In one thousand nine,
nine,
nine one.
The small Arab states of Kuwait was at the centre of the last major war of the twentieth century.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait,
putting nearly half the worlds oil within his reach.
Virtually everyone agree he had to be stopped.
Over one million troops faced each other across the battlefield.
Revolutionary new technology like stealth bombers,
cruise missiles and precision guided bombs would make this a battle,
unlike anything anyone had seen before.
I'll be getting to grips with some of the challenges faced by the men and women on the front line.
in this new era of warfare.
And I'll show how the commanders chose their tactics in a war dominated by catching a technology and ruthless political calculation with the seizure of Kuwait said,
I was saying threatened to hold a whole world to ransom.
He warned that the fight that would follow would be the mother of all battles.
Everything.
What now depend on the outcome of Operation Desert storm a battle for Kuwait.
The?
In the early hours of August,
the second nine nine nine,
nine,
nine Iraq's army shocked the world.
By invading its neighbour,
Kuwait.
They smashed through the defenses on the border and headed straight down this road towards the capital.
Kuwait City.
Kuwait Tiny Army was unable to mount any serious resistance.
Thousands of Iraqi troops were soon swarming through the campaign.
That's around for thirty m.
Just hours after the start of the invasion,
Iraqi troops arrived here at the Parliament building.
The guards were taken completely by surprise,
and within minutes,
Kuwait's Parliament had been captured.
A ruler of Kuwait,
the Amir,
along with most of the royal princes,
abandoned their palaces and fled.
By the end of the day,
the entire country of Kuwait was completely overrun,
as thousands of Iraqi troops continue to pour across the border,
and they were all obeying the orders of one man.
Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein was the President of Iraq and a brutal dictator.
For eleven years he had enforced of violence regime that murdered and tortured without hesitation.
He built up the fourth largest army in the world,
with over a million troops.
But his regime was in serious trouble.
Not least because an eight year war with his neighbour,
Iran,
and left him with a mountain of debt.
Iraq was bankrupt,
so then had to come up with a solution to his cash crisis,
and it lay across the border here in Kuwait.
This is Iraq,
and here is cool.
Wait,
wait!
It's almost floating on oil.
Outside the capital.
Kuwait City oil wells cover much of the country to the north.
There are oil fields on the border with Iraq.
Here in the center,
the borgen oil field is the second largest in the world.
Altogether,
Kuwait held ten percent of the world's oil,
and it was this vast wealth that the dam had captured,
together with the Iraqi oil fields.
that's a damn already owned.
He now had control of over a fifth of the world's oil reserves.
So damn gambled that western leaders that don't have the stomach for a Middle East war and would have to accept his occupation of Kuwait.
But he was in for a rude shock.
This will not stand.
This aggression against what has happened is a total violation of international law.
Please raise their hands.
The United Nations condemned the invasion and cooled Amsterdam to withdraw his troops from Kuwait.
But far from withdrawing,
there were signs that he might be planning something even bigger.
Thousands of Iraqi reinforcements were moving into Kuwait.
Some set up defensive positions along the coastline.
But most worrying for global leaders,
it was a large number of troops and tanks driving right down through the country and messing on its southern border.
The question was,
would they stop there?
Two hundred miles south of the border was the richest concentration of oil wells in the world.
The oil fields of Saudi Arabia?
The Saudi army was small.
If Saddam chose to attack now there was nothing to stop him.
If he sees Saudi Arabia's wells,
he would control nearly half of the world's oil.
President Bush Sr and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were determined to stop it.
They were convinced that the only way to protect Saudi Arabia and its oil was to put U S and British troops in on the ground.
But there was a huge problem.
Saudi Arabia is the spiritual home of Islam.
It contains the cities of Mecca and Medina,
the most holy sites in the Muslim world.
Its royal family ran the country according to strict Islamic laws,
any attempt to fly in tens of thousands of troops from the non Muslim armies of Britain and America.
It was a political minefield.
On August was sixth,
nine,
just four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait,
a top ranked White House team flew to Saudi Arabia to meet King fired.
They offered to fly in thousands of U.
S troops to defend the kingdom.
King Father knew his meagre forces couldn't stop Saddam Hussein if he chose to invade.
So,
despite the risk of huge anger from devout Muslims,
he immediately gave the Americans the invitation they want.
It.
Within hours,
one of the biggest deployment of troops since World War II was underway.
More than two hundred and fifty thousand American and British troops from bases in the?
U.
S and Europe headed for the deserts of the Middle East.
The Americans and British were determined that their stand against Saddam Hussein should be seen as an international operation,
and not as an American led attack on an Arab country.
In the coming months,
troops from over thirty countries would take their place alongside the Americans and British in the Saudi Arabian desert.
It was an extraordinary coalition has even included several Arab states like Egypt and Syria,
but it was the Americans that dominated the man in charge.
It's called General Norman Schwarzkopf.
He was a giant of a man with a keen intellect.
He also had a fiery temper and he set the tone with one of his first public comments about Saddam Hussein.
It bears it here has come across that border and come back here.
We're going to get heads,
but when you get here.
so Scott was a tough chalk up.
But he knew he faced a mammoth task.
The?
Many of the troops have been trained to go into battle of the green rolling hills of Europe.
They arrived to find a scorched barren desert like this one.
it was a place few of them had ever imagined.
They'd have to fight over.
The sun cloaked their engines,
they've got in their food and no one was even sure of a stable enough to take the weight of the big American combat vehicles.
But the biggest problem by far was making sure the Western troops did not offend their Muslim hosts.
Even apparently innocent behavior like female American troops wearing short sleeves because huge offense in a country where women are expected to cover up completely.
Troops were issued with instructions on how to behave appropriately in a devout Muslim country U.
S Army chaplains,
where even renamed the royal Officers' so as not to cause offence,
but it remained a fragile coexistence.
An Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia remained a constant fear for the coalition.
But it was the stories about the actions of Sudan's army inside Kuwait that outrage world opinion.
They brought a reign of terror to Kuwait,
including summary executions in the street.
Sudan's men were looting shops,
houses and factories across the city,
torture and punishment beatings became commonplace.
is the Iraqis tried to crush any sign of Kuwaiti resistance?
Some resistance fighters?
We have been shot dead in front of their own families as a warning to everybody else not to get involved.
Western civilians living in Kuwait and Iraq had been rounded up and taken to Baghdad as hostages.
Saddam appeared with some of them on television,
in a clumsy attempt to show that they were being treated well.
Oh,
yes.
As he entertained,
says,
Stuart gets his milk.
Meanwhile,
his grip and Kuwait was tightening.
So they were saying to turn your weight into a defensive fortress.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops were in Iran and Kuwait,
many of them dug in down here on its southern border.
They'd built very heavily defended positions with great sand ramparts close to the frontier with Saudi Arabia.
Behind them was a second line of defense,
with thousands of troops.
And then about one hundred miles further back just inside Iraq was the dams,
elite troops,
the Republican Guards waiting in reserve.
By Nov nine,
nine,
nine nine world leaders had run out of patience with Sudan.
Although we haven't attacked Saudi Arabia,
he showed no signs of withdrawing from Kuwait.
So the U.
N security council passed a new resolution that changed the coalition's mission,
Traumatically twelve votes in favour.
Two votes against.
One abstention.
No longer with the coalition just defend in Saudi Arabia.
If sometimes troops have not withdrawn from Kuwait in six weeks,
the coalition will attack and force the Iraqis out.
The count down to war had begun.
For the U.
S military,
it was a daunting prospect they were haunted by the memories of the United States,
lost major company and knew that they could not afford to make the same mistakes again.
If one American soldier has to go into battle,
that soldier will have enough force behind him to win and then get out as soon as possible.
This will not be.
Another Vietnam.
The smaller circle,
but Saddam was determined that that was exactly what it would be.
He calculated that if the Americans attacked,
his best hope was to inflict massive casualties on the U.
S troops so damn believed that after the Vietnam War,
it was not something the?
U.
S public were tolerated at one thousand,
nine hundred and ninety eight.
He had the weapons to cause thousands of casualties in seconds.
Just two years earlier,
in March,
nine thousand,
nine hundred and ninety eight,
the Iraqi army had attacked a Kurdish village in northern Iraq.
Using a mixture of mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin.
Five thousand people were killed and thousands more suffered terrible injuries.
Throughout the coalition,
every soldier lived in fear of an Iraqi chemical attack.
Day after day.
They practice the drills that would save their lives if nerve gas was used against them.
To understand more about what this meant to the coalition troops,
I joined the British army training exercise.
My job was to help unload equipment until they instructor launched a gas attack drill.
Got that.
Nine seconds come on thinking about the drills.
If a soldier couldn't get their mask on this quickly in a real attack,
the gas could be lethal for a minute.
I then had to carry on with my task exactly like the troops were in a combat situation.
OK.
He says.
But gas model doesn't make it impossible to breathe properly.
As I was finding out.
Laughter.
Ah.
This time.
Unmask?
There's just nowhere in there at all.
Fighting something like a battle under those conditions,
it's absolutely unimaginable and that a lot of Mars is doing there.
They're shuttled around the idea of spending hours and hours in this ghetto.
Charging across hills is extraordinary.
But in one thousand nine,
nine,
nine one soldiers feared they really would have to fight while under chemical attack.
Some of them were already suffering heat exhaustion just from wearing gas masks in training.
What's gone for knew that if it came to war,
the greatest threat to his troops was Iraq's chemical weapons,
and he also knew he would have to minimize American and coalition casualties.
The key would be to keep his grand troops out of the battle for as long as possible.
Brought up.
Schwarzkopf's plan was to launch a colossal air attack on Iraq itself and all its forces on the ground to try and force sometimes who abandoned Kuwait.
But if this didn't persuade Sudan to lead,
coffin would have to take a far more risky step.
You'd have to order his forces to fight their way into vehicle weight.
and some of the experts predicted that this would cost thousands of American lives.
His strategy would call upon the full might of the United States armed forces.
More and more of the world's most sophisticated aircraft tanks and weapons were arriving in the Gulf and six American aircraft carriers with over four hundred planes would be positioned within striking distance of Iraq and Kuwait.
One week before the UN deadline expired,
seven hundred and fifty thousand coalition troops waited on the battlefield as the politicians made one last attempt to find a diplomatic solution.
The?
U.
S Secretary of State James Baker met Iraq's Foreign Minister,
Tariq Aziz in Geneva.
Both men knew the Tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives were at stake.
And James Baker,
one the Iraq,
is not to use chemical weapons,
reminding them that America had nuclear bombs.
But seven hours of talks ended in failure.
If Iraq's should choose to continue its brutal occupation of Kuwait.
Iraq will be choosing a military confrontation which it cannot win.
And which will have devastating consequences.
But Madame remained as defiant as ever and promised his people a great victory.
He warned that the Americans depended too much on technology.
He boasted that Iraq could rely on the bravery and experience of its soldiers.
They are faith would defeat the enemy.
At midnight on January,
one thousand,
nine thousand,
nine hundred and ninety one,
the U N deadline,
expired across the world,
people watched and waited.
Everybody knew it was just a matter of time before the war began.
Of coalition aircraft took to the skies and headed for their targets.
Operation Desert Storm had begun.
The British are air pilots in low flying Tornado aircraft carried bombs designed to crater Iraqi runways.
The Americans first target was Iraq's capital.
From the rooftops of Baghdad,
three thousand antiaircraft guns fired into the night.
Straight into this wall of fire,
eight American bombers,
they were so sophisticated that the Saudis have nicknamed the first.
If one seventeen stealth bomber was designed to be invisible to radar.
But this was its first test in major combat.
Dell's first target was the main communications,
telling it like that.
At exactly three air,
the pilot in the lead aircraft push the button and a two thousand pound laser guided bomb descended on its target.
Across the city,
the ground shook as fourteen more bombs from other steltz hit their targets.
The aircraft turned for home.
Cruise missiles launched from the U.
S warships knocked out the power stations and plunged the city into darkness.
The air campaign unleashed by the coalition against Sudan's Iraq was codenamed Instant Thunder.
It was the most powerful and focused use of air power in the twentieth century.
On the first night coalition aircraft,
through over a thousand sources,
they hit power stations,
radar and communication networks,
airfields and chemical weapons.
The aim was first to gain control of the skies above Kuwait and Iraq and destroys the dam's ability to coordinate his forces and then to target the forces themselves.
Guided him by laser,
a bomb launch from planes like these could explode with him three meters of its target,
even from a range of seven miles.
The bombing campaign had been badly damaged Iraqi radar stations and gave a rocky pilots little chance to respond rather than fly,
flying against the most sophisticated air force the world had ever seen.
most of them offered to leave their aircraft inside hardened hangers and try and sit it out.
Throughout that night and into the following day,
American and coalition aircraft continued to attack Iraqi targets,
including Saddam Hussein's palaces.
Saddam Hussein was in fear for his life.
He moved between safe houses to avoid the coalition attacks,
but in public he would not be cowed.
On Baghdad radio,
we declare that the mother of all battles had begun and in secret he ordered his army to launch the weapon that he hoped would blow the coalition apart.
Its target was a country over seven hundred miles from Kuwait.
At two am on January,
one thousand,
eight hundred thousand,
nine thousand,
nine hundred and ninety one air raid sirens sounded across Israel.
They warned of a Scud missile attack from Iraq heading for Tel Aviv,
Israel's biggest city.
Moments later,
the first hit this factory near our housing estates in a residential suburb of the city,
initial reports and the Israeli army suggested that Israel was under a chemical attack.
In the confusion and panic people all over the city put on their gas masks,
some even injected themselves with their antidotes to nerve gas.
Saddam Hussein's attack on Israel was an act of ruthless calculation.
He hoped Israel would retaliate.
If it did,
Israel would then appear to be on the same side as the Arab nations in the coalition.
So there is hope was that the Arabs hatred of Israel would make this unthinkable for them,
they would withdraw from the coalition and the coalition would collapse.
From Washington,
senior White House officials call the Israeli defense Minister urging him to show restraint.
For hours,
the whole world held its breath,
waiting to see how the Israelis would respond.
Eight scuds have been fired at Israel at nights,
and by daybreak,
residents were still on alert but reports of a chemical attack it turned out to be a false alarm.
And remarkably nobody had been killed by any of the missiles.
Under huge pressure from the White House,
the Israeli Prime Minister,
Yitzhak Shamir,
agreed not to retaliate,
at least for the time being.
In return,
the Americans promised to make the destruction of the Scud missile launchers inside Iraq their top military priority.
A Scud hunt was on.
Coalition aircraft began flying around the clock,
searching thousands of square miles of empty desert,
hoping to spot Iraq's estimated twenty mobile Scud launchers and then destroy them.
For the American commander General Schwarzkopf,
it was a tough challenge.
Finding the mobile launchers is like finding a needle in a haystack you can well imagine.
Scott has continued to hit Israel,
and Washington ordered schwarzkopf to step up the search.
By the twenty fourth of January,
forty percent of the coalition's air sorties were diverging to Scott.
Hunting and special forces like Britain's essayists were sent into Iraq to try and destroy the launchers from the ground.
The scattered attacks on Israel went on,
but still they failed to break up the coalition,
as Saddam hope.
In a further attempt to weaken public support for the war,
British pilots,
John Nicolay and John Peters shocked out on the first night were paraded on Iraqi television.
they had been tortured and were forced to denounce the wall as well should be stopped.
So you go home.
I do not agree on this wall.
With her.
The pictures provoked condemnation across the world and only inflamed Western public opinion against Sudan.
So then was unable to prevent the air campaign systematically destroying his army.
So two weeks after the air will begin,
he ordered an attack that but force the Americans into the risky ground combat they wanted to avoid.
That's around eight thirty P m.
Iraqi troops broke cover from their positions,
hearing Kuwait and headed down there towards the Saudi border.
Their movement was watched by an unmanned American spy plane,
feeding pictures back to its operator.
What do we have to wear a crow?
Let's see what they are.
Something.
Oh,
yeah.
Twenty two hundred and fifty three hours they crossed.
The Saudi Arabia.
campfires going to be placed by the baby is going to be per se.
it can be hard.
The coalition had complete control of the skies over Kuwait,
but not a single aircraft was close enough to stop the Iraqis for their air.
This is ridiculous.
BRIC and Mama couldn't ask for any better target.
The Iraqis took the coalition by surprise,
they met little resistance and sees the Saudi town of caffeine about ten miles down the road.
Troops from America,
Qatar and Saudi Arabia now had to fight their way into the city to regain control.
With loss of dawn raid.
They got that way.
And when our support finally arrived,
they had a decisive advantage.
I certainly would not want to be and I read through them.
there are swarming over that battle field,
like math.
After two days of fighting,
coalition troops finally regained control.
An estimated thirty eight Iraqis were killed and hundreds more captured,
but the coalition has suffered too.
In their first taste of ground combat,
forty three coalition troops,
including twenty five US marines,
were killed.
For some,
it had been a sobering experience.
I never expected that kind of fear,
but you have to overcome it because if you don't know the comment.
It's just like being defeated without.
Actually.
Being killed or anything like that.
But with catchy it back in coalition control world attention turned once again to the air campaign,
which was now in its fourth week.
Television audiences across the world had become hooked on the extraordinary footage being beamed into their homes around the clock.
It was all part of the public relations war.
After their experiences in Vietnam,
American commanders knew that unfavorable coverage like damage public support for the war.
so they carefully managed what was actually seen by the watching world.
Slush bucket that was an excellent splendor.
The American general,
who commands all the allied forces in the Gulf,
has said that operation Desert Storm has been going according to plan.
The aim was to portray the war as clinical and bloodless,
with socalled smart bombs,
making surgical strikes.
I'm now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in Iraq on this particular day.
Keep your eye on the cross hairs.
Right through the cross,
hairs.
And now in his rearview mirror.
But the laughter was about to end.
In the early hours of February,
the thirteen thousand,
nine thousand,
nine hundred and ninety one to stealth bombers flew towards the Al Maria bunker in the suburbs of Baghdad on what was supposed to be a routine mission.
Shortly after four thirty a M,
they released two laser guidance.
Exactly as planned,
the bombs dropped down a ventilation shaft and exploded deep inside the bunker to maximize destruction.
The trouble was,
it was packed with over four hundred.
Civilians are not a kind of good at it.
Laughter.
The?
Hundreds have been killed,
many of them children.
Pictures of the disaster were broadcast around the world.
How much he says?
Most of this was good.
It was a terrible mistake.
Coalition air planners and believed that the Al Maria bunker was being used by Iraqi commanders,
not civilians.
These images of so many dead civilians and their distraught relatives shattered the myth that this was a bloodless war,
and it forced schwarzkopf to curtail the bombing of Iraqi cities for fear of causing more civilian casualties.
But the Iraqi army got no such reprieve.
The air campaign and battered Iraqi targets for over a month and still so damn had not withdrawn his army from Kuwait.
Schwarzkopf new coalition ground troops would soon have to drive them out.
and in preparation he intensified the air strikes against the Iraqi front line.
There was nothing smart about this bombardment,
old fashioned planes like the giant be fifty tools that are flown over,
Vietnam dropped old fashioned explosives in napalm on the Iraqi positions when a canister of napalm hit the ground.
It explode in the mass of burning jelly,
which incinerated anything it touched and suck the air out of everyone's lungs within fifty metres.
A coalition airman through around the clock bombing missions attempting to destroy fifty percent of the Iraqi army,
is trying to get rid of the ground.
What's going on?
So we really try to get a poet and on to cleared out the grounds.
Peripheral wondered what about some of my vow to say so?
It's just this on rail.
The guy is going out here.
In retaliation for the coalition's continuous aerial bombardment,
so that machine unleashed a new kind of destruction.
He ordered the Iraqi army to blow up the oil fields of Kuwait.
It created scenes of apocalyptic devastation.
It looks like what I envision held would look like.
The country of Kuwait is burning.
Hundreds of wells were blown up,
sending a wall of flame and smoke thousands of feet into the air.
The pipelines were ruptured,
storage tanks exploded and huge lakes of oil pooled in the desert sands.
Choking black clouds filled the air and they turned to night as the smoke blocked out the sun.
This piece of environmental vandalism only increased the pressure on Schwarzkopf to launch the ground campaign.
His plan was a masterpiece of strategic deception.
The main attack would appear to come down here across Kuwait's southern border.
Forty thousand American marines were thrust up into the Iraqi defenses,
alongside them troops from other coalition countries,
including large forces from Syria and Egypt.
Their job was to make some of them think they were just the start of a much larger attack from here in the South.
But what's cups main blow would come not from the south,
but from the West.
Under the cover of the air War,
he had secretly shifted the bulk of his army,
one thousand,
nine thousand nine hundred tanks and nearly three hundred thousand men up to three hundred miles off to the West to launch a giant left book.
His main heavy chunk force with Britain's men and tanks on their right flank were waiting for the signal to burst into Iraq and swing east Asia's the dam's Republican guard divisions dug in on the Kuwait Iraq border.
Schwarzkopf's men had a double mission to liberate Kuwait and are so weaken the Republican Guard and the Iraqi army that they could never cause trouble in the area.
Again.
On the twenty fourth of February,
nine thousand,
nine hundred and ninety one,
the ground attack began.
Out in the Gulf,
the big guns of the U.
S warships began a massive artillery barrage on the Kuwaiti coastline.
But the real attack would come from the ground troops.
The?
And the first to go in would be the U.
S Marines.
This is happen.
You've got an American flag on his back.
I would go right away.
The Marines had to pull those gaps and huge banks of sand like this one,
so the tanks and artillery could advance.
As the first troops went in,
none of them knew what would happen.
The fear of a chemical attack was so great that the?
U.
S troops,
more chemical protection suits and gas masks.
In front of them,
they expected vast minefields and tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and heavily defended entrenched positions.
Coalition commanders expected the marines to be able to penetrate just a few miles into the heavy Iraqi defenses.
But as many as one in three of the marines being killed or injured.
But as the marines' crossed into Kuwait,
they were amazed at what happens everywhere.
Iraqi troops are their abandoned,
their positions over raising the white flag and surrender most of them of conscripts and after the devastating five week,
air bombardment.
They were sleep,
deprived shellshocked and dehydrated.
They were in no position to fight.
All right.
I just don't get up.
The Marines continued forward into Kuwait.
There was little resistance,
and nearly everywhere their progress was unopposed.
Bananas are people their remaining on the enemy,
because we're going to wipe.
Imagine that matters.
The Marines were scoring a major success in their thrust up here into Kuwait.
All those too successful they and the Arab forces to the east and west of them were fast heading for Kuwait City.
There was now a risk that some of the crack Iraqi units like the Republic of God,
I'm here.
Mike retreat before Schwarzkopf's army could destroy them.
So he brought forward the timetable for his main attack.
He ordered his big left hook,
including Britain's Chang force,
to go in fifteen hours ahead of schedule.
The British would go to Kuwait and the U.
S tanks would head for the Republican Guard.
Ten hours into the groundwater at two thirty PM,
British and American troops began a massive artillery barrage onto the Iraqi positions in front of them.
One of their key weapons was the multiple launch rocket system.
As each of the rocket's burst in the air above the Iraqis,
it scattered six hundred and forty four bomblets over them.
It was as if they were being showered by hand grenades and just over thirty minutes.
More than half a million of these bomblets landed on the Iraqi troops.
As the artillery died down,
more than one hundred and fifty thousand coalition troops and over one thousand and five hundred tanks began their advance.
So damn knew he couldn't keep to wait much longer,
but he was still determined to show the Americans you had the capacity to hit them where it.
He ordered his troops inside Kuwait to counterattack against the U.
S Marines.
But they couldn't match.
the Americans.
Find no hope that relentless drive towards Kuwait City.
However,
I'm still had one thus sting in his tail.
Iraqi troops fired a Scud missile towards a coalition days in death from Saudi Arabia.
The resulting explosion killed twenty eight Americans,
and one hundred were left wounded.
To go up there,
it was their biggest single loss in the war so far.
Despite this incident,
the British and American troops had to keep up the speed of their advance.
So damn was army was collapsing by the minute at every minute,
counted if Schwarzkopf was to be able to destroy the bulk of Iraq's military equipment before it escaped.
What scarfs main arm and thrust and swept across a hundred miles of Iraqi desert west of going and closed in on surnames and lead to Republican governor?
I like the four PM on the two thousand and six the February they came face to face.
The gunner and one of the lead vehicle spotted a line of Iraqi tanks on the horizon,
the?
U.
S tank commander realized that he was heading straight for a major Republican guard position.
The Ghana in the lead American tank quickly fired off a shot at one of the Iraqi tanks.
Seconds later,
the American commander watches the shell landed directly on the target.
the Iraqi tank exploded,
throwing a man out through the hatch engulfed in a ball of flame.
Within seconds,
the other American tanks had opened fire in just a few minutes.
The Republican Guards position had been obliterated.
The Iraqi towns had been utterly outgunned.
The American tanks can score a hit on the move.
From over two thousand metres away.
Iraqi tanks were only accurate below seven thousand,
five hundred meters,
and they had to be station.
Within a couple of hours,
over fifty Iraqi armoured vehicles will destroy,
with few American losses.
Throughout the night,
the Americans pursue the Republican Guard.
By daybreak,
they'd smashed an entire division,
leaving over one hundred tanks and armoured vehicles smoking on the battlefield.
The remaining Republican Guard divisions made a desperate retreat,
and the Americans continue to hunt them down.
It looked like the Americans now had the Republican Guard at their mercy.
But something had happened inside Kuwait that would help to save them from destruction.
Iraqi troops had been fleeing from Kuwait City in any vehicle they could get their hands on.
American commanders were determined to stop them.
It led to one of the most controversial episodes of the war.
Using laser guided bombs,
pilots attacked Iraqi vehicles along a stretch of this road leading north from Kuwait City.
This created a roadblock,
and behind it,
hundreds of vehicles became trapped in a giant traffic jam.
This made them totally vulnerable to the American aircraft overhead.
Some of them were so desperate to escape.
They drove off across the desert.
Every available American aircraft was ordered into the attack,
with devastating results.
For the mile after mile,
charred vehicles and human corpses littered the desert and choke the two main roads going towards a rock.
An estimated two thousand vehicles were destroyed.
Only very few of them with tanks or armored personnel carriers.
most were civilian vehicles stolen by the Iraqi army as they fled Kuwait City.
Nobody knows how many hundreds or thousands of Iraqis died in the attacks.
The American leadership realised that pictures like these would soon be on television around the world and they feared it would look like a massacre.
This would become a key factor in deciding when to end the war.
Thirty six hours later,
coalition troops led by units from Kuwait's own Army,
arrived in Kuwait City.
The street soon filled with vehicles as people celebrated the end of the Iraqi occupation.
We're coming to it.
Where can you wake up?
Alongside them,
when American troops greeted as heroes as liberators of a country that had been subjected to months of horror by the Iraqi regime.
They don't have any civilization.
they cannot buy guns only by torturing.
They brought them over here in this place,
and they just shut them and kill them and left them for five days.
Just like a garbage.
They want to put the names are down in my hands and they told me to remember it.
Even you are the old man.
With the liberation of Kuwait,
the main political goal of the wall had been achieved,
but the Republican Guard had not yet been destroyed.
However,
President Bush fear.
but continuing the bombing retreating enemy might give the impression that America was behaving like a bullet.
And so on.
February,
the twenty eight nine nine,
nine,
nine one Bush declared a ceasefire.
I am pleased to announce that exactly one hundred hours since ground operations commenced and six weeks since the start of Operation Desert Storm,
all United States and coalition forces will suspend offensive combat operations.
The Gulf War was over.
Within weeks,
tens of thousands of coalition troops began the long journey of all of grateful that the mass casualties they fear had never materialized.
In total to one hundred and forty eight coalition troops were killed,
far less than anyone had dared hope.
Nobody knows how many Iraqis died.
Though some estimates put the figure,
it's over thirty thousand,
including three thousand civilians.
Despite the prewar affairs of the coalition,
it had turned out to be one of the most one sided battles in modern history.
What's come from?
These men returned home to a hero's welcome.
The allies could have chased her down all the way to Baghdad,
but they had no authority from the U.
N and no wish to become mired in Iraq.
Instead,
they hope that Sudan would not be too weak to be a threat.
The?
But Sudan's regime did not crumble as the Americans hoped he crushed to uprisings that followed the end of the war and remained in power for another twelve years.
Several thousand U.
S forces remained in Saudi Arabia to keep watch on Sudan's army.
Osama bin Laden has claimed that it was this presence of U S troops in the Muslim Holy Land of Saudi Arabia that motivated him to launch a series of attacks against American interests.
This culminated in the events of September,
the eleventh two thousand and one.
President Bush,
his son George W Bush was now in the White House and then responds to provide the level of tax he declared a global war on terror.
As part of this war,
he launched a?
U.
S and British Led invasion of Iraq in two thousand and three,
which ousted Saddam Hussein from power.
Thousands of British and American troops remain in Iraq to this day,
dealing with the consequences.
No one knows when they will return home.
You can find out more about the Gulf War of Nine thousand Nine hundred ninety one in Dan's video podcast,
available online now at BBC,
Don't code at UK slash history next night on BBC Two Jacques De hosting.
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