NEWS ANALYSIS : U.S. Bets on Shiites to Tip Balance Against Hussein : Iraq: Repressed Muslims represent 55% of population. With coalition help, they may be ready to revolt.

By ROBIN WRIGHT and KIM MURPHY

Aug. 24, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON — As descendants of the original Mesopotamians, the Shiites of Iraq represent a civilization that has been among the richest in the Middle East, producing some of Islam’s most glorious shrines and the Arab world’s most famous legends. Their land is equally rich, holding two-thirds of Iraq’s 100 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

Yet the Shiites, who account for 55% of Iraq’s 17.5 million people and a majority of its army troops, are the poorest community. Their culture and religion are in limbo. And, despite their numbers, they have been brutally repressed at home, despised or disdained by neighboring Arabs and shunned by most of the outside world--largely just for being Shiites.

Indeed, after Operation Desert Storm, Middle East insiders joked that the only thing Baghdad and Washington still had in common was their fear of the Shiites, specifically their potential for zealotry made famous by their brethren in Iran and Lebanon.

But 17 months into a tense, still deadlocked showdown between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the outside world, the United States and its coalition partners are now betting on the Shiites to help finally tip the balance against the Iraqi leader. Speaking for the coalition, President Bush may announce as early as today action by the United States, Britain and France to enforce a “no-fly” zone in which Iraqi aircraft will risk being shot down if they fly over Shiite lands south of the 32nd Parallel.

Anxiety about the Shiites led the United States just last year to refrain from helping an uprising they mounted against Hussein, the boldest rebellion against the Iraqi leader since he became president in 1979. For American interests, the prospect of Hussein’s remaining in power seemed preferable to the fragmentation of Iraq--and to the assumed repercussions elsewhere in the Mideast that might have resulted from a successful revolution in Iraq’s southern Shiite stronghold.

What indications are there that the Shiites can now help the rest of the world get rid of Hussein, something they have so far been unable to do for themselves? “This time it’s different,” said Yusuf Khoei, grandson of the Grand Ayatollah Abul Qasim Khoei, the world’s leading Shiite cleric until his death this month in southern Iraq.

“Once the Shia feel the international community is serious, then people will have courage and rise up. Last time, when we were abandoned, many felt the West was not really interested, so they were disheartened and didn’t try again,” Khoei said from exile in London, where he works with the opposition Iraqi National Congress.

The Shiite opposition now envisions a sequence of events quite different from that at the time of their March, 1991, uprising, according to Laith Kubba, one of the National Congress leaders who met last month with former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft.

After the coalition formally establishes the air shield, the Shiite opposition expects that Hussein will send ground troops to bolster his hold on the south and that the U.S.-led coalition, in turn, will enlarge its response.

“Saddam may try to probe, but once the lines are established, even he won’t try to use tanks because the army won’t go to its own slaughter. They’d defect first,” said Kubba, who is also in exile in London.

During and after Operation Desert Storm, more than 60,000 Iraqi troops defected. The vast majority of them were Shiites.

“Once assured of air cover, most of the senior or middle-level officers will switch loyalty and take charge,” Kubba said. Although most ranking officers belong to Islam’s mainstream Sunni sect, most of the soldiers are Shiites.

Hussein’s hold on the south will then gradually disintegrate, the National Congress believes. With the Kurdish north above the 36th Parallel under coalition protection since last year, Baghdad will have control over only about half the country. When this stage is reached, the military in the center will be virtually cut off and will then be under unprecedented pressure to relieve Iraq of the source of its troubles--Hussein.

As appealing as this scenario is, U.S. analysts and private experts are not quite as convinced as the Iraqi National Congress that it will be so straightforward.

American specialists refer to it as the “Afghan strategy,” a reference to the decade-long Afghan war during which moujahedeen rebels slowly moved toward the center until the Soviet-backed regime collapsed.

“That’s certainly the direction we’re headed in, although it always seemed a little far-fetched to me,” one U.S. Iraqi specialist said. “It also has the potential to dismember the country.”

Added Laurie Mylroie, an expert on Iraq at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “It’s not going to bring him down overnight. More things have to be done.”

The Shiites face major obstacles, not least the absence of legal political or social groups to mobilize opposition. Since the Arab Baath Socialist Party took power in Iraq in 1958, a once highly organized religious network has been decimated, and the clergy has been drastically weakened.

Iraq was the birthplace of Shiism in the 7th Century, when Imam Hussein broke from the mainstream Sunni Muslims in a dispute over the leadership of Islam. And the magnificent gold-domed shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Ali in the southern Iraqi holy cities of Karbala and Najaf have drawn pilgrims from around the world for centuries. Both were also the historic centers of Shiite learning.

By this year, however, a U.N. Human Rights Commission survey reported that “a concerted attack” had reduced Iraq’s Shiite clergy from at least 8,000 in the early 1970s to only about 800.

Public and private practice of rituals has been forbidden. Iraq has also closed religious schools, banned Shiite literature and prohibited instruction on Shiism in the school system. The official curriculum teaches only a variant of the Sunni doctrine, even though the largest share of Iraqi schoolchildren are Shiite, the survey said.

Tens of thousands of Shiites have been detained, interrogated, imprisoned or executed during Hussein’s 13-year rule. An estimated 250,000 were forcibly deported in the early years of the Iran-Iraq War. And several unconfirmed reports have claimed that Baghdad has used chemical weapons and napalm in the south.

Now, the Shiites have little with which to fight back, Arab and U.S. experts fear. “The Shia have no known leadership inside the country or, unlike the Kurds, no guerrilla movement dating back decades,” said Mylroie of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The only two known Shiite political parties--Al Dawaa al Islamiya, or the Islamic Call, and the Supreme Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SIRI)--are fundamentalist groups based abroad.

Dawaa may have up to 6,000 members and sympathizers underground inside Iraq; its leadership has worked primarily out of Lebanon and Syria, according to U.S. analysts. Most of SIRI’s membership has long been in exile in Iran.

The recently formed Iraqi National Congress is a secular movement that brings together members of all of Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups. With the exception of Kurds living in northern Iraq, all of the congress’ known leadership is outside the country.

Also, Iraq’s more than 9 million Shiites are not a homogenous people, according to Phoebe Marr, an Iraq expert at Washington’s National Defense University.

They come from disparate tribes. And in the flat, barren countryside of the south, they are spread through modern cities as well as dusty villages, farmlands and oil fields and even in the border marshlands. The Baath Party newspaper once called the ancient marsh Arabs “monkey-faced” and asserted that they are not “real Iraqis” but the descendants of black slaves who arrived during the Middle Ages.

Not all Shiites oppose Hussein, and many have served in his governments, including former Prime Minister Sadoun Hammadi, who was appointed to that post after the war, then fired. The current prime minister, Mohammed Hamza Zubaidi, is also a longtime Shiite member of the Baath Party.

Perhaps the greatest misconception in the West is that the Shiites are all fundamentalist and pro-Iranian. In fact, a majority are just the opposite--as shown during the war with Iran when most Shiites in Iraq’s army did not defect to Iran, as had been widely predicted.

Despite a brief attempt by Iran and SIRI to set up a small Iraqi Islamic republic on captured land in the early 1980s, the majority of Iraq’s Shiites reportedly do not want either an Islamic republic or a Shiite-dominated secular state in the south. Only a distinct minority are zealots, National Congress officials contend.

Kubba and others in the National Congress told U.S. officials in closed-door sessions last month that they are sensitive to Iraq’s ethnic mixture and that the cost of any attempt to install Shiite leadership, religious or secular, in Baghdad would be suicide.

Despite the odds against the Shiites being able to tip the balance, National Congress officials remain almost giddily optimistic about the first joint U.S.-Shiite collaboration. “The last uprising came from the grass roots and, hence, was chaotic and took everyone by surprise, both in Iraq and in the United States,” Kubba said. “This time there is coordination.”