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Ambitious travelers journey about 30 miles toward Basra to see the remains of a convoy of fleeing Iraqi vehicles destroyed by allied aircraft. At the Iraqi border last week, tragedy was replaced by joy. Several thousand Kuwaitis were kidnapped by Iraqi soldiers in the last days of the occupation; last Friday Baghdad suddenly released about 1,175, transporting them back to Kuwait City in trucks bearing the seal of the Republican Guard. Most had been held at a military barrack near Basra, squeezed in so tight that they were forced to take turns sleeping. For the first three days, they were given no food or water. From then on, they subsisted on a single rock-hard roll a day.
Those who show up at the border are usually a bedraggled lot. At night they look like ghostly figures, small bands of refugees suddenly illuminated by the headlights of military convoys. Mostly they are expatriates or foreigners who lived in Iraq and are fleeing the anti-Saddam violence. Thousands of Egyptians, for example, are being deported. Mohammed el-Habal, 65, is one of about a dozen Egyptians who camped near the border last week, waiting for his status to be determined. "The Republican Guard told us that if Egypt had stayed with Iraq, if we had supported Iraq, we would not have been turned out," says el-Habal, who reports that some of his compatriots have been murdered by Iraqis.
The plight of Iraqis who lived in Kuwait before the war and who are now trying to return to Kuwait is even more desperate. Men, women and children are encamped near the border highway. U.S. soldiers have given them rations, but they have no water. On a cold, rainy night last week, the Iraqis huddled around campfires. The horizon was lit by the flames of the burning oil fields. In her tattooed hands, Fadiyah Saad held her new granddaughter, born by the roadside on March 5. The family was debating whether to name the child Hudud (borders) or Istiqlal (independence).
With Kuwait independent again, some of those who stayed behind yearn for aspects of the occupation. Supplies were more plentiful then, and those who had previously felt themselves to be mere employees of a business called Kuwait Inc. banded together as a nation. "For the first time," says Ali Salem, a resistance leader, "all barriers were breached. Shi'ite Muslims, who have long been discriminated against by the Sunni majority, were major players, perhaps even the most significant. We were, at least for that time, truly one."
There were approximately 60 resistance groups operating at any given time, each with 40 to 50 members. The head of each cell knew his opposite number in other units, but his subordinates did not know one another. Elaborate codes were developed to fool eavesdropping Iraqis. Young girls carried bullets in their underwear. Fake identifications were common. A sophisticated printing operation was hidden a block from the headquarters of Iraq's secret police.
In addition to the organized resistance, many Kuwaitis operated on their own. Since Iraqi soldiers examining cars at checkpoints frequently stole whatever was in sight, some Kuwaitis added rat poison to bottles of orange juice and then hid them in the trunk. Iraqi sentries would discover and seize the bottles -- and presumably drink the tainted liquid later.