Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 14, 1991 TAG: 9102140639
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: DHAHRAN, SAUDI ARABIA LENGTH: Long
U.S. officials said they were considering ways to avoid killing civilians in the air campaign, including announcing bombing targets in advance.
Two American airmen were killed when their EF-111A electronic jamming and radar-detection jet crashed on a combat mission, the U.S. military command said. It was the 27th U.S. warplane lost in the war.
In Baghdad, thousands of angry Iraqis marched to a cemetery to bury fellow civilians killed Wednesday in the U.S. bombing of a structure where they had taken shelter.
Baghdad officials say the building was a civilian air raid shelter; the U.S. military says it was a military command and control center.
On Wednesday, Iraqi officials claimed 500 civilians were killed in the raid. Official Baghdad radio said today that 64 bodies had been pulled out from the rubble, but it apparently referred only to those already identified.
The supervisor of the building said that by sundown Wednesday, 235 bodies had been recovered and hundreds more were believed buried beneath piles of concrete and twisted metal.
Associated Press correspondent Salah Nasrawi and other reporters escorted to the site of the attack today counted at least 40 corpses, many of them decapitated or missing limbs, pulled out between 10:30 a.m. and noon.
As coffins draped in Iraqi flags were lowered into a mass grave, crowds shouted anti-American slogans. "Bush, Bush, you will pay for all crimes shedding innocent blood every day," the mourners pledged.
At the daily U.S. military briefing in Riyadh, Marine Brig. Gen. Richard Neal said the allies have avoided bombing many strategic targets in Baghdad because of the risk to civilians, and continued to evaluate and re-evaluate their targets daily.
Asked if the allies might consider warning the Iraqis, either with leaflets or broadcast announcements, before bombing targets in cities, Neal replied:
"That's one of many options that we're exploring and we continue to explore."
The issue of civilian casualties was expected to be raised at a closed-door meeting of the U.N. Security Council today.
Iraq's information minister, Latif Jassim, today called U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar "a filthy and criminal conspirator" for "maintaining silence toward the crimes of the Americans and their jump type war allies."
A military communique read on Baghdad radio called the killing of civilians a premeditated crime. It said more than 130 new allied raids had been carried out against civilian areas, including religious sites.
Iraqi officials said Wednesday night's raids were considerably less intense than those of the previous night, and targeted mainly the downtown Baghdad telecommunications center, inflicting damage to nearby houses and business centers.
In Washington, a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed that Baghdad's al-Rashid Hotel, home to foreign reporters and diplomats, contained a key military communications center.
He said no strike on the center in the hotel was planned.
The New York Times today quoted military officials as saying there was a military communications center hidden in the hotel.
The Times quoted senior U.S. military officials in Saudi Arabia and Washington as saying the hotel communications center was responsible for relaying the last secure transmissions to Iraqi field commanders.
The newspaper quoted the sources as saying messages were relayed to Kuwait along cable lines hidden in two of the remaining bridges spanning the Tigris River. They said that if the hotel bunker were destroyed or the cables under the bridge severed, Saddam would have to relay messages to field commanders via high-frequency radio signals, which could be intercepted, the Times said.
The Ministry of Information in Baghdad today allowed reporters and TV crews to take an unrestricted tour of the hotel. Those reporters gave no indications that they saw a military communications center during their tour.
In an AWACS surveillance plane high over Saudi Arabia, the Air Force directed dozens of air strikes and combat air patrols over Iraq and occupied Kuwait early today. One mission was by B-52 Stratofortresses that bombed a missile assembly and repair facility near the Iraqi city of Taji.
Other targets included troops and artillery along the Kuwaiti coastline, the key Iraqi supply-line city of Basra and depots in Kuwait. Wave after wave of Air Force A-10, Navy A-6, and other aircraft went after Iraqi ground forces.
"Punishment, pure and simple punishment," said Maj. Clark Speicher, the mission control commander for the AWACS flight.
Not one Iraqi aircraft was detected airborne during the night.
Iraq today fired two Scud missiles at Hafr al-Batin, 65 miles south of occupied Kuwait and near a major allied military complex, allied officials said. They said the rockets broke up in the air, raining debris that caused some property damage and minor injuries to four civilians.
Neal said no Patriots were fired in response to the Scud attack because the city is not within "the envelope of Patriot forces."
There were also daytime air-raid alerts today for the first time in Riyadh and in neighboring Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. Sirens also sounded in Dhahran, site of a large allied air base.
The allies have been trying since the start of the war to knock out Iraq's mobile missile launchers, which it has used to fire more than 60 modified Scuds at Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The airborne "Scud patrol" reported the likely destruction of three mobile missile launchers in western Iraq, the U.S. military said. The area is a staging ground for missile attacks against Israel.
Along the desert front in northern Saudi Arabia, coalition forces fired artillery barrages overnight, and there was heavy allied air bombardment of Iraqi positions before dawn today.
The bombing was taking its toll on the Iraqi troops. Egyptian army officials said the largest group of Iraqi deserters to date - 22 - walked across the border and surrendered early this morning.
The Iraqi building hit Wednesday might have been one of 20 to 25 shelters in Iraq that contain both military facilities and civilian shelters, said Terry Gander, an editor of a Jane's military periodical.
Allied officials laid the blame for Wednesday's deaths at Saddam Hussein's door. "This guy [Saddam] is such a slime that I would not doubt he'd put people in there," said Navy Capt. Ronald Wildermuth, the U.S. Central Command's director of public affairs.
But in some quarters, the United States was reviled.
Palestinians in a half-dozen towns and cities in the occupied West Bank began a three-day general strike today to mourn the Baghdad civilian deaths.
In Jordan, which has a large Palestinian population, King Hussein expressed outrage at the bombing and called for an immediate cease-fire and an investigation by the U.N. Security Council.
Arab condemnation of the United States was not universal, however. "Iraq should announce its withdrawal from Kuwait to avoid any bombing of military targets that could hit civilians," said President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, a member of the allied coalition.
In the face of the fighting, some peace efforts continued.
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev met today with Kuwait's foreign minister, telling reporters beforehand: "The time is such that we have something to discuss."
It was also announced today that Iran's foreign minister will travel to the Soviet Union Friday to meet Gorbachev in a stepped-up Kremlin diplomatic effort to mediate the gulf conflict.
Iraq's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, is to visit Moscow on Sunday and meet with Gorbachev in the first visit by such a high-ranking Iraqi official since the war began. The visit follows a mission to Baghdad this week by Gorbachev's envoy, Yevgeny Primakov.
Saddam was reported to have told Primakov that Iraq was ready to cooperate with the Soviets in their efforts to reach a settlement. But there was no mention of relinquishing Kuwait - the principal allied demand.
When he returned to Moscow on Wednesday night, Primakov refused to discuss his talks with Saddam.
Meanwhile, Pentagon officials said the bunker in Baghdad was an active command and control center, an electronic choke point for the Iraqi military's war communications.
The structure's use as a communications facility had increased markedly over the past three weeks as primary stations were taken out by allied air attack, they said. Its targeting came after military officials had acknowledged Iraq's military had been able to maintain communications despite allied targeting of those systems.
Pentagon officials said it was originally built as a bomb shelter during the Iran-Iraq war, and in the mid-1980s had been hardened to enable electronics gear to withstand the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast.
The officials said they had no doubts about its military use. They said modifications included the installation of coaxial cables and fiber optics cables for use as a major communications link.
Navy Capt. David Herrington, deputy director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the top floor of the structure was reinforced with metal more than 10 feet thick.
The bunker was struck by a pair of 2,000-pound laser-guided "smart bombs" from a U.S. stealth fighter-bomber. Officials said one bomb opened the bunker's hardened shelter and the second followed behind, delivering devastating explosive force.
Pentagon briefers faced immediate questions about whether the videotape of the bombing would be released, as the Pentagon has done with examples of many successful bombing missions. Kelly said he did not know.
A spokesman, Marine Brig. Gen. Richard Neal, said military traffic and personnel had been observed around the bunker and that it would not have been attacked had U.S. commanders known it was being used to shelter civilians.
The shelter was one of five similar structures built during Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran and designed to hold about 2,000 people. Iraqi officials said civilians had regularly been spending nights in the facility since allied bombing began Jan. 17.
by CNB