Bush Orders Troops to Build, Defend Kurd Camps in Iraq : Refugees: The President says the expanded relief effort by the military will be temporary. He warns Hussein against attacking the U.S. units.

WASHINGTON —  President Bush ordered U.S. troops Tuesday to begin building camps in northern Iraq for desperate Kurdish refugees, pledging that American, British and French ground and air forces would protect the refugees against Iraqi harassment.

Abandoning the arms-length approach that he had taken toward the internal chaos that has caused the Kurds to flee Iraq, Bush effectively reversed the disengagement of some U.S. units from the region--and warned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s forces not to attack them.

“They should not respond militarily, in that they underestimated the United States once before on that and they shouldn’t do it again. And I don’t think they will,” he said, raising the prospect that allied forces could once again find themselves in combat with Iraqi troops.

While the President stressed that the camps are intended to be temporary and will be turned over to the United Nations as soon as possible, the expanded effort reflects how deeply the mounting refugee crisis has shaken the U.S. postwar plan for the region.

Bush made the announcement at the end of a day during which pressure continued to grow on the Administration to boost its efforts on behalf of the refugees, on whom, he said, “hunger, malnutrition, disease and exposure are taking their grim toll.”

He described the program as “a greatly expanded and more ambitious relief effort” intended to encourage Kurds now subsisting in filthy, disease-ridden conditions on cold mountainsides along the Iraqi-Turkish border to retreat “to areas in northern Iraq where the geography facilitates, rather than frustrates,” the massive relief effort.

“I have directed the U.S. military to begin immediately to establish several encampments in northern Iraq where relief supplies for these refugees will be made available in large quantities and distributed in an orderly way,” Bush said at a hastily scheduled news conference.

Expressing understanding for the Kurds’ fears about their safety in Iraq, Bush said: “Let me reassure them that adequate security will be provided at these temporary sites by U.S., British and French air and ground forces.”

The Kurds’ flight began after Hussein’s troops crushed their uprising at the end of the U.S.-led war that pushed Iraq’s occupying forces out of Kuwait. Now, the Turks estimate that there are 1.5 million Iraqi refugees trapped along the frontiers with Turkey and Iran.

In southern Iraq, which is not affected by Bush’s orders, 30,000 Shiite Iraqis have sought safety in the U.S.-occupied zone.

The latest Kurdish refugee plan appeared to have originated with the French, who on Saturday proposed to the State Department the establishment of a string of transit camps to assist refugees deciding to return home, under military protection.

Bush announced the plan late Tuesday after conferring with French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister John Major, Turkish President Turgut Ozal, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Javier Perez de Cuellar, secretary general of the United Nations.

The President emphasized that the effort is a temporary solution intended to meet “an immediate, penetrating humanitarian need.”

“I hope we’re not talking about a long-term effort,” he said.

Even as Bush moved U.S. troops closer to a postwar role in northern Iraq, he continued to insist over the last week that he would not allow them to become embroiled in the internal turmoil in that nation.

“All along I have said that the United States is not going to inter vene militarily in Iraq’s internal affairs and risk being drawn into a Vietnam-style quagmire. This remains the case,” he said Tuesday. “Nor will we become an occupying power with U.S. troops patrolling the streets of Baghdad.”

He said the administration and security of the camps will be turned over to the United Nations as quickly as possible but that he does not know when that transfer of authority will occur.

Pentagon officials said the new assignment will require only a small increase in the number of U.S. forces operating inside Turkey and northern Iraq.

A Marine Amphibious Ready Group, with 16 heavy-lift helicopters and 2,400 Marines, arrived in Iskenderun, Turkey, on Sunday to ferry supplies, provide medical and engineering assistance to the relief effort and establish water purification facilities. Altogether, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said, about 8,300 Americans--most of them GIs--are assigned to relief-related missions in Turkey.

American officials said that new U.S. deployments to the area are expected to involve units with technical specialties rather than heavily armed combat troops--although Bush said that the camps “will be protected vigorously.”

“We’ve been increasing fairly steadily and there are no limits on the numbers (of troops that could be sent in), but we’re not talking big combat-force deployments,” said a senior defense official. “The basic assumption is that guarding these camps is going to be a relatively light requirement because the Iraqis are not going to be dumb enough to screw around with them. If many more combat troops are needed, they may in fact come from other allies.”

A wing of F-16 fighters and a wing of A-10 fighters--more than 140 planes capable of warding off air and ground threats--remain in Turkey, where they operated during the Persian Gulf War.

With the President’s latest initiative, the aircraft are expected to provide aerial protection to Kurds as well as the U.S., French and British troops operating in the area. A defense official said the U.S. warplanes constitute “enough air power in the region to warn them to keep out. We’re not looking at any expansion to do the job.”

Responding to critics who have argued that Bush halted the war too soon, allowing Hussein to maintain sufficient military strength to attack the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south, the President portrayed the turmoil caused by the postwar uprisings as “another problem” apart from the war itself. And, he said, answering other critics, “I don’t think we’ve responded too little, too late.”

But he acknowledged that he had not foreseen the scope of the refugee problem.

On another matter, Bush said there are enough issues to talk about at a U.S.-Soviet summit conference that failure to achieve an agreement on a long-range nuclear weapons treaty or solution of differences over the scope of an already-signed non-nuclear weapons agreement would not scuttle such a meeting. Among those issues, he said, is the Middle East and the refugee problem.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said earlier Tuesday that Iraqi loyalist forces and armed Kurdish rebels had fought a pitched land battle between Kirkuk and the Iranian border within the previous 24 hours, apparently the heaviest fighting in several weeks.

“We believe there was also some limited skirmishing (Monday) in southern Iraq along the Tigris River,” Boucher said.

Concerning relief operations, Boucher said that 46 military flights delivered 326.2 tons of food, water, tents, blankets, clothing, ground sheets, sleeping bags, tarp rolls and baby food on Monday to camps straddling the Iraq-Turkey border. Since the emergency airlift began, he said, 198 military flights have dropped more than 1,390 tons of supplies.

Boucher conceded that the United States had done far less to assist the Iraqi refugees who have fled to Iran. He said that Washington gave the International Committee of the Red Cross and the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees $10 million to assist refugees there.

“Despite the overwhelming influx of refugees, the government of Iran is generally dealing very effectively with the needs of those people,” he said, adding: “For example, the Iranian Red Crescent has fielded over 6,000 staff and volunteers and they are operating 29 camps holding about 250,000 people at this point. Of course, more is needed and more is being done.”

Times staff writers Melissa Healy and Norman Kempster contributed to this report.

APPEAL FROM BAGHDAD

Iraq asked the United Nations to let it sell oil to buy food. A9