Iraq Armed Forces Kuwait

En route to Mediterranean: Aircraft carrier Saratoga, the battleship Wisconsin, one guided-missile cruiser and other support ships. Red Sea: Aircraft carrier Eisenhower, one guided-missile cruiser, one guided-missile destroyer and other support ships. Persian Gulf: The command ship LaSalle, two guided-missile cruisers, three guided-missile frigates and other U.S. Navy support ships. Also, one British destroyer and two French frigates.

Iraq on Saturday denied allegations that it was moving troops southward and potentially threatening Kuwait. "There have been no unusual troop movements in southern Iraq," an unidentified military spokesman told the official Iraqi News Agency. There have been no changes "in the normal lines used for training our forces throughout Iraq, especially in the south," he said. The statement was a response to Kuwaiti allegations Friday that Iraq was reinforcing units in the south.

The Democratic-controlled Congress, closing ranks behind President Bush at a crucial moment in American history, voted Saturday to authorize U.S. troops to attack Iraq as early as Wednesday. Bush's victory was decisive and bipartisan, even though the authorization was strongly opposed by the Democratic leadership and most aspirants for the Democratic presidential nomination. Many Democrats abandoned their party leaders, and Republicans were nearly unanimous in support of the President.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein planned to invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia this month but called off the attack when one of his top aides defected to Jordan, the defector said Sunday. Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Majid, who was head of the country's clandestine weapons program and is Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, said he attended meetings of the Cabinet and the Revolutionary Command Council in which the invasions were discussed.

The phone call came to the royal palace in Kuwait city just before 4:30 a.m. It was Princess Mariam Saad al Sabah's brother-in-law. "You have to leave the palace. Go to the summer house," he said when she reached over to her bedside table and picked up the telephone. "He had no time to say why," she recalls. "All I knew was, he is a calm person, and at that time his voice wasn't calm. We left."

Despite the heavy hand of the Iraqi invaders, Kuwait city is a lawless capital of increasing desperation, according to refugees who have reached the safety of Bahrain. Only in the past week have Iraqi police officers been deployed on the city's streets, said one refugee who arrived in Bahrain over the weekend. "Very few people are venturing out of their homes," he said. "The looting continues--some by the Iraqis, some by Arab and Asian workers. They even hit the Pizza Hut."

Speaking softly in a voice that often broke, an American-born woman who fled Kuwait after the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion told members of Congress about the scene at a hospital there: "We took our cousin, who was in labor, to Sabah Maternity Hospital. Upon our arrival, we saw a Kuwaiti woman at the front door--in hysterics, because she was in labor and they (Iraqi troops) would not allow her to enter," said Deborah Hadi, pausing to fight back a sob.

The Kuwaiti resistance, which for nearly two months carried out a campaign of ambushes, sniper attacks and harassment against Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, has scaled back its activities in the face of violent retaliation against not only the resistance fighters but other Kuwaitis as well, according to sources close to the Kuwaiti government.

Family members of American hostages in Iraq say they are deeply torn by President Saddam Hussein's offer to let them visit their loved ones over Christmas--revolted by the obvious attempt at manipulation but desperate to bring some comfort as best they can. "It may be the women's last chance to see their husbands," said Leslie Kern, a Columbus, Ohio, psychologist who has organized a voluntary nationwide counseling service for families of American hostages in the Persian Gulf.

It wasn't the quicksand that was so frightening. Or the sandstorms. Or the oil pipelines that loomed suddenly out of the blowing sand. It was the tanks. "We were afraid the tanks would fire at us and that would be it," said Bassam Mohtady, an American who, with his 8-year-old son, crossed the Kuwaiti desert in a caravan of vehicles led by a local Bedouin guide. "It was like cat and mouse in the desert," added Mohtady, 34, who arrived with his son, Sammer, in Boston on Sunday.

By sending some of his best troops south toward the border with Kuwait, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein seems to have shattered his country's hope of having the United Nations lift the sanctions that have devastated its economy. Word of the troop movements came Friday as Iraq's top diplomat, Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz, was appealing to the United Nations to lift the sanctions, which he said are responsible for growing malnutrition, inadequate medical care and widespread suffering.

The accusation was shocking, somehow more than an atrocity: "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Stupefying--but true? Amid all the uncontested, horrifyingly brutal actions of the Iraqi occupation army in Kuwait, the notorious baby-incubator story stands out.

President Bush videotaped a statement at the White House on Wednesday that will appear at the beginning of next weekend's ABC docudrama "The Heroes of the Desert Storm," the producers said. "We sent the White House a copy of the script and asked for the President because we thought it would be an appropriate way to begin the film, to pay tribute to these individuals by having the commander-in-chief of the armed forces salute them," said Don Ohlmeyer, the movie's executive producer and director.

Kuwaiti warplanes sank an Iraqi gunboat, and coast guard units captured 46 disguised Iraqi soldiers who landed on Bubiyan Island to scavenge abandoned ammunition, Western security officials said Thursday. The clash erupted Wednesday afternoon when Kuwaiti coastal forces intercepted five fishing boats loaded with ammunition as they started to leave the island, the officials said.

Kuwait complained to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that about 80 Iraqis backed by 12 naval vessels had landed on Kuwait's strategic Bubiyan Island in violation of the Gulf War cease-fire. The Kuwaiti coast guard and some aircraft destroyed seven of the vessels, according to an unofficial translation of Kuwait's letter to the council and to Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar. Kuwait's U.N.

Aug. 1, '90 Aug. 1, '91 Japanese yen per dollar 147.20 137.55 German marks per dollar 1.59 1.76 Oil, per barrel $21.54 $21.27 Gold, per ounce $373.30 $363.20 Silver, per ounce $4.82 $4.05 30-year fixed-rate mortgage 9.98% 9.50% Prime lending rate 10.00% 8.50% Federal Reserve discount rate 7.00% 5.50% Dow Jones industrial average 2,899.26 3,017.67 Source: New York Mercantile Exchange (oil futures); New York Commodity Exchange (metals futures); Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.; Federal Reserve

Fourteen Americans, part of a sudden surge of more than 50 captive Westerners freed by Iraq, arrived Tuesday evening in Jordan, relieved to be out of Baghdad but concerned about the people they left behind. The release of more French, British and Finnish detainees was either completed or in process. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's current hostage strategy is expected to peak today with a decree freeing all French civilians, estimated to number 400, held against their will in Iraq and Kuwait.

American helicopters and jets hammered Iraqi tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers in what one pilot described Tuesday as a "turkey shoot," and a senior U.S. military source said the month-old air campaign is inflicting "horrendous casualties" on Saddam Hussein's forces.

He looks every inch the Kuwaiti milkman: plump, jolly and self-effacing, wearing a spotted white robe, a big gold watch, black tasseled loafers and a merry grin. He likes to use American slang, especially "okey-dokey," and offers his guests Popsicles. But 27-year-old Mohammed Ezzat Jaafar, who once ran one of the largest dairies in the Middle East, is a quiet hero--first of the Kuwaiti resistance, now of his country's painful, stumbling reconstruction.

Kuwait's martial-law court Tuesday sentenced eight people to death, six of them in absentia, for collaborating with Iraqi occupation forces. All eight were charged with aiding the enemy and joining the Iraqi popular army, a civilian militia. Khalil Jumaa Aboudi of Iraq and Salim Hashoush Rashid, a stateless Arab, were the only two in court. The nationalities of the others were not known.