Mar. 22, 2003. 06:21 AM
'I don't feel shame for surrendering'
SANDRO CONTENTA
IN IRAQ
SULAYMANIYA, Iraq—Five days ago, Iraqi officers told the poorly fed soldiers in Battalion No. 2 that anyone trying to escape would be arrested and shot in front of his family's home.
The next day, at midnight, Moushraq Ahmed Hashem and three others crawled out of their desert bunkers south of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
Despite the warning, they walked single file through a 25-metre-long minefield, and broke into a run when machine-gun rounds from the guards on duty whistled past.
Hours later, waving a white T-shirt, they surrendered to startled Bedouins, who turned them over to Kurdish rebel militias in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
And so ended what Hashem and his fellow ex-soldiers described as a miserable, poverty-stricken existence in an Iraqi battalion, facing war against a superpower.
"If we stay and fight, we die. If we run, we might die, but at least we have a chance," said Hashem, 19.
Besides, he added, "Why would we fight the Americans if they are coming here to liberate us?
"Why defend Saddam's regime if it is a bad regime," he said in an interview yesterday.
When they surrendered four days ago, two days before the U.S. and Britain launched their war against Iraq, Hashem and his friends may have been the first Iraqi soldiers to give themselves up.
Yesterday, U.S. officials said thousands had surrendered as American forces barrelled into Iraq from Kuwait, pushing toward Baghdad.
"Morale is very low — even among officers," Hashem said. "When an attack comes their way, everyone will surrender."
Hashem sat in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's main security office in Sulaymaniya, in the eastern part of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, largely kept out of the Iraqi army's reach since 1991 by patrolling U.S and British warplanes.
With him were Bassem Salah Madloule, 27, and Abass Fahad Mohsin, 21. A fourth who ran away with them was not present.
All three are from Basra, in southern Iraq, and all three are Shiite Muslims. Shiites are a majority of Iraq's 22 million people, and have long been oppressed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.
Their poverty was apparent in their clothes, and their relief at being out of the Iraqi army in their animated stories about their former military lives.
They were soldiers in infantry Division 15, within Brigade 436, in Battalion 2. They were stationed about 200 kilometres north of Baghdad, and their main duty was to protect the strategic Baghdad-Kirkuk highway.
Behind them, to the north, were the Kirkuk oilfields, Iraq's most productive. To the south was the capital, where Saddam may make his final stand, and in front of them were Kalar and Kifri, towns controlled by Kurdish rebel militias.
Three months ago, when the U.S. was making its intentions for war clear, they said officers ordered the soldiers to hand over their civilian clothes and underwear. They put them in a pile and lit a big bonfire.
"They thought we wouldn't run away if we didn't have civilian clothes," said Mohsin.
Three of the deserters managed to hide some clothes and use them for their escape, but Mohsin had to hightail it in his green soldier's uniform and a torn and dirty white coat.
To keep them in their bunkers, officers constantly told them war would not break out. But the soldiers knew better.
At night, in the darkness of bunkers big enough for four soldiers, they would secretly listen to American military broadcasts from Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes, on radios they were forbidden to have.
All three seemed quite informed about speeches from President George W. Bush and debates about U.N. weapons inspections on the Security Council.
Facing war against the U.S. was bad enough, but Iraqi military life, the young men said, was even worse.
They said they were each paid monthly salaries equivalent to about $4 (U.S.). As war approached, the Iraqi government more than tripled their salaries in a bid to keep soldiers from fleeing.
Their daily meals consisted of two buns of bread, soup, and dates.
"Meat? Never," said Hashem. "The officers told us we would get mad cow disease."
The last 60 days before their escape seemed an endless, backbreaking routine. They got up each morning at 5 a.m. and were bussed just south of Kirkuk. For the next 12 hours they dug lines of trenches one behind the other, to be used for retreating troops in battle.
Any failure of duty was punished by jail, or a shaved head.
"And you even had to pay for the razor," Hashem said.
Each soldier, the men said, was armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and 120 bullets. The heaviest artillery in their battalion were 82-mm cannon, many in such bad shape they might shoot or explode.
They said they never saw chemical weapons, or heard talk of them. But all were convinced Saddam has ordered explosives placed on all of Iraq's major oil wells. "Everyone knows that Saddam will blow them up," Hashem said.
"I don't feel shame for surrendering," Madloule said. "What's shameful is defending the regime. Every family in Iraq has someone that was killed by Saddam's regime."
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