Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991                   TAG: 9103170247
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B/1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: STEVE COLL and WILLIAM BRANIGIN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: MUTLAA, KUWAIT                                LENGTH: Long

KUWAIT HIGHWAY BOMBING WASN'T A GOOD, CLEAN FIGHT

Fire and shrapnel exploded on the highway as bombs fell from the Silverfox squadron's A-6E and other attack planes. Navy, Air Force and Marine pilots trapped the long convoy by disabling vehicles at its front and rear, then pummelled the traffic jam for hours. Scores of Iraqis were crushed or incinerated in their vehicles. The victims, said Cmdr. Frank Sweigart, the squadron leader, when debriefed later that day by reporters, were "basically just sitting ducks."

The highway north of Kuwait City became the most vivid scene of destruction in the six-week Persian Gulf War, its images of wreckage and death contrasting sharply with emotionally remote "smart bomb" videotapes and television pool reports filmed from the rear of the desert battlefield.

Yet the way the highway bombing unfolded - its ferocity, timing and public presentation by senior U.S. military officers - also constitute one of the war's most complex and ambiguous episodes.

The bombing demonstrated the grim irony of the brief ground phase of the conflict that a war undertaken to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait ended with some Iraqi troops desperately trying to leave the emirate while U.S. forces held them in place and destroyed them.

U.S. military officers said their main purpose in pounding fleeing Iraqi troops was to protect allied forces elsewhere on the battlefield by cutting off potential reinforcements for Iraqi Republican Guard divisions north and west of Kuwait. In retrospect, some officers say, the doomed Iraqis crowded on the highway north of Kuwait City, many of whom had loaded their vehicles with loot stolen from the emirate, probably wanted to go home to Baghdad, not reinforce the Republican Guard. But there was no way to know this in the heat of battle, they added.

While the highway bombing was an act of war ordered by allied field commanders seeking to protect their troops on a dangerous battlefield, it also was the focus of a public relations campaign managed by the U.S. Central Command in Riyadh. It was a campaign designed to shape perceptions of the war's last and most violent phase, which culminated in the near-total destruction of Iraq's army in the Kuwait war theater.

To the northeast of here, more than 400 charred vehicles and dozens of bodies mark the 50-mile stretch where another fleeing convoy was destroyed along a second road that connects the Kuwaiti city of Jahra to Iraq.

The "highway of death," as the road near Mutlaa has come to be known, may be something of a misnomer. It is now apparent that more Iraqis fled their vehicles and were taken prisoner than were killed by U.S. bombing of the highway. There still are no reliable figures on precisely how many people were killed in the convoy, but reporters who visited the scene as bodies were being collected say the most they saw at any one place was 40, and they estimated that a total of 200 to 300 Iraqis may have died at the scene.

The following reconstruction is drawn from interviews with Kuwaiti eyewitnesses, U.S. field commanders and soldiers in Kuwait, officers with the U.S. Central Command in Saudi Arabia, and pool reports of interviews with U.S. pilots conducted at the time of the bombing.

\ Boxed in

It was Monday night, Feb. 25, less than 48 hours into an allied ground offensive that Kuwaitis hoped would liberate their beseiged country. Ever since the ground war began, there had been signs that Iraqi troops were preparing to leave Kuwait. Sunday, for example, they had been seen loading television sets and other booty into stolen cars and trucks. Now the flight was feverish, "as if they were racing to get to Iraq," recalled Manawar al Said, a Kuwaiti education ministry employee who lived by the highway.

Near midnight came the first thunder of bombs. Iraqis on the highway redoubled their panicked flight, only to exacerbate the traffic jam. Vehicles poured onto the southbound lanes to head north and collided with one another. Hundreds of Iraqis jumped from their cars and trucks and ran off into the night, desperate for a place to hide. Some crouched in a nearby cemetery. Many sought refuge in empty houses.

By morning the highway was a mangled scene of destruction and death. Pilots from the U.S.S. Ranger aircraft carrier buzzed the convoy again and again, dropping cluster bombs and whatever other munitions they could hurriedly load onto their attack planes. Marine FA-18 jets unleashed 500-pound bombs on the stranded vehicles. Air Force F-16A fighter-bombers raced north from bases in Saudi Arabia. There were so many planes striking the convoy, pilots said, the "killing box" had to be divided in half by air traffic controllers to avoid mid-air collisions.

U.S. pilots in the sky and Kuwaiti civilians on the ground who witnessed the attack were struck by the scale of its destruction. A few felt pity for the Iraqi victims or expressed mixed feelings about the one-sidedness of the bombing. But most said they thought the Iraqis only were getting what they deserved.

"I think we're past the point of just letting him get in his tanks and drive them back into Iraq and say `I'm sorry,' " U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. George Patrick told a media pool reporter that Tuesday as he rested between missions against the convoy. "I feel fairly punitive about it."

Navy pilot Sweigart, speaking to a reporter on the U.S.S. Ranger as he reloaded between attacks on the highway, said "one side of me says, `That's right, it's like shooting ducks in a pond.' Does that make me uncomfortable? Not necessarily. Except there is a side of me that says, `What are they dying for? For a madman's cause? And is that fair?' "

Kuwaiti civilians living in homes by the highway where Sweigart's bombs exploded felt none of the pilot's ambivalence. "These people who left Kuwait at the last moment were the security forces of Iraq, the people who really controlled the city," Kamel al Awadi, a Kuwaiti marketing executive who listened to the bombing from a two-story house near the tail end of the trapped convoy, said afterward. "They were the most brutal, most vicious people in Kuwait. We have no pity on them, because they had no pity on anybody."

\ Whom do you trust?

\ That same Tuesday morning, while bombs exploded on the highway, senior U.S. military officers stationed far away at the theater command headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, wrestled with an unexpected problem: How to publicly counter Iraq's surprise claim that the troops attempting to flee north from Kuwait were part of an orderly withdrawal from the emirate designed to comply with United Nations resolutions.

Baghdad's announced withdrawal order posed several problems for the U.S.-led coalition. Continued allied attacks raised the specter of a one-sided slaughter of retreating Iraqi troops, possibly complicating U.S. political problems in the Arab world. Perhaps more importantly, a successful Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait would deprive the allies of the chance to humiliate Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, destroy the remnants of his army and prevent him from posing a continued military threat in the region.

As the highway bombing proceeded Tuesday, the U.S. responded to the Baghdad Radio withdrawal announcement by downplaying evidence that Iraqi troops were actually leaving Kuwait, emphasizing that Iraqi forces had to abandon their weapons and armor to avoid allied firepower, and later arguing that Iraqi troop movements out of Kuwait were not a voluntary withdrawal but a retreat under fire.

At 7 a.m. Tuesday morning, five hours after Baghdad's withdrawal announcement, a U.S. military officer emerged from the war room of the U.S. Central Command headquarters to brief dozens of reporters on overnight developments. The officer, who cannot be identified under Pentagon rules, immediately was peppered with questions about whether Iraqi troops actually were leaving Kuwait.

The officer said the U.S. military command did not "have any real evidence of any withdrawal at this time. There are vehicles on the road, just as we've implied throughout the campaign. There are still not any indications of a significant amount of movement in any direction, north or south."

In fact, most Iraqi troops in and around Kuwait City began to flee toward the Euphrates River on Monday night, according to Kuwaitis who were there. U.S. military sources in Riyadh said the officer who gave the briefing thought his characterization was accurate because it was not clear as he spoke whether the Iraqis being bombed on the highway were going home to the north or merely heading west to reinforce the Republican Guard.

As the day wore on, senior officers with the U.S. Central Command in Riyadh became worried about what they saw as a growing public perception that Iraq's forces were leaving Kuwait voluntarily and that U.S. pilots were bombing them mercilessly, according to U.S. military sources. Relaying these worries to the Pentagon as they prepared for Tuesday's scheduled televised news briefing, senior officers agreed that U.S. spokesmen needed to use forceful language to portray Iraq's claimed "withdrawal" as a fighting retreat made necessary by heavy allied military pressure.

That strategy became evident at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday in Saudi Arabia (8:45 a.m. in Washington) when President George Bush stepped into the Rose Garden in Washington to read a brief and hastily arranged televised statement saying that the war would continue despite Baghdad's withdrawal announcement, that Iraq could not be trusted, that Iraqi troops were retreating under pressure, not voluntarily withdrawing, and that Saddam Hussein was attempting to achieve a political victory from a military rout.

The president's statement was followed quickly by a televised military briefing from Saudi Arabia, which had been postponed earlier, apparently to accommodate the White House announcement. At the Saudi briefing, Brig. Gen. Richard Neal emphasized that Iraqi forces were not withdrawing unilaterally from Kuwait but were being pushed from the battlefield.

In fact, however, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in and around Kuwait City had begun to pull away more than 36 hours before U.S. Marine and allied ground forces reached the capital. It is not clear why the Iraqis left when they did. Some prisoners reported being abandoned by their officers and many exhibited low morale and expressed no desire to fight attacking allied forces. An unknown number of those who left may have been responding to orders from superiors.

While the Iraqi troops may have pulled out because they were battered by allied bombing and fearful of a direct ground attack, they did not move out under any immediate pressure from allied tanks and infantry, which still were miles from Kuwait City.

The U.S. Army's Tiger Brigade did attack the paralyzed Iraqi convoy on the road from Kuwait City on Tuesday afternoon, but only after hours of relentless air strikes had pinned the fleeing Iraqi vehicles down. Units of the 2nd Marine Division also reached the road from Kuwait on Tuesday and began striking it with artillery and tanks. Capturing the highway intersection controlling entrance to Kuwait City was a primary objective "from day one," said Marine Corps Commander Lt. Gen. Walter Boomer.

The attempt by U.S. Central Command briefers in Riyadh to shape perceptions of the Iraqi movement from Kuwait largely had succeeded by Tuesday night. By then, the encirclement of Iraqi troops in southern Iraq and Kuwait was well advanced. Concerns that Saddam Hussein might save face by pulling his forces back to Baghdad and claiming victory to the Arab world seemed much diminished. Now a tourist trap

\ These days the "highway of death" is Kuwait's main tourist attraction. Kuwaitis in traditional robes and keffiyehs tote video cameras up and down the highway to record the devastation. U.S., British and various Arab soldiers tour the mayhem and take snapshots of each other alongside junked tanks, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles.

U.S. soldiers cleaning up the damage said they were satisfied justice had been done on the highway. "It was like a robbery," said Staff Sergeant Casey Carson of the Tiger Brigade. "It was like we were the police force and these guys got caught trying to burglarize a house."