Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 6, 1991                   TAG: 9103060280
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: AMMAN, JORDAN                                LENGTH: Medium

CIVIL WAR SPREADING IN IRAQ/ REPUBLICAN GUARD FIGHT REBEL TROOPS

U.S. military sources in Saudi Arabia said thousands of rebels were battling Saddam's forces for control of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, and fighting was raging in at least four other cities.

Rear Adm. Mike McConnell, intelligence director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Washington that "chaotic and spontaneous" unrest apparently had spread to 13 cities. He predicted Saddam would quash the uprising because of the "lack of organization and leadership" among the insurgents, but he said, "I think in the long term, Saddam . . . is going to find it difficult to maintain his control."

McConnell said forces loyal to Saddam had used tanks, artillery and heavy weapons against some of the insurgents or buildings they have occupied.

Reports from Iraqi Kurdish rebel leaders in Syria said fighting had erupted in northern Iraq. They said the government had lost control of Irbil, a city of 900,000, and six other towns. There was no independent verification, but the reports coincided with Syrian encouragement of Iraqi opposition groups.

Amid widespread reports that Iran's Shiite government is supporting the rebellion in the south, Iraq sent Deputy Prime Minister Saadoun Hammadi to Tehran Tuesday on a surprise visit. Iran's official IRNA news agency said Hammadi brought a message from Saddam for Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but it gave no details.

IRNA said, however, that Rafsanjani, in a telephone conversation later with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, "expressed concern over the unrest in Iraq as well as the exodus of Iraqi people living in border areas to Iran," and said, "The best thing the multinational forces can do is to quickly withdraw from the region and let the countries of the region solve their problems themselves."

Earlier, Iraq's official Baghdad radio accused the U.S.-led allied force of provoking the uprising through a "conspiracy" it said was aimed at "striking at Iraq's growing power" and trying to "disturb" its "security and national unity."

Refugees said Islamic revolutionaries, heartened by Saddam's defeat in Kuwait, are now under pressure from Republican Guard units and are running out of ammunition, according to news agency dispatches from Safwan, a town near the Kuwaiti border in southern Iraq that is still under allied control.

The refugees said the guards, known to be fiercely loyal to Saddam, were regaining access to Basra after it was reported to have fallen to opposition Shiite militants over the weekend.

The sources said the Basra showdown involved between 4,000 and 5,000 fighters. Anti-Saddam forces included regular troops pitted against the Republican Guards, the American military source in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, said, in the first report of dissension in Iraqi military ranks.

"You get the sense it's growing," the source said. "Tanks are squaring off. It's platoon versus platoon. On one street corner you will see three tanks combat-parked, and at the other end of the street tanks aiming back at them."

Because Iraq has banned travel into the area by foreign journalists, it is impossible to verify the various accounts.

In what was seen here as an attempt to win support, Baghdad radio reported late Tuesday afternoon that Saddam has ordered his commerce minister to increase the portions allotted by ration cards, which are usually handed out only to members of the military.

Iraq's Islamic holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, also swept up in the uprising, fell to local opponents of the regime, according to unconfirmed reports by the official Iranian News Agency IRNA. The two cities, leading centers for scholars of Islamic theology in Iraq's Shiite heartland, have served as havens to exiled Iranian religious leaders in the past and have traditionally opposed the secularist Baathist rulers in Baghdad.

Refugees streaming into Safwan, the closest that Western correspondents traveling from Kuwait can approach to the area of the fighting, said the Republican Guard had surrounded and sealed off the town of Zubayr, about 20 miles north of Safwan and 10 miles south of Basra.

An Iraqi engineer who fled from Zubayr said he had seen two helicopters strafing civilians. He told of "fighting, stealing, killing" taking place in southern Iraq.