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When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, global condemnation and sanctions followed, but when those failed to stop the Iraqi dictator in his tracks, a US led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm to stop his invasion by force.
For 6 weeks between January 17th and February 28th 1991, coalition forces descended on Iraq, using devastating air power to shatter Saddam’s regime and force him out of Kuwait.
The campaign was a success, but it did not come without cost or controversy. Today on A Day In History, we’ll look at the darker side of Desert Storm: at the suffering of innocent civilians caught up in a war they never chose, at the hundreds who died from the coalition's celebrated ‘precision bombs’, and the Iraqi troops who died by the hundreds as they tried to retreat.
Desert Storm launched on January 17th 1991 and was primarily an air campaign. Conscious of the possibility of civilian casualties as their forces descended upon Iraq, coalition forces had a long list of ‘no fire’ targets to minimise civilian casualties which included schools, hospitals, mosques, and historical sites, but the realities of war meant that these places were never 100% safe.
US officials pitched it as a new modern war where sophisticated targeting systems and precision guided munitions would make collateral damage a thing of the past. Such a promise cared more about favourable media coverage than the reality of waging war in a populated country, and it set an impossibly high moral standard that coalition forces were doomed to miss.
These high-flying promises were shattered almost immediately. On the first day of Desert Storm, an air strike on the Diwaniyah telephone exchange went awry and the bombs instead hit a hotel and apartment complex nearby, killing 15 civilians. On January 20th, at least 12 people were killed and 50 houses were damaged in the town of Najaf when bombs again went off-target. Similar episodes happened across Iraq almost every day of the war.
Missile attacks had no less potential to go wrong either. The US deployed its advanced Tomahawk missile at $2 million dollars a shot, counting on their accuracy and high-yield to strike targets in the first 2 weeks of Desert Storm. On February 1st, 6 of these missiles were launched at the Al Rashid Air Base near Baghdad where intelligence sources believed Saddam was keeping chemical weapons. Unfortunately, at least one of the missiles went off target and came down in the Karada neighbourhood where 18 people, including 7 children, were wounded or killed. It ended up being the last tomahawk missile attack of the war as US leadership decided they were too expensive and too unreliable to be appropriate for further use in Iraq.
#operationdesertstorm #usairaqwar #history #desertstorm
Sources:
Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, (1993)
Felicity Arbuthnot, ‘The Ameriya Shelter - St Valentine’s Day Massacre’, Uruk Net, 13th February 2007, web.archive.or...
Anthony Tucker-Jones, The Gulf War: Operation Desert Storm 1990-1991, (2014)
Human Rights Watch, Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War, (1991)
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