Iraq Army Units Under Strength, POWs Report

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia —  More than a quarter of the positions in Iraq’s regular army in Kuwait are either deserted or unmanned, raising serious questions about Iraq’s ability to defend against a ground assault, according to reports from allied officials who have debriefed Iraqi defectors in Saudi Arabia.

The interviews, according to a senior government source familiar with the reports, also reveal that the small Iraqi contingent that launched an ill-fated invasion on the Saudi border city of Khafji last week expected to be joined by a full army division.

The reports, which U.S. officials are reviewing with cautious skepticism, seem to indicate that command and control of Iraqi troops in southern Kuwait has been disrupted, although only some units are experiencing severe shortages of basic supplies, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The prisoners reportedly have told allied officials that an estimated one-fourth to one-third of the troops in Iraq’s regular army in Kuwait have either defected, been taken prisoner, suffered casualties or simply fled their positions. Many of them are reportedly returning to cities in Iraq from which they were drafted into the army.

The estimates include only the regular army in Kuwait, approximately 395,000 troops, and do not include Iraq’s more highly regarded Republican Guard units that have been the targets of the heaviest allied bombing assaults in southern Iraq and northern Kuwait.

“You have massive desertions in Kuwait,” said the official familiar with the reports. While not all of the deserters are crossing the border into Saudi Arabia, he said, there has been a gradual increase in the number of line crossers and an increase in the number of officers among them.

A total of 51 officers have deserted or surrendered, officials say. Two officers were among 23 new prisoners of war taken on Tuesday. Included among those defectors, according to a senior allied military source, were six soldiers who crossed into Saudi Arabia in a Land Rover. The highest-ranking Iraqi officer in allied hands reportedly is a major.

Iraqi prisoners have said that the abortive invasion of Khafji on the night of Jan. 29 turned into a disaster when an estimated 1,500 to 3,000 Iraqi troops stormed into the city in tanks and armored personnel carriers, expecting to be joined by a full division of at least 15,000 men, according to the official.

The Saudi army, which fought for nearly two days alongside Qatari forces and was supported by U.S. artillery and air power to dislodge the Iraqi invaders from Khafji, has reported that 30 Iraqis were killed, 33 wounded and about 400 captured.

“The people who went into Khafji thought a whole division was going to come in with them,” said the official familiar with the reports. “The problem was a combination of the others either not being able to go or able to be mobilized.

“Their whole command structure has been disrupted,” he continued. “A lot of the reaction we get from the POWs is that, overall, the morale doesn’t seem to be very high.”

In the three weeks since the war began, the more than 850 Iraqis who either have deserted or have been taken prisoner have painted a picture of a regular army that is undersupplied, battered, in some cases confused--and perhaps beginning to raise questions about the leadership in Baghdad.

An officer among the group surrendering Tuesday announced: “Kill Saddam and this will stop.”

U.S. officials have treated reports from Iraqi POWs with some skepticism, in part because most individual prisoners are not in a position to know about military conditions throughout the theater.

However, reports of poor supplies and substantial desertions have been widespread and from a wide variety of quarters, officials said.

“The question is, are they just saying this, or is it really an accurate assessment of what the Iraqi condition is,” said Maj. Mac Balod, a U.S. Army spokesman in Riyadh. “When you start getting stories that match up, you can pretty much paint a picture of the validity of what they’re saying. In many cases, their stories have collaborated with others, and so there is obviously some validity to what they’re saying.”

Prisoner reports on supplies getting into southern Kuwait are mixed. Troops from some units reported that they still have adequate supplies, but others complained that they have little or no food and supplies, according to the official.

“The thing we’ve noticed over the past week or so,” he said, “is they’re becoming worried about supplies not getting to the front line. What we see going on in terms of the supply lines, when the supply lines were hit the first week or 10 days of the war, it takes about a week to realize that they’re running out of stuff, and as time goes by they’re finding out they’re using up things--they don’t have any more left.”

The lack of supplies seems to have been a major motivating factor in many of the defections, he said. “If they have no supplies, what are they going to do? Either starve to death, come out and charge across the border or come out and surrender. . . . A lot of them are saying we’re completely out of supplies, we’re not stocked and we’re not fed. Others are saying we have enough supplies, but what does enough mean? The bottom line is, if you’re consuming and you’re not getting anything to compensate, you’re going to run out.”

Large numbers of troops have reported they are ill-fed, perhaps receiving only one meal a day. In interviews with Saudi journalists, reported in Saudi Arabic-language newspapers, Iraqi soldiers captured at Khafji said they took no food with them into their 36-hour siege of the town, and many said they had not eaten before the battle.

One of the soldiers said there were thousands more behind in Kuwait who wanted to surrender but were afraid to do so because Iraqi intelligence officers were monitoring the activities of troops in southern Kuwait.

A Saudi government official, who visited Iraqi soldiers captured at Khafji, said that most of them appeared very hungry, so he passed a tin of biscuits to the prisoners.

“I handed it down, and all the hands grabbed,” he said. The man who got the tin “wasn’t even chewing; he just swallowed them, one by one. I could hardly stand to watch it.” The soldier, he said, was “young, tired.”

Combat pool reporters interviewed troops from the Army’s 1st Infantry Division, which captured four Iraqi soldiers last week after a strange nighttime encounter at the border.

As the Iraqi troops came into view, “they stopped about a hundred meters out and buried their hand grenades,” recalled Capt. Michael Bills. “Then they just kept walking toward our lines.”

The waiting U.S. crew, in a Bradley fighting vehicle, opened fire on either side of the Iraqis with a light machine gun and fired another gun over their heads.

“At that point, they all four went into the dying cockroach mode,” said Sgt. 1st Class Chris Maturich. “They went down on their backs and their arms and legs were twitching.”

Once it was determined that the soldiers were surrendering, they were taken into custody. They appeared to be starving and were fed, Maturich said. “They really tore into the (rations) we gave them,” he said. “They ate everything, even the packs of salt and sugar. They swallowed the Chiclets whole. I guess they didn’t know it was gum.”

Asked if the allies are prepared to handle and feed potentially thousands of POWs, a senior U.S. military official said, “We have in place the capacity to handle what we think probably will be the (POW) responsibility we will have to handle.”

Recent prisoners say they learned how to turn themselves in by reading one of the estimated 14 million leaflets prepared by U.S. psychological operations officers and dropped over Iraqi forces in southern Kuwait. Many of the deserters have been found with the leaflets in their pockets, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.

However, a Saudi government official said the leaflets and accompanying radio broadcasts into Kuwait may have backfired in at least one case. They recommend that tank crews attempting to defect approach allied forces with their gun turrets reversed, he said. Iraqi soldiers entered Khafji with the turrets on their tanks pointing backwards, then re-aimed the turrets and opened fire.

Now, the Saudi official said, allied forces are recommending that Iraqi troops walk in front of tanks with which they are attempting to defect.