Kuwait: Waiting for Liberation

By MICHAEL KRAMER/TAIF

Here, finally, was a Saddam surprise, an Iraqi action that U.S. contingency planners had minimized before the war began. When Iraqi troops began pumping oil into the Persian Gulf from Sea Island, an offshore loading facility near Al-Ahmadi last week, Baghdad's motives were instantly clear to Saudi Arabia and to the Kuwaiti government-in-exile. In Taif, Saudi Arabia, where the Kuwaiti administration has settled for the time being, experts plotted the prevailing currents in the gulf and concluded that in only a few days the giant spill could reach Jubail, Saudi Arabia. That is where a mammoth desalinization plant provides much of the potable water consumed in the kingdom's eastern province -- a military target if ever there was one.

Whatever the allied response might be, none could be undertaken without a go-ahead from the Kuwaitis. So at 10 a.m. last Friday, intense consultations began. Some argued for blowing Sea Island to smithereens. Others demurred, estimating that it could take two years to rebuild the facility. Most of the oil would dissipate anyway, they claimed, and floating booms placed near Jubail could capture the residue before the desalinization plant was seriously threatened. By Saturday morning, the options ranged from an air strike on Al- Ahmadi to a special-operations action designed to stanch the spill, but no decision had been reached.

Such is the course of the gulf war. The coalition's air and naval forces have a free hand in conducting battle, but only after nonmilitary sensitivities are accommodated. Just as the alliance is trying to avoid civilian casualties, so too it is eager to save as much of Kuwait's infrastructure as possible.

Inside Kuwait, meanwhile, resistance members wait. When the war started, techno-euphoria erupted. As they watched the CNN telecasts from Dubai, they marveled at the allied coalition's precision weapons. Expecting almost instant liberation, they began to joke. "We told each other we were going to beat the record," said Ali Salem, one of the resistance leaders. Israel took six days to defeat an Arab coalition during the 1967 war; now, the Kuwaitis predicted, the U.S. would show Israel how it could be done in even less time.

That was before the alliance's strategy became clear, however. "Driving Saddam from our country is only good if we also make sure he can never come back," a Kuwaiti minister said last week. "If the Iraqis in Kuwait had been hit without mercy early on, it might have forced a pullback, and Saddam could have kept his war abilities intact. It's slower this way -- going after his capacities in Iraq before turning to the occupation forces -- but it is the best way to meet the ultimate objective."

Salem, 35, was studying at Stanford University when Saddam's forces moved into Kuwait. Within 48 hours Salem was back home in Kuwait City. Today, with his wife and three children safe in Cairo, he coordinates food distribution in the city, keeps tabs on foreigners still hiding there and funnels intelligence reports to Taif.

In several conversations with Salem, who was speaking by satellite phone from Kuwait City, a portrait of life there emerged. "We still have water and power," he reported last week, "so we are better off here than in Baghdad. But the Iraqis cut off gas on Thursday, and they are back to their old ways. Eleven Kuwaitis were executed on Wednesday and Thursday, and house-to-house searches, which had fallen off since the war started, have now picked up again." According to Salem, the Iraqis are still hunting the few remaining foreigners in Kuwait City, and reports of Iraqi defections to the resistance have been exaggerated. "What can we do with them?" he asks. "I think the word has gotten out that we cannot hide them, so with no one to surrender to, they wait for the allies to arrive."

Also overblown, says Salem, are reports that Kuwait's hospitals are full of Iraqi casualties. "There are perhaps 200," he says, "but not thousands, as we know you have heard. On the other hand, our people say that the hospitals in Basra are indeed full. It seems that the Iraqis are taking their wounded home."

On instructions from the government-in-exile in Taif, the resistance has for the most part ceased sniping at the Iraqi occupiers. But scattered automatic- weapons gunfire can be heard in Kuwait City about once every two days. "Some targets," Salem explains, "are just too tempting."

Other resistance fighters report that Iraq's Republican Guards are being hit as hard by allied air attacks as the Pentagon's briefers say. "We hear it, and in some cases we see it," says one, "and the road to Basra is busy. Palestinians who have helped the Iraqis are fleeing Kuwait, and Kuwaitis who fled to Basra are coming back because the U.S. bombing of southern Iraq and northern Kuwait has become so heavy that it's safer to be back here."

But not completely safe. "Someone is coming," Salem said last Friday at 7:30 p.m. "Call back tomorrow or Sunday. I'll be here, I hope."