SADDAM'S SOLDIERS Prematurely SURRENDER

Post-9/11 Era Forum

TERRIFIED Iraqi soldiers have crossed the Kuwait border and tried to surrender to British forces - because they thought the war had already started.

The motley band of a dozen troops waved the white flag as British paratroopers tested their weapons during a routine exercise.

The stunned Paras from 16 Air Assault Brigade were forced to tell the Iraqis they were not firing at them, and ordered them back to their home country telling them it was too early to surrender.

The drama unfolded last Monday as the Para batallion tested mortars and artillery weapons to make sure they were working properly.

The Iraqis found a way across the fortified border, which is sealed off with barbed-wire fencing, watchtowers and huge trenches.

A British Army source in Kuwait contacted me to explain how the extraordinary surrender bid unfolded. The source said: "The British guys on the front-line could not believe what was happening. They were on pre-war exercises when all of a sudden these Iraqis turned up out of nowhere, with their hands in the air, saying they wanted to surrender.

"They had heard firing and thought it was the start of the war.

"The Paras are a tough, battle-hardened lot but were moved by the plight of the Iraqis. There was nothing they could do other than send them back.

"They were a motley bunch and you could barely describe them as soldiers - they were poorly equipped and didn't even have proper boots. Their physical condition was dreadful and they had obviously not had a square meal for ages. No one has ever known a group of so-called soldiers surrender before a shot has been fired in anger."

Last night the Ministry of Defence officially denied the incident had taken place, but the story was corroborated by an intelligence source.

Meanwhile Saddam Hussein has ordered thousands of troops back to Baghdad as he turns the city into a fortress.

It is believed that two rings of steel are being established around Baghdad. The outer one consists of regular Iraqi army soldiers and the inner one is made up of Republican Guard fighters - thought to be the only troops that will put up fierce resistance.

Source: Sunday Mirror (UK)

yep sable, thats right, its our fault the citizens of Iraq are poor and don''t enough food and are gased and raped and killed by their own leader. GET REAL. WAKE UP. WE MUST GET RID OF SADDAM AND THE ONLY WAY IS WAR!!!!!!

umm sable, the soldiers did that because unlike Saddam, we would feed our POWs.

The threat is weapons that could be sold, and some do not appear to understand that.

I'm not sure how much you know about the newspapers "The Mirror" and "The Sun" but over here in the UK most of what's written in them is take with a pinch of salt, they have been known in th past to be very economical with fact.

(Not that I'm saying the same is true with this story - lest there be any eager lawyers reading )

I believe you have one slightly similar in the USA called National Enquirer?

But again if true it underlies the fact Iraq isn't a threat to my country so let the inspections continue.

hmm, Dreamzwalker, that remended me of something i readed about POW. It comes from http://www.iacenter.org/fireice.htm, and here is a part of it:

Part 1:


The assault on the Iraqi military, which was as defenseless as the civilian population, was relentless. More than 40,000 tons of bombs targeted the military, often in proximity to civilian areas. B-52s carpet-bombed military areas from extremely high altitudes. Estimates of the numbers of Iraqi soldiers killed by the end of the bombing ranged from 100,000 to 200,000. On March 22, 1991, the Defense Intelligence Agency placed Iraq’s military casualties at 100,000. Near the end of the bombing, as U.S. troops planned to advance on Kuwait City and Iraq, U.S. General Kelly said of Iraqi forces: "There won’t be many of them left." When asked for his assessment of the numbers of Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed, General Colin Powell answered, "It’s really not a number I’m interested in." General Schwarzkopf had a strict policy that Iraqi dead were not to be counted. Both violated international law requiring respect for enemy dead, their identification, notification of family, and proper religious burial. Americans know how they feel about their MIAs from Vietnam and earlier wars.

The U.S. claims to have destroyed 4,300 tanks and 1,856 armored vehicles. The Pentagon claimed 1,500 tanks were destroyed by F-111s alone, confirmed by video camera. Nearly all these planes employed laser-guided depleted-uranium missiles, leaving 900 tons of radioactive waste spread over much of Iraq with no concern for the consequences to future life. The rate of tumors, cancers, leukemia, and other fatal growths has increased alarmingly in the last few years in Iraq. Doctors believe radiation is a major cause.

At the end of the bombing campaign, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers were simply murdered. The European Parliament heard this description in April 1991:



[H]undreds, possibly thousands, of Iraqi soldiers began walking towards the U.S. position unarmed, with their arms raised in an attempt to surrender. However, the orders for this unit were not to take any prisoners. ...

The commander of the unit began the firing by shooting an anti-tank missile through one of the Iraqi soldiers. This is a missile designed to destroy tanks, but it was used against one man.

At that point, everybody in the unit began shooting. Quite simply, it was a slaughter.



The Toronto Globe and Mail carried an early Reuters dispatch on the ground action, entitled "Getting Blown to Bits in the Dark":



The first high-tech video of ground fighting in the Persian Gulf war shows terrified Iraqi infantrymen shot to pieces in the dark by U.S. attack helicopters.

One by one they were cut down, bewildered by an enemy they could not see.

Some were blown to bits by exploding cannon shells. Others, jarred from sleep, fled their bunkers under a firestorm.

The tape was shot through the night-vision gunsights of the Apache AH-64 attack helicopter, which turn pitch dark into ghostly day.

Reporters and even hardened soldiers held their breath when the first video was shown in a briefing tent of the 18th Airborne Corps, whose chopper crews had begun carrying the war to the Iraqis.

Combat reporters permitted to see the video did not say where or when the engagement took place. No casualty count was given. Reports from the front are subject to U.S. military censorship.

Apaches—equipped with cannons, laser-guided missiles, and infrared optics—have led several lightning strikes behind Iraqi lines in recent days, raiding bunkers and taking prisoners.

The pilots of the 6th Cavalry exult in their prowess.

"I just didn’t quite envision going up there and shooting the hell out of everything in the dark and have them not know what the hell hit them," said one Balak of Beemer, Neb.

"A truck blows up to the right, the ground blows up to the left. They had no idea where we were or what was hitting them," he said.

"When I got back I sat there on the wing and I was laughing. I wasn’t laughing at the Iraqis. I was thinking of the training, the anticipation. ... I was probably laughing at myself ... sneaking up there, and blowing this up and blowing that up.

"A guy came up to me and we were slapping each other on the back and all that stuff, and he said, ‘By God, I thought we had shot into a damn farm. It looked like somebody opened the sheep pen.’ "



Reuters thus confirmed not only that Iraqi soldiers were totally unable to see the enemy, or defend themselves, but that U.S. troops quickly realized this. It was like slaughtering animals in a pen. A report from William Branigin in the Washington Post described what the 1st Cavalry Division encountered as it moved into Iraq:



By the side of a dirt road in Iraq’s south-eastern desert sat a truck belonging to President Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard. In and around it lay the bodies of eight Iraqi soldiers. The immediate area was cordoned off with white tape like a police crime scene.

The headless corpse of one of the soldiers was on its back a short distance from the truck. Another body was wedged inside the engine compartment. Two more lay face up in the bed of the truck, their feet sticking grotesquely over the side.

This was the gruesome face of the Persian Gulf War, a facet of the conflict not previously seen by many of the young American soldiers who took part in the allied ground offensive against Iraq this week. After weeks of a high-tech war waged largely from the sky, the horrors on the ground took some of the troops by total surprise.

... Already, units of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division that had suffered no combat casualties in their unopposed drive through southern Iraq have seen several of their number killed or wounded by bombs or mines in the area they are holding. ...

A couple of miles away from the vehicles, a large expanse of desert that apparently had been a Republican Guard training area was devastated by aerial bombardment well before the U.S. armored units swept through. ...

The entire area was littered with pieces of ordnance, including hundreds of unexploded individual yellow cluster bombs sticking into the sand.

Even Iraqi units with operational tanks and the will to resist were helpless. Here is how the New York Times reported one slaughter:

The battle, which raged on February 27, the day before a cease-fire went into effect, was a showcase for the superiority of American weapons. But it was also the sort of one-sided victory that some American soldiers who tasted combat for the first time say they will not want to talk about a lot when they get home.

The sky was overcast and it was raining as the Americans approached the ridge around noon.

When the battle began the American tanks generally fired from a safe distance of about 2,500 yards. Unable to find the Americans with their targeting system in the overcast weather, the Iraqis aimed their guns at the muzzle flashes of the guns of the American tanks, and their rounds fell well short.

Other soldiers said the biggest fear was not the Iraqis but the worry that the American tanks might be hit by other allied units in the battle.

The psychological effect on the few American troops who actually witnessed this massacre will be important to monitor. Many will be casualties of the horror, psychological victims of American unfriendly fire power.

Reports by the U.S. press, although censored by the Pentagon and approved by the military, still could not help but reveal the war crimes committed against Iraq’s armed forces. New York Newsday published a graphic, lengthy summary of the "ground war" on March 31, 1991. It portrayed the attack upon an army that did not want to fight. It described "one-sided carnage," vehicles with white flags of surrender being destroyed, and "dazed and starved front-line Iraqi conscripts happily surrender[ing] by the thousands." It spoke of how U.S. pilots called the assault a "turkey shoot," and carrier crews frantically reloaded attack planes so they could shoot "fish in a barrel."

New York Newsday reported yet another slaughter of Iraqi soldiers that was approved by General Schwarzkopf two days after the ceasefire. According to U.S. military officials, it was the biggest clash of the Gulf War ground campaign, yet no Americans were killed.

The battle occurred March 2 after soldiers from the 7,000-man Iraqi force fired at a patrol of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division. ...

"We really waxed them," said one American Desert Storm commander who asked not to be identified. ...

Although the number of Iraqi troops killed is still unknown, New York Newsday has obtained Army footage of the fight showing scores of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s elite soldiers apparently wounded or killed as Apache helicopters raked the Republican Guard Hammurabi Division with laser-guided Hellfire missiles.

"Say hello to Allah," one American was recorded as saying moments before a Hellfire obliterated one of the 102 vehicles racked up by the Apaches.

... Although McCaffrey’s division was equipped with loudspeakers mounted on helicopters, they were never used to broadcast word of the cease-fire. "There wasn’t time to use the helicopters," said Lamar.

Instead, after the 6:30 a.m. Iraqi attack, McCaffrey assembled attack helicopters, tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery for the assault, which began at 8:15 a.m. According to Lamar, the attack ended after noon, with the wreckage strewn over a couple of miles of Route 8, the main Euphrates River valley road to Baghdad.

A senior Desert Storm commander said details about the post-cease-fire attack were withheld at the time even though officials in Riyadh and Washington knew the extent of the damage shortly after the battle ended.

... "We knew exactly [what the damage was] but it didn’t look good coming after the cease-fire," the Desert Storm officer said. ...

The combat film of the March 2 attack shows the Apaches destroying vehicles to create a roadblock so that the Hammurabi could not escape on the highway, which is elevated above the nearby Haw al Hammer swamp.

"Yee-HAH," said one voice. At one point, an Iraqi soldier runs in front [of] a tank just as the Hellfire explodes, hurling the soldier and chunks of metal into the air.

The Pentagon has documentary evidence, including hours of videotape, of this deadly assault on a virtually defenseless unit.

Months later, Newsday broke perhaps the most horrifying story of all. Thousands of Iraqi troops had been buried alive in the first two days of the ground offensive.

The U.S. Army division that broke through Saddam Hussein’s defensive front line used plows mounted on tanks and combat earth movers to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers—some still alive and firing their weapons—in more than seventy miles of trenches, according to U.S. Army officials.

In the first two days of ground fighting in Operation Desert Storm, three brigades of the 1st Mechanized Infantry Division—"The Big Red One"—used the grisly innovation to destroy trenches and bunkers being defended by more than 8,000 Iraqi soldiers, according to division estimates. While 2,000 surrendered, Iraqi dead and wounded as well as defiant soldiers still firing their weapons were buried beneath tons of sand, according to participants in the carefully planned and rehearsed assault.

"Once we went through there, other than the ones who surrendered, there wasn’t anybody left," said Captain Bennie Williams, who was awarded the Silver Star for his role in the assault.

The unprecedented tactic has been hidden from public view. ...

"For all I know, we could have killed thousands," said Col. Anthony Moreno, commander of the 2nd Brigade that led the assault on the heaviest defenses.

The article said that after the first wave of bulldozers incapacitated the Iraqi defenders, a second wave filled the trenches with sand, ensuring that none of the wounded could survive.

Part 2:

Many of those massacred fleeing Kuwait were not Iraqi soldiers at all but Palestinians, Sudanese, Egyptians, Filipinos, and other foreign workers. They were trying to escape to save their lives. As Newsday reported of the Highway of Death between Kuwait City and Basra:

The vast majority of the vehicles photographed were cars, buses, and military and civilian trucks apparently carrying Iraqi soldiers and some civilians, as well as their rifles and large quantities of goods they had looted from Kuwait. Reporters described one section of the highway as a virtually unbroken wall of wrecked and fire-blackened vehicles, piled on top of each other in a jumble of charred, twisted metal; truck cabs crushed, cars flattened underneath buses, other cars flipped upside down, tank guns pointing crazily skyward while the rest of the tank lay on its side.

Less than 10 percent of the vehicles in the one section photographed were tanks, personnel carriers, or artillery. ...

North Carolina GI Mike Ange described what he saw:

I actually went up close and examined two vehicles that basically looked like refugees maybe trying to get out of the area. You know, you had like a little Toyota pick-up truck that was loaded down with the furniture and the suitcases and rugs and the pet cat and that type of thing, all over the back of this truck, and those trucks were taken out just like the military vehicles.

The bombing of Iraq took more than 150,000 lives outright and left a broken and bleeding nation.

The bombs killed indiscriminately, mostly Iraqis, but others as well. Among the dead were Muslims and Christians, Kurds and Assyrians, young and old, men, women, children, babies.

In 110,000 aerial sorties, the U.S. lost thirty-eight aircraft, probably all from mechanical failure, pilot error, and accident. This is a lower rate than aircraft losses in war games when live ammunition is not used. Not a single B-52 was lost as they carpeted Iraq with 27,500 tons of bombs. Major bombing raids against Germany during World War II cost as high as 25 percent of the planes participating.

Total U.S. war casualties, including thirty-seven acknowledged to have died from "friendly fire," were 148, according to the Pentagon.

The U.S. has continued to attack Iraq with its aircraft, which patrol its skies night and day, and by cruise missiles launched from its enormous military positions in the region, including the largest naval armada since World War II. As the end of President Bush’s term approached, attacks increased. On 13 January 1993 more than one hundred U.S. aircraft bombed and strafed southern Iraq. The press interviewed the jubilant pilots, who described how they "honed in with deadly accuracy," delivering bombs containing "two thousand pounds of American anger." On 17 January 1993, the second anniversary of the assault on Iraq and three days before President Bush left office, he ordered an attack across Iraq. Baghdad was hit by fifty cruise missiles. One of the missiles hit the al-Rashid Hotel, killing two employees. An international Islamic conference scheduled there at the time, to be attended by Saddam Hussein, had been moved. Strikes the next two days were heavier. Iraq acknowledged twenty-one deaths on 19 January 1993. The attacks were deliberate criminal violence.

President Bill Clinton showed what he was made of by ordering minor attacks in the first days of his new presidency. On 26 June 1993 he authorized an attack with twenty-three cruise missiles on Baghdad. One hit the home of Layla al-Altar, a renowned artist and director of Iraq’s National Center for the Arts, killing her and her husband. Sporadic attacks have continued, the most recent in June 1998.

Continuing to call Iraq dangerous and a threat to peace, the U.S. maintains a nuclear arsenal larger by far than all other nations combined. In fiscal year 1996 it spent $264 billion on its military compared to $47 billion spent by the Russian Federation and $32 billion by the People’s Republic of China. Iraq’s gross national product, with which it had to meet all the needs of its people, was $11.5 billion—less than 5 percent of U.S. military costs.

With an arrogance to match its violence, the U.S. requested that the UN Security Council investigate war crimes committed by Iraq against U.S. soldiers and Kuwaiti citizens. This presaged later requests by the U.S. for UN prosecution of Serbs, Hutus, Pol Pot and—after his death—surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein and others, while opposing an independent International Criminal Tribunal capable of equal protection under law.

There was no war. No combat. There was only a deliberate, systematic genocide of a defenseless population while barely setting foot on Iraqi soil. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, "the greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government," he could not have dreamed in his worst nightmare what the U.S. did to Iraq.

i wont argue about USA acts in this war. Because this is War, it s not something noble, it s not something shiny, it s not something to be proud off.

but sometimes, Wars have to be done.

In our case, i dont see enough reason for this to happen again. really not enough.