On the night of February 26-27, 1991, the U.S. and Canadian Air Forces took turns to attack two highways in Iraq, causing hundreds of vehicles to be destroyed and numerous casualties.
In 1990, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, which led to the outbreak of the Gulf War, and the multinational force led by the United States quickly assembled in place to launch a comprehensive attack on the Iraqi army.
In order to swallow Kuwait, Saddam Hussein deployed 540,000 troops and 3,000 tanks, 2,000 artillery pieces, and 2,800 armored vehicles to Kuwait and the border of Basra. But as soon as the war began to fight Iraq, it was found to be terrible, the frontal battlefield was not fought, and the air power was already overwhelming people who could not lift their heads. In order not to completely collapse the Iraqi army, Saddam Hussein began to brew an escape route for his own army.
With little effort, the ultra-efficient bombing of the US military destroyed the deployment of the Iraqi army, Saddam Hussein admitted, the Iraqi army began to flee from Kuwait in a chaotic manner, trying to flee to Basra to regroup and stabilize their positions, and they did not know that what awaited them was a net of death.
In fact, the Iraqi side can not be called "chaotic", their withdrawal was drawn up by the Supreme Command, and even has a "plan to withdraw troops from Kuwait", the Iraqi military top management for this purpose "fully considered the carrying capacity of the road, the withdrawal of the troops in a planned design time period, the Iraqi army will complete the entire withdrawal work in 25, 26, 27 three days."
However, this kind of planned "clever plan" is completely to pit people, the Iraqi army has been bombed indiscriminately by multinational forces, even lost battles, supplies and establishments are completely in a state of chaos, many troops even have insufficient tank fuel and soldiers' drinking water and food, they simply received the order to withdraw the troops and ran back according to the road they came.
The US military has long opened a large net of air-ground joints, turning the main force of the Iraqi army into fish on the chopping board. The US military used air-ground integrated frontal assault to increase the tactics of depth and detour, wielding two large pincers, while rushing the Iraqi army to flee back from Kuwait, while laying down the line of killing at the border between Kosovo and Iraq early, the US military gathered the 101st, 82nd Airborne Division, the 1st, 3rd, 24th Air infantry division, the 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions, the 1st Cavalry Division, the 1st Marine Division and other elite units, waiting to eat the main force of the Iraqi army.
The Iraqi army was extremely short of drinking water and supplies, and they knew that they could not get out of the desert, so they took away a large number of ordinary vehicles stolen from Kuwait, and even some people carried gold, silver and treasure and banknotes, and many Iraqi civilians fled, who quickly congested the road into a dead snake that could not be drained.
The main road to escape is known as "Route 80", a six-lane highway that connects to Kuwait's capital and leads north of Al Jahra Governorate to the Iraqi border town of Safwan, through which one can enter Iraq and travel to Basra, which is also customarily referred to as "Route 6" because of the many pathways to Iraq.
The first to retreat was the elite Hammurabi Panzer Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard, which, with the advantage of mechanization, tried to retreat quickly via Route 80 before reassigning on a steady footing. But this elite force did not encounter its former rival, the Iranians, and the commander of the U.S. 24th Aircraft Division, General Barry McCavery, had already prepared a battalion of AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships to stand guard.
The escape of the Hammurabi Division became a tragedy, and Barry McCaffle was a firefighter himself, and during Operation Desert Sabre, he temporarily asked Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander-in-chief of the multinational force, for two more bases of ammunition.
Hundreds of armored vehicles, tanks, and military vehicles of the Hammurabi Division fled quickly along two roads, with the troops of Highway 80 forming a defensive formation, which was also mixed with a large number of ordinary civilians.
Soon they saw the ferocity of modern warfare, and the American Apache troops came out of the flanks of the road and quickly launched a crazy killing show. Lacking air defense, lacking organization, the Iraqi army had nowhere to escape on the desert road of the Ichima Pingchuan River, they either slipped into the depths of the desert or lay motionless on the ground waiting to die, and the Apaches hunted and killed several times along the road, creating a hell on earth full of scorched corpses.
The battle created countless tragedies on the 80-kilometer road that was enough to make the news a mosaic, and the death toll on Routes 8 and 80 was estimated to be 800-1000, which also gave rise to the name "Death Highway".
The U.S. military then began to collect iraqi Third Army personnel fleeing on Route 8, and several A-6 "Intruder" attack aircraft appeared, cleanly blowing up the large vehicles in front of and behind the Third Army, so that they were paralyzed on the road. Then several A-10 attack aircraft appeared, firing several rounds of attacks with missiles and cannons until they could not fire the shells.
An A-10 pilot involved in the attack said it was like a fireworks show with explosions everywhere.
The U.S. Navy then carried out 10 hours of air raids on them, dozens of attack aircraft from the USS Ranger CV-61 used Various tricks to sweep the ground of Iraqi troops, and the bottleneck near the Mutla Ridge checkpoint became another death zone, where more than 300 tanks and cars were blown up or abandoned.
According to other memoir biographies, F16 fighters of the U.S. Army's "Weasel" unit also participated in the attack on the Iraqi army's road troops, and they blew up the Iraqi convoy with extremely poor visibility.
Route 80 was not much better at this time, the US military began to bomb as if in the air "all-armed" bombing, the ammunition on the deck of the aircraft carrier was taken away as soon as it approached the deck, and the aircraft desperately loaded with weapons ranging from 500-pound ammunition to cluster bombs, because there were too many planes flying near the road, and air controllers were once worried about colliding with the aircraft. The 50-mile (80-kilometer) road was a completely potholed, dead ground of flesh, debris, and coke.
In a 1993 interview with an Iraqi who survived the attack, The Washington Post recalled: "Hundreds of cars were destroyed, soldiers screamed and scattered, but they were quickly hit by cluster bombs. Bombs fell at night and were littered with burning cars and corpses. ”
In addition, there are the ground troops pursued by the multinational forces at the end of the rank, who have also caused huge casualties to the Iraqi army and civilians, and even sensitive prisoner-of-prisoner killings. For example, journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that witnesses accused U.S. troops of a platoon of the 1st Brigade of the 24th Aircraft Division of being accused of killing prisoners, and they used Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to strafe 350 disarmed Iraqi prisoners of war, and even military intelligence personnel confirmed this statement. But Hersh's claims have been refuted by many, with people believing that he has no evidence other than lip service.
In fact, after the US military experienced the killing of the "road of death", there was indeed a controversy over the "excessive use of force" within the UNITED States, because the Iraqi forces were not purely military retreats, they were withdrawn after the mediation of the Soviet Union in accordance with United Nations Resolution 660 and the Presidential Decree, which should not be attacked legally, and the Iraqi army was mixed with a large number of civilians.
White House spokesman Marin Fitzwater made a clear international commitment that the United States and its allied partners would not attack Iraqi troops leaving Kuwait.
But U.S. President George W. Bush said: "Just coaxing the Soviets, the U.S. Air Force has been bombed for more than a month, I don't want to continue negotiations, but I can't ignore Gorbachev, after all, he has supported us for so long." ”
Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general and social activist, objected, arguing that the multinational force violated the Third Geneva Convention by killing and injuring refugees in large numbers but also illegally attacking soldiers "out of combat," and that in 1991 he gave a report called "War Crimes: A Report on U.S. War Crimes against Iraq," arguing that most of the poor people killed were pro-Iraqi people. Palestinian militants allied with the PLO, as well as women, children, children, relatives of Kuwaiti collaborators, many Palestinians were also expelled from Kuwait on a massive scale.
Commander-in-Chief Norman Schwarzkopf again responded to the question about the Road of Death in 1995, saying: "We bombed the Northern Road, first, because there was a large amount of military equipment there, and my commanders were ordered to 'destroy all the equipment of the enemy', and secondly, they were not innocent!" They are not a clean group of border crossers, they are robbing and raping in Kuwait, they are a bunch of rapists, thugs, murderers! They simply tried to escape before they were caught. ”
Later Secretary of State Powell also wrote in his autobiography, My Trip to America: "Television reports give the impression that we are killing for the sake of slaughter. He later labeled Iraq with a bottle of suspected washing powder at the UN General Assembly as "possessing weapons of mass destruction", starting the second Gulf War.
To be honest, the elements of the wronged souls on the road of death are indeed more complex, except for the women and children, refugees and the more innocent Kuwaiti who were wrapped up, many Iraqi soldiers did not have clean hands and feet, and they committed various atrocities in Kuwait; some even took off their uniforms and tried to blend in with the local area, but fled for fear of screening and taking the road, carrying a large number of precious looted items; the Iraqi army troops made a lot of war money, and when they fled, some tanks were stuffed with gold bars.
Later, there were many Saudi "Gulf War gold diggers", whose purpose was to search for vehicles and dead people who were submerged in the depths of the desert, and to find the treasure left by the Iraqi army. Some of the american troops killed some people, and many treasures disappeared with the burning vehicles, but some people still escaped, some of them successfully crossed the Euphrates River, some abandoned the fuelless vehicles, and some people never came out again.
Do you believe anyone has ever found these treasures?