Highway of Death (Arabic: ???????? ? ? Ar? Q al- mawt ) refers to the six-lane highway between Kuwait and Iraq, officially known as Highway 80 . It runs from Kuwait City to the border city of Safwan in Iraq and then to the Iraqi city of Basra. The road has been used by Iraqi armored divisions for the 1990 Invasion of Kuwait. The road was repaired after the Persian Gulf War and was used by US and British forces in the early stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
During the US-led coalition raids in the Persian Gulf wars, America, Canada, Britain and France and ground forces attacked Iraqi military personnel who tried to leave Kuwait on the night of 26-27 February 1991, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of vehicles and the deaths of many inhabitants. The US attack on the Iraqi column is actually done in two different ways. Between 1400 and 2,000 vehicles were beaten or abandoned on the main Highway 80 north of Al Jahra (the "actual" Death Road). Several hundred more scattered less well known Highways 8 to Basra's main military stronghold south of Basra.
The scene of destruction on the streets are some of the best known war scenes, and it has been said that it is a factor in President George H. W. Bush's decision to announce the cessation of hostilities the next day. However, many Iraqi forces managed to escape across the Euphrates river, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that more than 70,000 to 80,000 troops from the defeated division in Kuwait may have fled to Basra, evading capture.
Video Highway of Death
Death Street
Highway 80
The attack began when A-6 attack on a Marine Aircraft Wing jet plane blocked the head and tail of the column on Highway 80, bombarding a large-scale vehicle column of mostly troops of the Iraqi Regular Army with Mk-20 Rockeye II cluster bombs , who effectively boxed on Iraqi forces in massive traffic jams when Turkish buds began in earnest, setting targets for the subsequent air strikes. Over the next 10 hours, a number of US Navy and US Air Force aircraft and US Navy pilots from the USS Ranger (CV/CVA-61) attacked the convoy using various weapons. Vehicles that survived the air strike were then involved by coalition ground units arriving, while most vehicles that managed to avoid traffic congestion and continued driving on the north road were targeted individually. The bottle-neck road near the Mutla Ridge police station was reduced to long lines disturbed over 300 trapped and abandoned vehicles sometimes called Mile of Death . The debris found on the highway consists of at least 28 tanks and other armored vehicles with many civilian cars and buses filled with stolen Kuwaiti treasures.
The death toll from the attack is still unknown and controversial. British journalist Robert Fisk said he "lost the number of Iraqi bodies crammed into the smoldering ruins or face face down in the sand" on the main site and saw hundreds of bodies strewn across the road all the way to the Iraqi border. American journalist Bob Drogin reported seeing "a number of" dead soldiers "in and around the vehicle, crushed and bloated in the desert sand drowned." A 2003 study by the Project on Alternative Defense (PDA) estimated that less than 10,000 people were driving the main caravan of cut-offs; and when the bombing begins, just leave their vehicle to flee through the desert or to the nearby marshes where some die from their wounds and some then taken captives. According to the PDA, the often recurring low estimate of the number killed in the attack was 200-300 reported by journalist Michael Kelly (who personally counted 37 corpses), but the minimum number of deaths at least 500-600 seems to make more sense.
In 1993, The Washington Post interviewed an Iraqi survivor from the attack:
There were hundreds of cars destroyed, soldiers shouted. [...] It was the night when bombs fell, illuminating scorched cars, bodies by the side of the road and soldiers lying on the ground, hit by cluster bombs as they tried to escape from their vehicles. I see hundreds of soldiers like this, but my main target is to reach Basra. We arrived by foot.
Highway 8
The Iraqi army included the 1st Armored Division of the Republican 1 The Iraqi Guard Hammurabi tried either to move or flee on and near the Eastern Highway 80 from Highway 80. They were involved above the much larger areas in small groups by US artillery units and Apache AH-64 combat helicopter battalions operating under the command of General Barry McCaffrey. Hundreds of Iraqi army vehicles, majority grouped in defensive formation about a dozen vehicles, were systematically destroyed along 50 miles of nearby highways and deserts.
The PDA estimates that the number killed there is in the range of 300-400 or more, so the number of possible deaths along the highway becomes at least 800 or 1,000. A large column composed of remnants of the Hammurabi Division seeking to retreat to a safe haven in Baghdad was also involved and wiped out deep inside Iraq by General McCaffrey's forces a few days later on March 2 in a controversial postwar "turkey kills" -style "an incident known as the Rumaila Battle.
Maps Highway of Death
Controversy
The attacks became controversial, with some commentators accusing the use of disproportionate force, saying that the Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwait in accordance with the original UN Resolution 660 of 2 August 1990; and the column allegedly included Kuwaitis and civilian refugees. The refugee suspects include women and children of pro-Iraq family members, Palestinian militants united by the PLO and Kuwaiti collaborators who fled shortly before the Kuwaiti government returned to pressure nearly 200,000 Palestinians to leave Kuwait. Activist and former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark alleges that this attack violates the Third Geneva Convention, Common Article 3, which prohibits the killing of soldiers who "are out of battle." Clark included it in his report 1991
Additionally, journalist Seymour Hersh, quoting American witnesses, alleged that a platoon of Bradley Fighting Vehicles USA of Brigade 1, 24th Infantry Division fired on a large group of more than 350 Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered at an emergency checkpoint after fleeing. destruction on Highway 8 on February 27, turns out some or all of it. Military Intelligence Personnel guard at checkpoints claimed they were also fired from the same vehicle and barely drove the car during the incident. Journalist Georgie Anne Geyer criticized Hersh's article, saying that she offered "there is no concrete evidence that such allegations - being aired, investigated and then dismissed by the military after the war - are true."
A relatively minor controversy is considered to plunder the functional Iraqi weapons after the battle, before the US Military Police is deployed to guard the wreckage of the plane. Several Saudi civilians who were scavenged allegedly sold Iraqi assault rifles on the black market to buyers from the wider Middle East.
General Norman Schwarzkopf stated in 1995:
The first reason we bombed the highway coming north from Kuwait was because there was a lot of military equipment on the highway, and I had given my commanders all orders that I wanted every Iraqi device we could destroy. Second, it is not a group of innocent people who are just trying to get back across the border into Iraq. This is a group of rapists, assassins and thugs who have raped and looted downtown Kuwait and are now trying to get out of the country before they are caught.
Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger disagrees with General Schwarzkopf's description of the dead, which states:
The television crew traveling with Allied forces in Kuwait suddenly had an accident. When the first pictures appeared on American television, the White House justified the attack by referring to the dead as 'torturers, looters, and rapists'. However, it is clear that the convoy includes not only limited trucks, but civilian vehicles: van Toyota, Volkswagen, motorbikes being beaten. Their occupants are foreign workers trapped in Kuwait: Palestine, Bangladesh, Sudan, Egypt and others. In an impressive report for BBC radio, Stephen Sackur, who distinguished himself from the possibilities in the Gulf, described the killing in such a way that he split up for his audience, ordinary Iraqis from Saddam Hussein. He turns [them] into a human being. The burned numbers, he says, are just people trying to get home; he sounded angry. Kate Adie is there for the BBC. His television report showed bodies in the desert and consumer goods scattered among blackened vehicles. If this 'loot', it's sad: toys, dolls, hairdryers. He interviewed a US Marine Lieutenant, who looked depressed. He said the convoy was 'no air cover, nothing', and he added ambiguously, it was not at all professional. 'Adie did not ask what he meant, nor did he try to explain why the massacre took place. But he said that the men who fought and died for Iraq here came from the northern part of the country, from a minority community, persecuted by Saddam Hussein - Kurdish and Turkish.
Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Foreign Affairs, said the massacre of the "shooting gallery" scene was the reason for ending the Persian Gulf War feud after the Kuwait Liberation campaign. Powell later wrote in his autobiography My American Journey that "television coverage began to make it look as though we were involved in massacres for the sake of massacre."
According to the Institute for Foreign Policy Research, however, "his appearance is deceiving":
Postwar research found that most of the wreckage on Basra's road had been abandoned by the Iraqis before being fired and the true enemy victim was low. Furthermore, opinion surveys show that American support for the war is largely unaffected by the picture. (Arab and Muslim public opinion, of course, another matter, about which Powell might be true).
Photojournalist Peter Turnley publishes photos of mass graves on the scene. Turnley writes:
I flew from my home in Paris to Riyadh when the ground war began and arrived at "death miles" early in the morning when the war stopped. Several other journalists were there when I arrived at this magnificent place, with massacres scattered everywhere. At mile distance these cars and trucks with wheels are still spinning and the radio is still playing. Bodies were scattered along the road. Many asked how many people died during the war with Iraq, and the question was never answered well. That first morning, I saw and photographed the US military "detail detail" that buried many corpses in a huge cemetery. I do not remember seeing many television pictures of these human consequences. I also do not remember many photos of these victims published.
Majalah Time berkomentar:
The photographs are one of the most amazing to come out of the Gulf War: miles of burned, destroyed, destroyed vehicles from every description - tanks, armored cars, trucks, cars, even a stolen Kuwaiti fire truck - pollute the road highway from Kuwait City to Basra. For some Americans, the pictures are also disgusting. (...) After the war, the correspondents found several cars and trucks with bodies burned, but also many vehicles that had been abandoned. Their occupants ran away on foot, and American aircraft often did not fire at them.
In popular culture
- In 1991, The Guardian commissioned British anti-war poet Tony Harrison to commemorate the war, and especially the Road of Death. His poem, A Cold Coming , begins with an ecological representation of the graphic photos taken on Highway 8 by photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke.
- The 2005 film Jarhead contains scenes in which a group of US Marines find the Highway of Death.
- First-person shooter games 2011, Battlefield 3 features a Thunder Run singleplayer level, where the player's order is to reach Highway 1, which is clear based on the Highway of Death.
See also
- The Battle of Junkyard
- The Way of Death ( Todesgang )
- Hell's Highway (disambiguation)
- Raate Road
- Mersad Operation
Notes and references
External links
- Photos of the destroyed military equipment taken by a contemporary American soldier
- Photo of the Highway of Death taken 1991 by a Kuwaiti journalist
- Kuwait map with high resolution. Highway 80 leads north from Kuwait city, via Al Jahra
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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