Banner Graphic, Volume 21, Number 151, Greencastle, Putnam County, 1 March 1991 — Page 2
THE BANNERGRAPHIC March 1,1991
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Iraq claims it wiped out allied units behind lines
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) Baghdad radio claimed today allied airborne units that landed behind Iraqi lines were wiped out, and it said Iraq would be remembered forever for its stand against a “total siege.” A radio commentary also denounced Arab partners of the U.S.-led coalition, which it said stopped fighting only after fierce battles with Iraq’s elite Republican Guard. GOVERNMENT newspapers praised Iraqi forces. One headline proclaimed: “By God’s will and the might of our leader Saddam Hussein we foiled the aggressors’ plot.” “Oh, our beloved Iraq, you are still inside the heart and conscience of every Iraqi citizen and every soldier,” a radio commentary said. “You teach mankind many, many things.” The government on Thursday ordered its soldiers to stop fighting and agreed to comply with all 12 U.N. Security Council resolutions against Iraq for its Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait. AT THE SAME time, the government scoffed at allied claims of victory after six weeks of air strikes and four days of ground fighting that took U.S.led troops into Iraqi territory as Iraq’s soldiers pulled back from Kuwait. “All the paratroopers dropped behind the Iraqi defensive lines at the approaches to Dhi Qar govemate, southern Iraq, were wiped out after all the communication lines were cut between the coalition forces and the U.S. forces command in the Dhi Qar region,” the radio claimed today. It said “various sources” reported President Bush’s ceasefire decision resulted from heavy tank battles “described as the
Kuwaiti hospital workers tell horror stories
KUWAIT CITY (AP) Morgue worker Hadra Ahmad grew accustomed to the sight of death. But she never got used to the horror of the deaths suffered by Kuwaitis during seven months of Iraqi terror. A volunteer Red Crescent worker at urban Mubarak Hospital, the 29-year-old woman today described the corpses she had seen since the
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SADDAM HUSSEIN Foiled aggressors’ plot fiercest battle since World War II.” A radio commentary praised Iraqi citizens. “IT WAS A WHOLE chapter of rare exploits which you recorded over the past seven months of total siege,” it said. “At the same time, large and rich Arab regimes sided with the unsuccessful conspiracy, supplied it with men and money, and hired out its cheap and mercenary media to the dirty petrodollars,” it said. The commentary said Iraqis “have stood up against the raids of acrimony, vileness and hate for more than 42 days. Their homes, houses of worship, air raid shelters, schools, hospitals, and economic and civilian installations were subjected to more than 100,000 air raids.” “By this stand alone, oh Iraq, the whole world will regard you with pride and dignity until the end of time.”
Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion. Some had been shot in the mouth. Some had their throats cut. Some were apparently burned alive and then shot, she said. “ON MY DUTY alone, I have seen more than 500 bodies,” she said. “Why arc they doing these things? We just cannot understand.”
4 J " p i ■1 U| s
(Left to right) Lori, Jan, Bill, and Ralph
Saddam’s battle-weary army blundered to defeat
WASHINGTON (AP) the fourth largest army in the world. Battle-hardened from eight years of war. Ready to make allied blood flow. “This is a very formidable force,” Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said of Iraq’s army in August So what happened? SADDAM HUSSEIN’S army blundered to defeat because it was badly used by its commander in chief, say military analysts. And it was crushed by a brilliantly implemented allied battle plan, say Pentagon officials. Instead of battle-hardened, the Iraqi army was battle-weary. It was big, but much of it was poorly trained. Saddam mobilized 40 divisions of reservists late last year. “Cannon fodder. The talent pool was too thin,” said Kenneth Brower of Britain’s Sandhurst Royal Military Academy. BUT IN THE hands of competent generals, the Iraqi army could nonetheless have inflicted heavy casualties, the analysts added. The Air-Land battle doctrine of the U.S. Army emphasizes rapid maneuvers and attacking an enemy’s vulnerabilities. Instead, Saddam’s men were ordered to fight the same way they had in the war against Iran: hunkered down. “They didn’t read our book,” said a Pentagon source who requested anonymity. “We knew more about them than they knew about us.” SADDAM SHOULD have positioned his Republican Guard and armored reserve further west, said the source. That would have allowed the Iraqis to blunt the allied flanking movement that trapped the core of Saddam’s army. The Iraqi army “undcr-
Sorrowfully and calmly, she recalled the bodies she had seen: teen-age girls who were raped then slain, young men who had been tortured slowly with cuts and bums before being put to death by the Iraqi occupiers. “But now our heart is clear,” she said, two days after the Iraqis fled Kuwait. “They are gone.” At the hospital, one of six in Kuwait, doctors said hundreds of bodies had been brought to medical authorities. But they said thousands of other corpses were believed to have been left in the desert or tossed into the Persian Gulf. VICTIMS WERE sometimes rounded up by Iraqis seeking information about the Kuwaiti resistance. But sometimes, it seemed, they were simply tortured for the sake of it, the doctors said. At al-Amiri Hospital, a man who would identify himself only as Dr. Hassan described an incident also
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From his cramped position in the tail of a U.S.A.F. KC-135 tanker, Airman Ist Class Clayton Izumi guides a refueling boom to an F-16 fighter
performed” because the allies played “our strengths against their weaknesses,” said the source. The allies blew apart Sovietdesigned T-72 tanks used by the Republican Guard. “In the right hands, it’s a good weapon,” Marvin Feuerwerger of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said of the T-72. EVEN IRAQ’S preparations for a straight-ahead, slug-it-out attack weren’t as complete as they should have been, said retired Army Col. Michael Stupka. The defensive line that U.S. Marines and others penetrated was a mile or so deep, potentially dangerous but not insurmountable.
known to others. In September, only a month into the occupation, a doctor whom friends would only call Hisham was found by the Iraqis to have some simple medical equipment in his home, including an intravenous drip apparatus. The Iraqis accused him of treating wounded Kuwaiti resisters. THEY TOOK HIM to prison, shot him, gouged out his eyes, then mutilated him further, Hassan said. Then they look him back to his own house and hanged him. His wife and family were ordered to leave the body there for 72 hours, said Hassan. “Their policy was kill, kill, kill,” he said. Doctors in several hospitals said the Iraqis regularly cut off the ears of Kuwaiti captives. Dr. Abdul Rebha Abbas produced 24 Polaroid photographs of mutilated bodies brought to him with horribly beaten
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during the air war in the Persian Gulf. Analysts say it was the constant bombing by allied jets that broke down the Iraqi army. (AP photo)
Iraqi engineers should have built a defense that was five or six miles deep, Stupka said. No hail of long-range artillery fire rained down on allied troops when they breached enemy lines. “I ASSUMED they were lying doggo” waiting to unleash a heavy attack, Sandhurst’s Brower said of Iraq’s troops. Instead, “morale fell apart.” The air war waged by the allies had much to do with the collapse. Based on their performance against Iran, Iraqi troops “seemed capable of taking a pounding,” said Stephen Glick, a defense consultant who specializes in the Middle East.
faces. Several had entrails protruding. DOCTORS SAY there is no way of telling how many Kuwaitis were killed or tortured. But several said they were certain the number of Kuwaitis killed was well over one thousand, and possibly many thousands. Several testified to cases in which young women were raped and killed and their naked corpses returned to their parents. A young man by the name of Mishaal Abdullah said that on Monday the day the Iraqis fled his family and neighbors watched several Iraqi soldiers, accompanied by doctors in white coats, arrive in the modest residential neighborhood of Kurain. AS THEY WATCHED, he said, the Iraqis rounded up nine people and made them lie on the ground. Then they put needles in their neck veins and drew blood from them until they were dead.
$4.1 / Middle East Roundup
By The Associated Press
Here are developments in the Persian Gulf war: Around the Gulf:
• From the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf, U.S. and allied troops held their fire along a smoldering battlefront Thursday, weary, muddy but victorious in a lightning war that freed Kuwait and humbled Iraq. Statesmen began what President Bush called “the difficult task” of securing the peace, and ordinary soldiers began a new countdown for the trip home • The U.S. command reported some cease-fire violations Thursday, including an incident in which Iraqi gunners fired on troops of the U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps retrieving the bodies of American airmen killed in a helicopter crash. The Americans fired back and destroyed two tanks and two multi-ple-rocket launchers, the command said. Other isolated clashes with pockets of Iraqi troops continued in mid-afternoon Thursday, Associated Press correspondent Neil MacFarquhar reported from the field. The Iraqi units involved had been bypassed in the swift advance of allied forces. • Kuwaitis said thousands of their countrymen, mostly young men, were taken off to Iraq as hostages in the final days. Kuwait’s U.N. ambassador put the number at 22,000, in addition to 8,632 Kuwaiti soldiers held prisoner by Iraq. • U.S. losses were put at 79 killed campaign and 212 wounded. A total of at least 126 allied troops were killed in combat; 56 were missing in action, including 35 Americans; and 13 were prisoners of war, including nine Americans. The Saudi ambassador to Washington said an estimated 85,000 to 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and wounded as their army was shattered in 37 days of air bombardment followed by four days of ground war. Some 80,000 Iraqis are prisoners. • Despite bellicose claims of victory by Baghdad radio, Iraq’s army the world’s fourth-largest on the eve of war was in shambles. The U.S. military said the allies destroyed, captured or otherwise defeated 42 Iraqi divisions, each averaging 12,000 troops, leaving only one full division intact. The Pentagon said said U.S. air and ground forces overall had destroyed or captured some 4,000 of the 4,280 Iraqi tanks in the Kuwait theater, and knocked out or rendered ineffective 40 of the 42 Iraqi divisions on hand. Only three American tanks were reported destroyed or damaged. Washington: • One day after halting the war, President Bush announced Thursday that Iraq had promptly agreed to talks on a permanent cease-fire and the return of prisoners of war. “We are going to get back our POWs and we’re going to do it fast,” Bush declared. • The administration said Secretary of State James A. Baker 111 will fly to the Middle East next week to begin charting the postwar future of the Persian Gulf. He will stop in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Israel, as well as Turkey. Baker also will go to the Soviet Union, which tried and failed to broker a peace agreement to avert the ground war. • White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater said a pullout of U.S. forces might begin in days, but cautioned that “it took seven months to get in, it’s going to take a lot of months to get out. But we’re going to start a steady withdrawal.”
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