The U.S. prepared Sunday to send a negotiating team including senior Pentagon figures to the Middle East and warned of unspecified further actions if Iraqi troops were not withdrawn from the Kurdish city of Arbil.

President Clinton put U.S. forces in the Gulf on alert after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sent up to 40,000 Iraqi troops into the Kurdish "safe haven."The main victim of the assault, Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), urged the U.S. and other Gulf War allies to use force to stem the Iraqi attacks.

Iraq says it launched the assault at the invitation of the PUK's rival, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) of Massoud Barzani. Baghdad also alleged that Iran was helping the PUK.

White House chief of staff Leon Panetta said there was a difference between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which prompted the Gulf War, and "engaging in an internal dispute with the Kurds, in which one of the Kurdish parties has indicated they invited Saddam Hussein in."

But he added that "we have made clear to the Iraqi president you do not use force and we will respond accordingly."

Arbil, a PUK stronghold since 1994, is the capital of the "safe haven" set up in 1991 by Western troops, who later left air forces based in Turkey to enforce a no-fly zone.

Contradictory reports emerged Sunday from the Kurdish enclave. Western military observers in northern Iraq said reports of heavy Iraqi involvement in fighting for Arbil were "greatly exaggerated."

"If reports of heavy shelling in Arbil were correct, hospitals would be overflowing with casualties. But they are not," one officer said. "I think that Saddam's troops stayed out of the fighting and let Barzani's men get on with it."

However, one U.S. aid worker said "hundreds of Iraqi tanks" were at Arbil.

In London the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group to which both Kurdish parties belong, said Iraqi troops were looting its houses and offices in Arbil and had executed 96 of its soldiers at Qoshtapa, 13 miles further south.

The soldiers had gone there to monitor a notional ceasefire between the Kurdish factions, agreed at U.S.-sponsored talks in London last week.

Another aid worker said that "Iraqi troops are well on their way out of Arbil, back to Mosul where they came from."

However, the Iraqis were having problems withdrawing because many of their tanks broke down. Iraq said over the weekend it had no plans to remain in the region and would withdraw its troops.

Talabani claimed that Iraqi jets had crossed the no-fly zone and bombed his forces near Arbil, and hinted he might seek Iranian help.

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"We are going to wait some days, or let us say one week, to see what the reaction is of the U.S. and the West," he told BBC radio. "If the West betrays us ... we will surely turn to anyone who is ready to help us."

Talabani also said Iraqi forces were shelling the area near his political base at Sulaimaniah, which lies beyond the western-imposed exclusion zone.

The KDP and Baghdad said their joint operation was prompted by an incursion of Iranian troops, which had crossed into Iraq to help Talabani and occupied a border area. The PUK and INC denied this.

Iraqi analysts in London said minor Iranian reinforcements to the PUK had arrived two weeks ago.

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