The Highway of Death is the name given to the war crime carried out by American and Canadian forces on the night of the 26th-27th February 1991, during the Persian Gulf War.
Massive columns of defeated Iraqi forces (including Kuwaiti hostages, civilian refugees, and Iraqi conscripts as young as 15 years old) 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 unilaterally declare an end to the war hours later so the US government could begin damage control and a cover-up of the extent of what had taken place. This is why they didn't keep going to Baghdad the first time around. Like the World War II Dresden atrocity committed by the Allies (see: http://tinyurl.com/oucaucx), the death toll was concealed from the world 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. There may have been as many as 80,000 killed.
Most of the American and Western witness and other personal testimony that can be found in the comments on the public shares of this post is also in agreeance with what is written here.
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: 90 kilometres of wrecked vehicles and human remains. Biblical proportions.
Kelly was also the first American journalist to be killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As well as grossly violating all civilised ethics and values, former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote in a 1991 report that the attacks violated the Third Geneva Convention, Common Article 3, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who "are out of combat".*
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.
Iraq had committed the cardinal sin of attacking Israel during the war, and so there was a terrible price to pay.
-The Hidden World
The massacre of the Iraqi POWs: http://tinyurl.com/q5xzryp
"Allied forces bombed them from the air, killing thousands in their vehicles on what become known as the "Highway of Death"."
*"WAR CRIMES: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal" by Ramsey Clark and others
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