Iraq Armed Forces Kuwait

The Navy has launched a formal investigation into allegations that on the second day of the Persian Gulf War, U.S. servicemen shot Iraqi soldiers as they tried to surrender to a naval combat team, Navy officials said Tuesday. It is the first major, publicly acknowledged military inquiry into charges of wrongdoing by U.S. military personnel serving in the Persian Gulf. International law governing the conduct of war forbids any attack on troops attempting to surrender.

More than a dozen Palestinians charged with cooperating with the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait went on trial Saturday as the emirate continued its prosecution of alleged wartime collaborators. A Turkish house painter charged with spying and theft and accused of wearing an Iraqi uniform in Kuwait city was acquitted by a five-judge martial-law tribunal. A Palestinian man caught with one bullet was sentenced to six months' probation.

They come each Sabbath eve, the white- and black-robed mourners, to squat in the sand beside the graves of their martyrs. They read the Koran, they weep and they pour sweet rose water over the dusty marble headstones. Some plot revenge. About 300 men and women killed during the occupation by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi troops are buried in this desert cemetery, about six miles west of Kuwait city. The Muslim priest who washed and wrapped the bodies said many had been tortured and mutilated.

Amid international criticism of its treatment of suspected wartime collaborators, a Kuwaiti military tribunal stepped on the brakes Tuesday, postponing trials for 24 people accused of working for a pro-Iraqi newspaper during the occupation of Kuwait. The Lebanese editor of the newspaper Al Nidaa fled Kuwait with the Iraqis, but he and 23 staff members, all but one of them non-Kuwaitis, are charged with collaborating, accepting payment from the enemy and aiding Iraqi intelligence.

President Bush delivered a mild rebuke on Monday to Kuwait in the wake of the first trials of defendants accused of collaborating with the Iraqi occupation. He urged the Kuwaiti government to "extend a fair trial to everybody." While Bush's comments demonstrated mild displeasure with the trial's conduct, the President went out of his way to emphasize the brutality that Kuwaitis had been subjected to during the seven months that Iraqi forces occupied their nation.

President Bush shrugged off allegations Thursday that Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had counseled against military action in the early days of the Persian Gulf crisis. Bush, responding to excerpts from a new book by Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, said that Powell has the "integrity and the honor" to offer candid advice and the "discipline" to "salute and march" when the President makes a decision.

Eight parchment pages from a Tunisian Koran written in exquisite Arabic calligraphy in the late 9th or early 10th Century once lay on exhibit in the Kuwait National Museum. So did a dagger overlaid with gold and set with enamel and rubies by craftsmen of Mogul India in the 17th Century. And so did an enameled glass perfume sprinkler crafted in Syria in the 13th Century.

The old man had gone quite mad. Iraqi secret police had tortured his son, a Kuwaiti resistance fighter, gouging out his eyes and piercing his arms and legs with an electric drill. They finally shot him before his horrified family, and barred the kin from moving the corpse for three days. "So after liberation, when we captured this Iraqi, we took him to the father," recalled Monsour Ali, 23, a former resistance fighter. "And we gave him a gun. He shot the Iraqi in the head and the heart.

Not every enemy soldier fled north in February when coalition forces chased Saddam Hussein's army back to Iraq. Dozens of Iraqi stragglers, perhaps hundreds, have shed their uniforms and taken up residence in vacant homes here in this suburb of Kuwait city, authorities said Friday. Between 30 and 35 Iraqi soldiers posing as stateless Arabs have already been rooted out, according to Kuwaiti army intelligence officers. Many of the soldiers are believed to be survivors of the Feb.

More than a month after President Bush declared Kuwait liberated, Iraqi forces still control a small pocket of the emirate's territory, a Kuwaiti tank commander said Monday. About 300 Iraqi soldiers remain inside Kuwait, just south of the Iraqi port of Umm al Qasr, Capt. Nasser Duwaila said. He badly wants to get them out. "This is our land," said Duwaila, the acting commander of Kuwait's 7th Armored Battalion. "Kuwait is not free if there is one Iraqi soldier on our land."