Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 1, 1991 TAG: 9102010649
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From The Baltimore Sun and/ The Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
U.S. Marines said they had been told five or six Iraqi divisions, which could include as many as 60,000 troops, were preparing for a possible attack near the Kuwaiti town of Wafra.
Meantime, allied forces reported that they had regained control of the Saudi village of Khafji after a fierce firefight lasting more than 36 hours.
Officials said Arab soldiers from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, supported by U.S. air and artillery fire, finally drove Iraqi troops from the center of town and took 191 prisoners.
Early Friday, fighting flared again in the town eight miles south of the Kuwait border, and military officers said four Iraqi armored brigades, with several thousand men, were on the move north of the border.
Two U.S. Army soldiers, one male and one female, who, according to some sources might have strayed into the village during an early stage of the battle, were reported missing by the U.S. command.
The two were on a "transport mission" along the major military supply route in northern Saudi Arabia and were supposed to have been dozens of miles from Khafji, driving in another direction, military sources said.
Although U.S. policy forbids women from serving in combat units, they do serve in support units, which often are located very near the front lines, officials said.
Iraq earlier had claimed that the Americans were taken prisoner. If true, the unidentified female soldier would become the first U.S. servicewoman captured in the gulf war.
Baghdad Radio said that she "will be given good treatment in accordance with the spirit of lofty Islamic laws."
While coalition forces fought to reclaim Khafji today, allied aircraft heavily bombed a 10-mile-long Iraqi armored column headed for Saudi Arabia, according to a combat correspondent traveling with British troops. U.S. officials acknowledged they had sharply increased air strikes against Iraqi forces in desert areas north and west of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.
A U.S. squadron commander said that up to 1,000 Iraqi military vehicles were moving through southern Kuwait toward the Saudi border today.
"Roughly 800 to 1,000 vehicles are moving now . . . in columns, in small groups, in convoys," Lt. Col. Dick `White, commander of a squadron of Harrier jets, told pool reporters.
Reporters in Khafji early today saw streets lined with Soviet-built BTR-60 armored personnel carriers, smashed and gutted by TOW missiles, dead Iraqi crews inside.
In Washington, Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly termed the performance of Iraqi troops as "pretty shabby," saying the forces "achieved nothing other than to be mauled badly.'
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in an interview in Cairo with ABC, predicted Iraq would be driven from Kuwait within a month.
Iraq said its incursions at Khafji and other border points signaled the start of a "thunderous storm" on the desert floor.
The official Iraqi News Agency claimed: "Iraq has taken the initiative in opening the pages of the showdown at the time and place it decides."
U.S. commanders have said they would not stage a ground invasion of Kuwait until ordered to do so by President Bush. Military analysts have suggested that a U.S-led offensive may still be weeks away, to give allied bombers more time to "soften up" Iraqi soldiers by dropping thousands of tons of explosives on their reinforced positions in the desert.
There has been speculation that the allied air campaign could be extended, possibly for another month or more, in hopes of forcing Iraq out of Kuwait without a costly ground battle. But the top U.S. commander in the gulf, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, strongly played down that notion.
Allied forces cannot "wait it out indefinitely," he told NBC-TV. "There's a finite limit to the amount of ammunition and that sort of thing we have available to us."
Eleven Marines were killed and two others wounded in a skirmish with Iraqi forces Tuesday, the first allied ground combat deaths of the war. Military officials initially announced the toll at 12 dead, but revised that figure. Names of the victims, most of them ages 19 to 23, were released Thursday.
The U.S. Central Command in the Persian Gulf was investigating the possibility that the Marines could have been killed by weapons fired by American or other allied forces, Pentagon officials said.
Lt. Gen. Kelly said the 11 had been aboard two light armored vehicles that were destroyed in the nighttime battle. He indicated there had been at least one report from the battlefield that U.S. or allied weapons, so-called "friendly fire," had been responsible.
by CNB