'Unless Baghdad surrenders, they must fight - they don't know if Saddam will be toppled'

The two Iraqi army deserters looked wary and tired as they explained yesterday how, four days into the war, they dodged patrols to cross the front line into Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

Haidar Abdul Hussein, a commando, said he decided to desert despite knowing he would be executed if caught. "I heard that the war had started on a little radio the size of a cigarette packet we had smuggled into my unit, although radios were forbidden. I did not want to die for Saddam," he said.

Abdul Hassan Ali, a young specialist in communications whose eyes flickered nervously from side to side, had been determined to flee because of the misery of life in the frontline trenches.

On the third night of the war, the two men had both been posted on sentry duty. They knew the movement of their patrols and that no mines had been planted on the path they planned to take. Within a few hours, they had reached an encampment of several hundred peshmerga set among rolling green hills at Bardarash, near Arbil.

Their interviews come with a health warning. Mr Hussein and Mr Ali are deserters, not prisoners, but they are now dependent on the Kurdish authorities. They were unlikely to express opinions that would upset their hosts. Both were also adamant that certain details of their background and flight should be concealed so as to avoid retaliation against their families.

Much of their time in recent weeks had been spent digging trenches outside their camps, which their officers assumed would be bombed. Mr Hussein said: "We dug a deep trench about 100 metres from our camp and camouflaged it with soil from somewhere else so nobody could see that there had been fresh digging."

Although a commando, Mr Hussein was not really a member of an elite unit. He explained that every Iraqi army infantry brigade had one so-called commando unit attached to it "to act if a quick response is needed in an emergency". He had, in fact, been in the army before, had deserted and then returned under an amnesty announced by President Saddam.

Both soldiers said that morale was at rock bottom in their units. "It didn't get any worse when we heard about the war because it could not get any lower," said Mr Hussein. Mr Ali spent much of his time repairing the landlines for the field telephones. "The food was poor and there was not enough kerosene for the lamps at night," he said.

Mr Hussein said: "Breakfast was lentils and tea. At 10am the soldiers received stale bread and poor quality dates that you would not feed to animals in the south. Lunch was rice and soup. Every two days there was a small piece of chicken to go with it. The only rations which were increased recently was the bread. They started to give us four small loafs instead of three."

Mr Ali and Mr Hussein insisted that most of the rest of their unit would have deserted if it could. But security men were everywhere. "If you escape field security, the Baath party will catch you and if you escape them it will be the special forces," said Mr Hussein.

He was sceptical about an uprising by the Shia Muslims of southern Iraq or mass desertion by soldiers. He said: "Unless Baghdad surrenders, they have to fight because they don't know if Saddam will really be toppled."

Patrick Cockburn is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington