Evening, everyone. Sadly, with my last semester of grad school now underway and diverting much of my attention, it may be a while before I can post another chapter for this timeline. Rest assured, I have no desire to let it wither and die because I'm looking forward to what happens next as much as you.
I'll still frequent AH.com and post updates when I can and certainly answer your queries to the best of my ability. I apologize for this chapter not being the most auspicious or earth shaking in content, but it's as good a place as any to pause things. As always, my thanks to everyone who's commented and offered advice throughout the summer. And now, on with the show!
Lines in the Sand: A History of the Gulf War
XIV
“The United States is paying dearly for its arrogance, and after the final victory the waters of the Gulf shall run red with the blood of its lost sons.” – Saddam Hussein
Moscow, USSR - 21:40 MSK April 2 1991
“The question, comrades, is what are we are going to do about this business with the Arabs?”
“Haven’t you heard? We are expected to continue serving as the lapdog of the imperialists.”
“That fucking upstart is going to see the Union crashing down around us because he has no stomach to keep the republics in their proper place.”
“Goddamned diplomacy…all of this ‘shoulder to shoulder’ business with the Americans is insanity. Decades of work, DECADES, lost in the span of a month to keep Washington happy.”
“If your man Saddam had bothered to get our approval before throwing the entire goddamned peninsula into the furnace, we wouldn’t have lost decades of work to begin with!”
“Trying to keep Saddam collared was a chore at the best of times. But losing Yemen as well, and Assad facing off against them both…the mind staggers at the investment we’re losing.”
“Do not mince words, Boris. Our investment is already well lost. All we can really do is salvage what we can from the wreckage.”
“Suppose that Saddam triumphs in this war? That would put us in an unassailable position in the Middle East and able to truly dictate terms to the West.”
“
If he manages this, then yes. Which I highly doubt he will. He has been surprisingly lucky against the imperialists so far, but it will not last. What happened in Yemen was mere practice, and once the Americans regain their feet Saddam will be overwhelmed.”
“Sadly, I must agree with you comrade. It is only a matter of time before this charade ends. You must admit though, it is providing us with a wealth of information about American capabilities against our equipment.”
“A child trying to operate his father’s car and sending it off a cliff proves nothing.”
“Indeed. If we could unleash the Red Air Force alone upon the West, we could destroy their planes and throw them into the Gulf within two days.”
“Boasts count for nothing here, Dmitriy, and it brings us no closer to arriving at a solution.”
“I was merely indulging, comrade. At least I desire to do something against the Americans besides talk them to death.”
“Mind your words, Comrade Minister. There are only loyal sons of the Soviet Union within these walls. Do not dismiss our purpose to serve your own delusions.”
“Comrades, enough. This bickering is pointless. We need solutions.”
“…Very well. Lets us consider the situation anew. Without massive outside support, Iraq will lose this war eventually. We are in no position to offer that support, so barring a miracle it is only a matter of time before the Americans are victorious in the Middle East. A victory that will, no doubt, result in a greatly increased presence by their military in the region for years to come. And will also no doubt result in the dismemberment of two valuable allies of the Soviet Union.”
“‘Valuable’ may be somewhat of a stretch.”
“Regardless. We must make the most of this situation.”
“If there has been any upside to this catastrophe, it has been our economy. Oil prices continue to rise, and with most of the Middle East in flames or blockaded that leaves us in a favorable position. Already we are in the midst of deals with the Europeans and the Japanese. Tokyo, especially, has been quite desperate to find a suitable replacement for their oil shipments.”
“That must be giving Washington conniptions.”
“My point, comrades, is that this war will not last forever, but the longer it goes on and the more damage done to the oil fields provides us with greater opportunity to take advantage of the current market situation. Therefore, it is to all of our advantage to assist the Iraqis.”
“And how would you suggest we accomplish this delicate task?”
“There is the matter of several thousand of our fellow citizens still trapped within Iraq. Saddam has been quite adamant about refusing them exit visas.”
“An unfortunate situation. The stupid prick will be made to answer for that eventually.”
“His little weasel of a Foreign Minister keeps knocking at our gates and begging for scraps. Perhaps we should finally throw something his way.”
“Hm. Getting that many people out of the country would take numerous transport flights. Something the Americans are learning the hard way right now.”
“Numerous flights utilizing large cargo carriers. No reason to disrupt our commercial air traffic with this. Quite a lot could be shipped on those flights before we get everyone out.”
“What about sending a few surplus S-200s his way? We’re phasing out the system anyway, but they would be more than sufficient to keep the American pilots on their toes. Saddam will surely agree to such an exchange.”
“An excellent start, Comrade Minister! We would finally have an opportunity to tweak the Americans’ noses back for their meddling in Afghanistan.”
“We must be careful not to overplay our hand here. The consequences of word leaking out about this arrangement would be…unfortunate. How are we to explain this sudden change in Iraq’s thinking, this newfound generosity?”
“That is easy enough. Cover the exchange by saying that we have decided to give new consideration to Iraq and Yemen’s peace proposal. Iraq releases our nationals in a sign of good faith, we debate and muse over their demands for a time, the back-and-forth continues for months, and in the end everyone is right back where they started. With the exception of all of our people being home, of course. We come out of the arrangement looking quite clever at having taken advantage of Iraq, and no one in Washington is the wiser to what has truly taken place.”
“…This could certainly work. We will need to proceed with the utmost secrecy though. If one of Mikhail’s toadies discovers this operation, it is all of our necks.”
“Don’t concern yourself with that. We’ll deal with him and that little bastard Yeltsin soon enough.”
Excerpt from Mother of All Battles: A New History of the Arabian War
By Simon Anderson Naval Institute Press 1995
Race to Riyadh
The loss of Bahrain as a contributing partner in the alliance was a serious blow to morale and prestige. An insignificant Third World naval force had managed to sneak in under the nose of CENTCOM and detach the island from the defensive effort. While losing Bahrain’s military support was hardly fatal to the war effort, it placed the United States in an awkward position as the remaining members of the Gulf states looked to them as a suitable protector from Iraqi aggression. General Schwarzkopf had spent his time as CENTCOM’s commanding officer trying to convince the leaders of the Middle East that the United States would not ‘cut and run’ as it had in Lebanon, but such assurances meant little if the Americans could not even prevent a few Iraqi patrol boats from operating at will in the Gulf. In addition to the justified fury of the American military in regard to the Iraqi operation, CENTCOM’s desire to show the Gulf that they were fully capable of defending their borders no doubt helped influence the scale of the response operation on March 31.
In the early hours of the morning, three USN submarines had moved into position from their previous posts patrolling the Strait of Hormuz and over the course of half an hour fired off no less than 35 Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets in Kuwait City and Um Qasr. Guided by onboard GPS, the missiles struck naval and port facilities in both cities and took out the surviving major surface units of the Iraqi Navy. What few patrol boats that survived the initial wave of strikes were mercilessly finished off when a wave of A-6 Intruders from the USS
Midway raided the ports an hour later. Nicknamed ‘Operation Overkill’ by the
Midway’s pilots, it completely annihilated any and all remaining naval capability for Iraq. The strike itself met with only a delayed response from local Iraqi air patrols and the F-14 escorts for the Intruders downed a Mig-21 as the raid was exiting the area. Allied revenge wasn’t without its casualties however; 2 A-6s and an F-14 were lost to air defense emplacements guarding the port zones.
With the naval threat from Iraq now thoroughly dealt with, CENTCOM set about trying to court Bahrain back into the fold of the alliance. Under the terms of the neutrality agreement, both Iraqi and allied ships were barred from operating in Bahrain’s waters, though after the air attack on March 31 the declaration really only applied to the Western navies and gave the Republican Guard some measure of a guarded flank for their forces in Dhahran. The skies over the island were a slightly different matter, as while Bahraini airspace was closed to overflights by the various surrounding air forces, it did nothing to prevent Iraq from continuing to launch its nightly missile attacks against targets in Qatar. The passage of 5 Al Husseins overhead on the night of April 1 were the first in a wave of ongoing reminders at what Sheikh Isa was sparing his people from by staying out of the fight, though the poor accuracy of the missiles led to some near misses for the island in the coming days. For CENTCOM, the threat of missile attacks proved to keep the sheikh frustratingly aloof from their pleas to rejoin the fight. Every day that Bahrain stayed out ran the risk of other Arab nations deciding to cut their losses and back down. On the bright side, the sheikh had rejected a request from Saddam to potentially base anti-ship missile batteries on the island. Bahrain was a dead zone in the campaign maps that had to be worked around and would have to be dealt with in the near future, but at least the island’s neutrality was unbiased enough to prevent it from acting as a forward staging area for the Republican Guard and the IAF.
To the west, there was little doubt over the intended objective of the Iraqi 2nd Armored (Medina) Division and the 4th Mechanized Division as they moved south from Hafar al Batin. Thanks to the newly signed cease-fire with Prince Nayef, Saddam’s forces now faced only a battalion-sized force of pro-Sultan infantry backed up by a few tanks and towed howitzers defending King Khalid Military City. These were the soldiers who had remained after the initial round of mass desertions or defections to opposing factions in late March and were determined to defend their zone of responsibility and the honor of their units in the face of overwhelming Iraqi firepower. With the majority of pro-Sultan units deployed east to assist with the defense effort along the coast or fighting to maintain some semblance of control in Riyadh, the Saudi battalion was quite literally the only allied force of any size standing between the Republican Guard and the kingdom’s seat of power. Adopting the title of ‘The Defiant Battalion’, they had refused multiple calls from the Iraqis to surrender or pull back in the days leading up to the offensive and managed to throw back an initial Iraqi reconnaissance in force around midday on April 1. The small victory was quickly eclipsed as the full armored might of the Iraqi thrust hit the Saudi defense lines that afternoon and the battalion was in full retreat within an hour. Surprisingly, losses among the defenders were lighter than expected as a significant amount of enemy’s firepower was targeted against defensive emplacements that had been abandoned as the succession crisis developed, allowing many to escape down Highway 50. The struggle for the sprawling military base concluded by nightfall, leaving the Iraqis in possession of the last major urban center in northeastern Saudi Arabia.
While the Republican Guard met with relatively no resistance on the ground in their latest advance, their progress was contested much more fiercely in the kingdom’s skies. With the IAF steadily losing a war of attrition to assist the ground assault, Saddam had been forced to pull and redeploy several fresh squadrons of fighters to the Saudi theater, severely weakening the air defense capability against his neighbors. The new squadrons provided a much needed shot in the arm for maintaining an acceptable level of air cover for the Republican Guard but did nothing to slow the appalling daily losses in the face of determined allied resistance. Planners in Baghdad estimated that if the current rates continued, the IAF would be gutted within two weeks and unable to even make a contribution to defending Iraqi airspace. With this deadline looming, Saddam had ordered his units to proceed south regardless of casualties. The divisions now operating in the Dhahran area were fully committed to pushing the Americans out of the area and unable to move against Riyadh without almost certainly getting flanked and cut off by the allied ground army around Al Hofuf. With every unit in eastern Saudi Arabia now pinned down in the battle along the coast, it fell to the two western Iraqi divisions to break the stalemate and make a run for the capital.
With the majority of the IAF defending their new conquests in eastern Saudi Arabia, air cover for the western push was noticeably spottier, something that the allies were quick to take advantage of. With a number of fighter squadrons still recovering operational capacity after the forced relocations from Riyadh and Dhahran, only the relatively limited number of craft available for strikes prevented the advance from becoming a total massacre. As it was, allied air units broke through IAF patrols with relative ease to hit the staggered lines of vehicles stretching for miles along Highway 50 and inflicted serious casualties throughout April 2-3. As one A-10 pilot recalled, ‘If you shot at the highway there was no way you could miss hitting something. It was point-fire-kill. Easiest missions we ever flew.’ The matter of Prince Nayef’s ceasefire threw a potential wrench into the strikes as it technically closed airspace over central Saudi Arabia from use by the allies. Despite this restriction, there were numerous incidents of American fighters launching from carriers in the Mediterranean passing through Nayef-controlled territory on their way to hit the western attack column. In all, the balance between attack and defense seemed evenly matched but failed to prevent the column from penetrating as far as the town of Al Artawiyah by April 4 before pausing to resupply. 30 miles to the south was Al Majmaah, the last Saudi town of any size between them and Riyadh, and the latest chosen line of defense for the Defiant Battalion. Raided stocks from what was left at King Khalid had helped augment their supply situation, but the sheer distance of their advance in so short a period had strained their abilities almost to the limit. At the start of the conflict Saddam had deemed the western push as a secondary front to merely divide allied attention and allow the main thrust along the coast to knock out the main defensive effort. With the coastal front rapidly settling into stalemate and the western push now deemed essential to winning the war against the West, the commanding officers of 2nd Armored and 4th Mechanized found themselves ordered to achieve victory despite having been a distant second in the resupply effort for the past month. If anything, the fact that they managed to push as far south as they did under the circumstances was more a testament to their adaptability and resourcefulness rather than any sort of strategic genius on Saddam Hussein’s part. As it was, the western force had the dubious honor of enjoying the longest exposed supply line of their forces in Saudi Arabia as they consolidated for a push on Al Majmaah. With regular attacks from the air fraying everyone’s nerves and SAM defenses only succeeding in shooting down 2 allied planes, the column was feeling increasingly isolated as it camped on its stretch of dusty highway.
In a grim retread of the losses of Al Jubayl and Al Shuqaiq, the fall of Dhahran removed the final major desalinization plant on the eastern Saudi coast and cut off the water supply for the Al Hofuf area. Local wells were already far overwhelmed by local needs and unlike Riyadh there were few local aquifers that the populace could turn to. It now fell to CENTCOM to bridge the gap and keep the area hydrated, a task it was able to achieve only after instituting water rationing for the area and limiting the daily water intake for its ground troops. Qatar was able to make up most of the difference by increasing the output of its own desalinization plants, and long convoys of tanker trucks carrying water for distribution became a common sight on the southern highways. In spite of this, there was a large amount of simmering unrest among the population of Al Hofuf who blamed the Americans for the current hardships. While not actively hostile, there was little doubt that the locals wanted the Americans gone at the earliest opportunity.
As CENTCOM settled into its new headquarters in Doha, the allies were finally able to start taking stock of what had been lost with Dhahran. The loss of the port facility had been a major blow to the reinforcement effort with planners estimating a possible counter-offensive taking place no earlier than August 1991. With the Iraqi advance mostly stalled in front of Buqayq and advancing only with heavy casualties, it appeared that the allies would be able to maintain their toehold over eastern Saudi Arabia and keep Qatar secure. Additional units could be brought in through Doha and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, and air squadrons were regaining combat readiness at a satisfying rate. While there had been some losses of equipment and vehicles during the pullout, the vast majority of the allied force and in particular the supply units had survived the offensive intact. If anything, the timing of the Iraqi offensive had been almost fortuitous in that it had taken place before the various supply dumps and logistics hubs could be properly built up. If the attack had occurred as per its original timetable it would possibly have captured enough material to delay a major counterstrike until the late fall of 1991. Of course, such an attack would have faced significantly more allied troops, so such speculation is no more than that. There is even a school of thought that actually credits Yemen for its closure of the Bab el Mendab, claiming that the blockade helped prevent many of the supply convoys from reaching eastern Saudi Arabia before the second Iraqi offensive and thus prevented desperately needed supplies from falling into enemy hands. The theory, while interesting at first glance, fails to take into account that aside from the prepositioned stocks in Diego Garcia, most of the supplies had to be brought in from bases in the United States and the initial wave was only just beginning to reach the Suez Canal when Icebreaker successfully concluded. As a result, the ground forces noticed very little difference in their supply situation after March 28.
On the other hand, several weeks’ worth of work building up munitions for the air squadrons had been lost when Dhahran fell. Since the city’s airfields had served as the primary hub for the ground attack fighters, the close support squadrons felt the pinch most badly and had to scale back their missions as a result. The A-10s of the 23rd Tactical Wing, now flying out of new facilities in Doha, reported on April 2 that they only had enough stocks to conduct four more days of combat missions at reduced levels. Part of the problem lay in that the allies had been unable to save some 37% of total war stocks in the Dhahran area (including nearly a hundred of the precious smart bombs), and those that had made it out in the convoy were now being frantically sorted and reorganized to send on to the new airfields. In sum, the supply situation for the air units would be an absolute mess with tangles and bottlenecks lasting until mid-April before finally getting things under control. Thankfully, the shortages did not apply to the heavy bombing squadrons based out of Egypt and Diego Garcia. Attack runs by B-52s enjoyed great success in disrupting the deployment of follow-up forces in the Iraqi offensive and stalled an attempt by the Al Abed Infantry Division to move south and take over occupation duties in the Dhahran area, though a single Stratofortress was shot down on April 2, the first combat loss for the bomber since the Vietnam War.
April 2 brought a new phase in the Saudi succession crisis with the first organized offensive between the factions. While limited clashes between small groups had been commonplace ever since March 20, the Battle of the Grand Mosque had been the largest and most public in what had mostly been disorganized street battles employing improvised weaponry. Interestingly, it proved to be Prince Nayef’s New Ihkwan that made the first move when the newly formed 3rd Infantry Battalion (Unity) attacked pro-Sultan units in Medina with the intention of seizing the Mosque of the Prophet. Despite having access to several towed howitzers, the New Ihkwan forces were eager to avoid a repeat of the debacle at the Grand Mosque and went into the attack with only light support from armored cars. Because of this, Nayef’s forces took heavy casualties in the face of heavier and entrenched firepower and were only able to break through after several hours of repeated assaults in the northern neighborhoods. Observers noted with much concern that it had been the attack of several suicide bombers that had thrown themselves onto enemy vehicles that had finally turned the tide in the New Ihkwan’s favor, a tactic that would see increasing use in battles between Nayef’s forces and the other two factions. With pro-Sultan forces falling back after concerted pushes in the Al Masani and Bani Dhafar neighborhoods that evening, the New Ihkwan was in control of the inner city by April 3, though remnants of the defensive effort continued to battle for control of the southern neighborhoods of Medina throughout the day before grudgingly scattering into the hills to the south.
The fall of Medina spurred Prince Mansour’s efforts to consolidate his position and secure his strip of territory in western Saudi Arabia. Religious fanaticism had been a growing problem for the kingdom over the last decade and now it seemed that Prince Nayef had tapped a particularly rich vein of potential manpower to augment his military and was arming it with all due haste. Facing threats from three directions and the Red Sea to his back, Mansour’s only hope lay in cultivating support from Egypt and working to turn his opponents to his favor or against one another. Swallowing his pride, negotiations for a cease-fire with Yemen successfully concluded on April 4 as each side promised to respect the current battle lines in the south as zones of control until a more permanent settlement could be reached. While it was viewed as a betrayal of his earlier promise to fight until Saudi Arabia was in full control of its territory again, the move freed his forces on the southern front to redeploy in response to the growing buildup of New Ihkwan forces in Medina and Zalim. Much more secretive negotiations through back-door channels with Jordan were bearing similar fruit and King Hussein had been surprisingly receptive to the possibility of Jordanian and pro-Mansour forces working in partnership much as he was currently doing with Egypt. With the southern front secure and the northern coast well on its way to follow suit, only the long and porous border between himself and Prince Nayef was left to fret over. In spite of the sacrifices and compromises to his stated cause, the hurried diplomacy paid off on April 5 when the equivalent of 2 brigades of pro-Mansour mechanized infantry moved to block several probing attacks by New Ihkwan units advancing west along Highways 60 and 40. Consisting primarily of light infantry and militia employing technicals and several dozen armored vehicles, they were part of a larger offensive as Nayef’s forces spread out from the Saudi interior to try and unite what was left of the kingdom by any means necessary.