Reprisals Curtail Kuwait Resistance : Occupation: Government in exile instead plans to set up military training sites in Saudi Arabia and Emirates.

TAIF, Saudi Arabia —  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.

“The resistance has largely died out because of the massive reprisals,” said a source close to the freedom fighters, who range from former military officers and police officers to wealthy business leaders. They have claimed responsibility for the deaths of more than 200 Iraqi soldiers since Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.

Officials of Kuwait’s government in exile said the government is focusing on new tactics to combat the Iraqi presence, including two military and civil defense training centers to be established in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

An estimated 50% to 60% of the 20,000 personnel in Kuwait’s armed services are in the process of being mobilized outside the country, officials said.

The resistance, which has peppered Kuwait city with the sound of machine-gun fire every night since the invasion, and awakened it in the morning with new posters of the exiled Kuwaiti emir plastered on telephone polls, could never have been expected to take on the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait, a senior Kuwaiti government official said.

“We have to appreciate that an army of almost half a million, which is roughly the size of the Kuwaiti population . . . with the size of the resistance we have, it is impossible,” Cabinet Minister Yahia al Sumait said.

“We are trying to be realistic about this. Kuwaitis never were trained for these kinds of things . . . and with the fact that the difference in ratio is 1 to 10 or 15, we did not expect to have an effective resistance. But to be honest, it was so effective, the retaliation from the Iraqis was so harsh, so savage, it ended up we had to change our tactics.”

Kuwaiti guerrillas, who have called themselves the Sumoud, or “standing against,” claimed responsiblity for at least one suicide car-bomb attack on an Iraqi position at a hospital in the suburb of Jabriyeh and for dozens of sniper attacks, firebombings of Iraqi patrol vehicles and armed attacks on Iraqi military emplacements.

When Iraqi soldiers went through neighborhoods and marked the houses of foreigners with red paint, resistance fighters painted over the markings during the night and pulled down street signs to further confuse the Iraqis, according to reports from Kuwaiti refugees in Saudi Arabia.

They also gave portable short-wave radios to Iraqi soldiers and encouraged them to listen to news reports about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from the British Broadcasting Corp. and the Voice of America.

Kuwaiti military officers said some Kuwaiti guerrillas bought tanks from disenchanted Iraqi soldiers and blew them up. Western diplomats said Kuwaiti doctors were reporting as many as 25 Iraqi injuries a night at the height of the resistance.

For the first few weeks after the invasion, Kuwaiti government officials communicated with resistance fighters by means of cellular telephones in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. But since the Iraqi government cut off the cellular communications, reports have been limited to Kuwaitis slipping in and out of Kuwait. In recent weeks, most refugee reports have been filled with terrifying tales of Iraqi reprisals against the resistance fighters and people suspected of supporting them.

Iraqi troops reportedly were demolishing the homes of suspected resistance members and terrorizing entire neighborhoods with house-to-house searches in areas where Iraqi soldiers had been hit.

A refugee interviewed in the Saudi gulfside town of Dammam told of a woman whose son had been arrested as a suspected resistance fighter. She was advised that he would be released if she showed Iraqi authorities his gun. The boy had a gun that had never been used, the man said, and the woman showed it to Iraqi soldiers. They sent her son home--shot through the head.

A Western diplomat in Saudi Arabia who has been monitoring events in Kuwait said five young suspected resistance fighters were shot on their doorsteps in front of their families.

Some Kuwaitis said entire neighborhoods were combed and some houses destroyed by Iraqi soldiers after resistance activity was reported in the area. They said internal opposition to the resistance was growing as a result of the reprisals.

Meeting this week with reporters in London, Kuwaiti Planning Minister Salman Abdul-Razek al Mutawa said the decision to cut back the resistance was made in response to the Iraqi policy of rounding up Kuwaiti nationals and destroying their homes.

“The resistance is now being toned down, really, to save the lives of innocent people,” he said. “The resistance we are now talking about is passive resistance of the people.”

In fact, officials of Kuwait’s government in exile in Taif say the resistance has largely accomplished what it set out to do: help mobilize world opinion behind Kuwait and demonstrate that Kuwait was prepared to do whatever it could to fight off the Iraqi invasion.

“They’ve achieved a lot of what they needed to, to struggle and to make life difficult for the Iraqis, and to show the world that Kuwaitis were struggling and they did not sit back and expect the American boys to do it,” a source close to the Kuwaiti government said.

Sumait, the Cabinet minister, said: “There was a claim by the Iraqis that the invasion of Kuwait was invited, that someone asked them to come over and help save Kuwaitis from the Sabah regime. The principle behind all of this has been to deliver an answer to the claim of the Iraqis: What you are saying is not correct.”

The Kuwaiti Defense Ministry has issued a circular in the past week encouraging exiled Kuwaiti men and women between the ages of 21 and 35 to report to the two new military training centers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to be prepared for outside military and civil defense service.

Moreover, Kuwait has now mobilized a full military brigade in Saudi Arabia and is preparing to complete mobilization of a second, a senior government official said. Most of the Kuwaiti servicemen have been equipped, government officials said.

“None of this means that we are stopping the armed resistance (in Kuwait),” Sumait said. “We are changing our tactics.”

But now, he said, the emphasis will be on military action outside Kuwait.