The Highway of Death is the name given to the horrific war crime perpetrated by American and Canadian forces on the night of the 26-27th February 1991, during the Persian Gulf War. Massive columns of Iraqi forces (including Kuwaiti hostages and civilian refugees) retreating from Kuwait in compliance with the original UN Resolution 660 were incinerated and roasted alive by a combination of air and ground forces in a secretive early test of thermobaric weaponry - explosives that work by utilising oxygen from the surrounding air to generate an intense, high-temperature explosion. The carnage and horror was such that George Bush Sr was forced to declare an end to the war hours later. Like the World War II Dresden atrocity committed by the Allies, the death toll was covered up and reduced to a small fraction of the actual one. BBC estimated at the time that thousands were killed in the 7-mile-long (11km) convoy, and some estimates are in the tens of thousands - the most likely ones. The late journalist and editor Michael Kelly wrote on the 10th March 1991 that For a 50 or 60-mile (approximately 90km) stretch from just north of Jahra to the Iraqi border, the road was littered with exploded and roasted vehicles, charred and blown-up bodies. (Cited in Health costs of the Gulf war by Ian Lee and Andy Haines.) Let the enormity of that sink in for a moment: 90km of wrecked vehicles and human remains. Kelly was also the first American journalist to be killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In an additional event that happened along side and was suppressed all together, a number of US Bradley Fighting Vehicles massacred a group of more than 350 disarmed Iraqi soldiers who had escaped the highway and surrendered at a checkpoint. The US Military Intelligence personnel who had been manning the checkpoint narrowly escaped with their own lives - they were fired on by the same vehicles and managed to flee in their humvees
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 15:43:32 +0000
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