Where Shadows Are Dark

By Jill Smolowe

Several days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, a clandestine radio station passed word that a satellite would pass over Kuwait City at midnight and snap photographs. The message instructed citizens to go to their roofs to demonstrate their opposition to Saddam Hussein. As improbable as that scenario might sound, thousands of Kuwaitis climbed to the tops of buildings at midnight and unfurled huge banners in Arabic and English -- the letters three feet high -- reading KUWAIT FOR US, NOT FOR THE IRAQIS! and WE DIE AND KUWAIT LIVES! Despite the bursts from automatic weapons fired into the air by nervous Iraqi soldiers, Kuwaitis stayed for an hour, waving their banners and shouting, "Allah akbar!" (God is great!).

That brief, exhilarating moment of national defiance went unseen and unheard by the world. Each day Kuwait grows more isolated as the Iraqi occupiers cut off the last few lines of telephone communication. Even the dozens of Kuwaiti refugees in Saudi Arabia who call home by mobile cellular phone can rarely get through. Citizens and foreign residents must rely on friends and relatives who have escaped the country to bear their message of despair. Although the tide of refugees is drying up as Iraqis reportedly mine the desert roads, each day brings another exhausted traveler on the run with fresh news about life inside Kuwait. As in every war, it is difficult to know if these stories are true. But taken together, the accounts suggest that despite the country's initial spirited defiance, Kuwait is now living on the edge of its nerves.

Saddam is slowly choking all life out of Kuwait. People stay in their homes, afraid to venture into the streets, where garbage smolders and the shells of stripped and abandoned cars, many of them disabled Iraqi military vehicles, glisten beneath the sun. Refugees report a deepening water shortage, and there is concern that the all-important desalinization plant is not being properly attended to. "There is no maintenance," says a Kuwaiti refugee in Saudi Arabia. "Sooner or later everything is going to break down."

Food supplies are dwindling, propelled by widespread hoarding. There seem to be stocks of staples to last several more weeks, but fresh fruits and vegetables are quickly disappearing. Poorly equipped Iraqi soldiers, who apparently have little or no food with them, have their own answers to the shortages. The invading forces, which were disciplined and relatively well behaved, knocked on Kuwaitis' doors to ask for handouts. Those troops are gone now, replaced by a scruffy army of "volunteers," mostly teenagers and retirees armed with AK-47s. They simply enter houses and take food. They seem to regard their mission as a nasty game of Supermarket Sweepstakes. Ron Jack, an American escapee who watched Iraqi forces pillage a giant Kuwaiti store, says, "They went straight for the hi-fis and televisions." Other troops have piled 12-wheelers high with Kuwaiti munitions and missiles.

Hard-to-confirm tales of destruction and rape abound. Saddam, who knows that such reports undermine his claim to have restored law-and-order in Kuwait, has introduced summary trial and execution for looters. Hamza Hendawi, a Reuters correspondent who escaped from Kuwait last week, reports that as a warning to thieves, Iraqi forces strung up the body of an executed lieutenant colonel on a crane and left it dangling outside Kuwait's municipal headquarters. A placard around the corpse's neck read HE STOLE THE MONEY OF THE PEOPLE. Beneath the body were piled stolen clothes and electrical goods. According to the Washington Post, the officer may actually have been punished for leading a dissident group in a clash with other Iraqi forces.

Kuwaitis' fears have not translated into collaboration. They have ignored Saddam's back-to-work orders, keeping most businesses, government offices and banks closed. So far, Iraq has been unable to identify any Kuwaitis willing to serve in official positions. The "new" government that was paraded before cameras shortly after Iraq's invasion has not been seen since.

There is a Kuwaiti resistance movement, but its effectiveness is difficult to assess. A refugee in Saudi Arabia who identifies himself only as Hussein says Kuwaiti soldiers and police distributed weapons to citizens on the day of the invasion, but there is a shortage of bullets. Refugees say that resistance groups mount hit-and-run attacks by night, targeting small units of Iraqi soldiers and military convoys with Molotov cocktails and hand grenades. When Iraq's intelligence service arrived in Kuwait City with a list of names and addresses of Kuwaiti army officers, civilians went around the city removing house numbers and street signs to thwart arrests.

Last week Kuwait's crown prince told reporters in the Saudi capital of Riyadh that refugees are forming a liberation army. While any such force is unlikely to pose a threat to Iraq's occupying army, Saddam may face a challenge from within his own ranks. Many refugees tell of encounters with Iraqi soldiers who expressed embarrassment about their invasion and begged Kuwaitis to forgive them. "Some said they thought they were being sent to ) fight against Israel," says Youssef, a refugee in Saudi Arabia. An escaped Bedouin woman says, "The soldiers told us they were afraid that their families would be killed in Iraq if they refused to fight." If troop morale is low, it is not surprising that some soldiers are donning civilian clothes and trying to blend into the Kuwaiti population, while others have attempted to escape to Saudi Arabia.

As Saddam moves quickly to seal all escape outlets, Kuwaitis and the remaining foreigners, who include some 2,500 Americans, will be in for tougher times. Baghdad Radio has warned Kuwaiti citizens that they will face "the severest of punishments" if they provide Westerners with shelter. Meanwhile, Saddam is filling Kuwait with thousands of Iraqis, who arrive in trucks with all their belongings and orders to take up residence in abandoned apartments. "By the time Saddam has finished," says a refugee in Saudi Arabia, "the population will be completely different." And Kuwait may well be a place no Kuwaiti would want to live in.

With reporting by William Dowell/Al Khafji and Jay Peterzell/Saudi Arabia