First Iraqi POWs Poorly Fed, Ill-Trained, Military Says

ABOARD THE USS NICHOLAS IN THE PERSIAN GULF —  The first Iraqi POWs, captured last week during an assault on heavily fortified oil platforms, are a poorly fed and ill-trained lot, military officials said Monday.

Most appear to be hastily drafted reservists who were forced to sit on the platforms without adequate food and supplies, the officials said.

“I don’t think that they wanted to fight,” said Cmdr. Dennis G. Morral, commanding officer of the frigate Nicholas, which helped lead the charge. “I don’t think they know how to fight. I think they were very relieved that we were rescuing them from this situation.”

But Morral said his troops also found a handful of maroon berets on the oil platforms--evidence that some of these men were members of Iraq’s elite Republican Guard.

He said when U.S. forces captured them after a gun battle, “most of them put their hands up, thanked us in their own way and cooperated.”

In fact, he said, one prisoner “tried to kiss” one of his Navy captors, a friendly embrace that the U.S. military man declined.

Twelve Iraqis among a group firing at allied planes from nine oil platforms off the Kuwaiti coast were captured Friday after an assault on their positions by the Nicholas and a Kuwaiti patrol boat.

Eleven more Iraqis from the oil platforms later were also found in rubber boats in the Persian Gulf. Five were killed, and three were wounded in the attack; U.S. and Kuwaiti troops suffered no casualties.

The Iraqi captives were the first prisoners of war taken by the allied forces.

Morral said the men had had no clean clothes for weeks and appeared to have fished for their meals by tossing hand grenades into the water.

“Fish would float up, and that’s what they’d subsist on,” the Navy commander said.

Cmdr. Robert Colligan, 31, of Ville Platte, Louisiana, the ship’s physician, said he treated five patients with significant injuries, including a couple of men who were near death. Virtually all the men seemed to be “inadequately clothed and inadequately fed,” he said.

Morral said there was nothing sensitive about the techniques they used in the operation against the oil platforms. “We snuck in and surprised them, and that is why we didn’t take any casualties,” he said.