Iraqi Defectors Fly 6 Copters to Saudi Arabia

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia —  Six Iraqi military helicopters crossed into Saudi Arabia on Monday and landed near a coastal town in the first major defection from Iraq’s armed forces involving aircraft, military and government sources here said.

Four of the helicopters landed at the Saudi town of Ras al Khafji, on the Persian Gulf coast about 10 miles from the Kuwaiti border, and their occupants sought political asylum there, the sources said. Two others ran out of fuel and landed in the Saudi desert short of Ras al Khafji.

In Washington, the Defense Department said the defections offer Saudi and American intelligence officials their first and perhaps most significant access to Iraqi officers who would play a key role in any conflict with U.S. and allied forces.

Although it was not clear whether the helicopters were Iraqi gunships or troop transport aircraft, U.S. defense officials said the officers flying either type of craft would likely be important sources of information about the readiness of Iraqi forces and their plans for the defense of Kuwaiti territory. The Iraqi military has about 500 helicopters, about 160 of them armed.

There was no word on how many people were aboard the six aircraft.

U.S. defense officials Monday night stopped short of stating conclusively that the border crossing was a defection, saying the aircraft might have unintentionally strayed off course. But privately, the officials appeared confident that the Iraqis intended to defect.

Although Arab forces along the Saudi border have received a steady flow of defectors from Iraqi ground troops, most of them have been low-ranking enlisted personnel, unlike the Iraqi chopper pilots.

More than 400 Iraqi soldiers have reportedly defected to Saudi Arabia in the months since Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, and large numbers also have fled into Turkey. But Monday night’s incident represented the first defection of pilots with aircraft and was described by one official here as a “very significant” sign that morale may be lagging within the Iraqi armed forces with the approach of the United Nations’ Jan. 15 deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

“So far, the defections we’ve had were basically people coming across the border. Now we have major equipment coming across,” the official said.

“The argument has been made that if (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein is hit, his military will not fight, that large portions of his military will desert, that if given a chance, they don’t want to fight,” he said. “This supports that in a very dramatic way.”

The Iraqi helicopters were first detected on Saudi Arabia’s air defense system about 60 miles north of the Saudi-Iraqi border, and the aircraft were asked to identify themselves by radio as they neared the border region, said a source familiar with the incident.

A Saudi F-15 jet fighter patrolling the border area intercepted four of the aircraft as they crossed the border and escorted them to a landing site at Ras al Khafji, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said.

“They picked them up on the air defense system, and they asked them to identify themselves, and they said, ‘We want to flee. We want to come over,’ so they had them come over,” he said.

The Iraqi News Agency denied Monday night that any defections took place. It called the reports “part of the attempts by the United States to create confusion and the wishful thinking of the losers cooperating with it.”

A Saudi source said the occupants of all six aircraft were quickly granted asylum. “We would be stupid not to,” he said.

An estimated 530,000 Iraqi troops are now in Kuwait and southern Iraq, and reports of poor supplies and low morale among the Iraqi forces have circulated for months. Kuwaiti refugees have described Iraqi soldiers stopping cars and entering houses looking for food.

The apparent defections are the latest of a number of reports of turmoil within the Iraqi armed forces, said to be spawned by opposition to the invasion of Kuwait on the part of some members of the army.

The former Iraqi chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Nizar Khazraji, was abruptly dismissed in November from the post he had occupied since 1985. Diplomatic sources in Baghdad later reported that Khazraji and other officers had been executed for plotting against President Hussein.

Egyptian newspapers reported the execution of a large number of Iraqi officers shortly after the invasion, but Iraqi officials denied the reports, and there has been no independent confirmation.

Khazraji was replaced by Gen. Hussein Rashid, former commander of Iraq’s elite Republican Guards and deputy chief of staff for operations.

Last month, Defense Minister Abdul-Jabar Shanshal, 70, was dismissed and replaced with the armed forces’ inspector-general, Lt. Gen. Saadi Tuma Jubouri. Iraqi officials cited Shanshal’s advancing age as the reason for the dismissal.

U.S. defense officials said that American or Saudi AWACS radar surveillance aircraft circling high over Saudi Arabia would have detected the choppers as they rose from their airfields and flew toward the border.

Under rules of engagement devised in the early days of Operation Desert Shield, the decision to let the Iraqi helicopters land rather than to engage them as hostile intruders would have fallen to Saudi military officials.

U.S. Air Force officials acknowledged that unless an Iraqi aircraft presents an immediate danger to U.S. pilots, Saudi officers aboard the AWACS plane and on the ground would have the final word in identifying a suspect aircraft as hostile or friendly. The conservative rules of engagement were devised to minimize the likelihood that an American pilot would initiate a hostile action against Iraq.

The defections highlight long-running concerns on the part of U.S. commanders in Saudi Arabia over how to deal with Iraqi aircraft penetrating the Saudi border in possible search of refuge.

The aerial border crossing came as Iraq’s tactical warplanes, for months virtually grounded inside Iraq, have stepped up their training activities. Intelligence experts have said that President Hussein made minimal use of his air force during his 1980-88 war with Iran, in part because he feared that some pilots would defect.

As Iraq’s aircraft increase their time in the air, officials said they foresee greater opportunities for future intelligence coups as Iraqi pilots get the chance to make a dash for the border. But they stressed that with such opportunities come the danger that a bomb-laden warplane could gain access to Saudi airfields in the guise of a defector.

Murphy reported from Dhahran and Healy from Washington.