners, all reservists, said they had eaten only rice and bread containing sawdust for months. They also claimed they were terrorized by the Kwat al-Khasa, the Iraqi special forces, who threatened to kill them if they tried to desert. How could these pathetic men explain the atrocities committed by Iraqis in Kuwait? "We are the victims of this war," said one soldier who gave his name only as Ali. "One man ruled everything. He sent us to Kuwait, which is a friend and an Arab country. He did it out of envy." Another chimed in, "Saddam is a bloody man. He likes to see blood everywhere."

To Kuwaitis, though, the Iraqi army is a band of criminals. "Soldiers is not the word for them," said Ali Abdul Karim, one of those celebrating freedom last week. "Thieves is the word." The occupying troops would spot a car or a house they liked and simply seize it, pretending it was being requisitioned for the army.

When the Iraqis finally pulled out on Feb. 26, Kuwait City residents were alerted by the early morning roar of engines revving. "They were in a hurry," says Jemal al-Mansour, a police lieutenant. "They were shouting at one another." Many of them simply stole cars, loaded them with looted television sets, dresses, china or anything else of value they could lay their hands on, and headed toward Iraq. Thousands of them ended up in a gigantic traffic jam, where allied planes and helicopters bombed and burned them into a tangle of wreckage miles long.

Second only to the Iraqis as a target of Kuwaiti rage are the more than 300,000 Palestinians who lived and worked in Kuwait before the invasion. Because the Palestine Liberation Organization allied itself with Saddam, Iraqi forces in Kuwait treated many local Palestinians as a kind of auxiliary force. They helped administer and police the country and were rewarded with special privileges. Palestinians manned checkpoints, for example, and were permitted to sell consumer goods in street stalls, something that was illegal before the war.

Kuwaitis today insist that the Iraqis were able to round up and execute large numbers of military and police officers because Palestinian informers led them to the right addresses. "Palestinians are no good," says Hiyam al- Bushehery, 24, a student. "They stood in the street and betrayed people at checkpoints. They told the Iraqis who was in the police."

Now the checkpoints the Palestinians used to man jointly with Iraqis are held by members of the Kuwaiti resistance, heavily armed with captured weapons. Palestinians who are found carrying Iraqi-issued identity cards are arrested and taken to the police stations, which are also controlled by the resistance. Rumors and warnings that a massacre might be in the offing spread through the city.

Preventing bloody reprisals against the Palestinians is one of the returning government's highest priorities. Sheik Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti Crown Prince and Prime Minister, pointed out in January that "some of the Palestinians did collaborate with the Iraqi troops. We shall check on the names of these people, whom the Kuwaitis inside know very well." But he added, "I don't want to blame all the Palestinians. There are many who stood shoulder to shoulder with the Kuwaitis." Resistance leaders say 5% or so of their members were Palestinians.

Such reassurances have failed to quiet the fears of the estimated 200,000 Palestinians who remain in Kuwait City, with their doors locked and windows taped. They are afraid of more violence like the resistance's bazooka attack on the P.L.O.'s embassy on Feb. 24, which left the building gutted and blackened. More than 10,000 Palestinians fled to Iraq in recent weeks.

Anarchy has not taken over, but the enforcement of law and order is shaky. In an effort to keep the lid on, the Kuwaiti government-in-exile declared a three-month period of martial law. Returning officials are pushing hard to get policemen and public-security officers back into Kuwait as soon as allied officers have sounded the all clear. The American and British embassies have already reopened, with ambassadors in residence, though U.S. Special Forces insisted on combing the grounds for booby traps. British Ambassador Michael Weston said after a quick look around the city, "Barbaric is too weak a word to describe the behavior of the Iraqis in Kuwait." Other would-be returnees, however, have been told they must wait out the three months needed to re- establish the government and its authority.

This has not gone down well with Kuwaitis outside the country. Embassies in all the gulf states were mobbed by citizens trying to return. They are not persuaded by explanations that repatriation will be arranged on the basis of a Kuwaiti's usefulness to the reconstruction. A group of men at the Kuwaiti embassy in Bahrain complained bitterly. "It is my country as much as it is theirs," said one. "I want to go back and look at my house." Said another: "They say there is no food or water. I will take my own."

Members of the small democratic opposition movement among Kuwaiti exiles are even more outspoken, charging that they are deliberately being kept away so the Sabah family can regain autocratic power. In fact, the return of the royal family is almost automatic, because restoration of the country's legitimate government was demanded by the U.N. Security Council's resolutions. The open question is whether that government will revive its canceled experiment with an elected national assembly and take other steps toward democracy.

For those Kuwaitis who spent the war in their own country, a more pressing concern was repairing their shattered lives. Late one night, 20 of them sat on a carpet in a house in Kuwait City, as General Norman Schwarzkopf's briefing on the war's final offensive flickered on a television set powered by a portable generator. It was confusing, one said, because "the Iraqis lied to us about everything. We don't know what to believe now." The only certainty was that Kuwait at last is free.

With reporting by William Dowell and Lara Marlowe/Kuwait City