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The Highway of Death refers to a road between Kuwait and Basra on which the retreating Iraqi army was attacked by aircraft during the Gulf War, on the night of February 26/27, 1991. Western news reports refer to the road as Highway 80, and it runs from Kuwait City to the border towns of Abdali (Kuwait) and Safwan (Iraq), and then on to Basra. The road was repaired during the late 1990s, and was used in the initial stages of the second Gulf War by US and British forces in order to invade Iraq.
The offensive action for which the road is famous became a controversial point, with some commentators alleging that the use of force was disproportionate, that the Iraqi forces were retreating, and that the column included many civilian refugees. Although no reporters were present during the action, and media accounts did not appear for almost a month, photographs taken afterwards showed dramatic scenes of burned and broken vehicles. Many sources are highly partisan, however, and it appears that no official casuality figures exist.
According to a PBS Frontline interview with Rick Atkinson, when asked whether we know how many Iraqis were killed on the Highway of Death, he answered: "I don't think we'll ever know how many Iraqis were killed there. There were about 1500 vehicles on the highway of death, counted, destroyed vehicles after the war. And another 400 or so on another road, a spur that ran parallel to the coast. Those who wandered through this wreckage right after the Iraqi surrender found relatively few bodies. Certainly some, and many that were terribly incinerated of those that were found. But the prevailing view is that many of the Iraqis had simply gotten out of their vehicles and ran. And it's difficult to believe that deaths on the highway of death probably exceeded more than a couple of hundred perhaps."
External links
- PBS Frontline's "The Gulf War" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/)
- An article in the Baltimore Sun, just before the second Gulf War, including a description of Highway 80 (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.border05mar05,1,3459890.story?coll=bal-iraq-storyutil&ctrack=1&cset=true)
- An article in The Daily Telegraph, during the war, including a map (http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/23/war123.xml)
- An article in Stars and Stripes, contrasting the condition of the road in 1991 and 2003 (http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=126&article=14772&archive=true)
- Peter Turnley's photo-essay, 'The Unseen Gulf War', which includes graphic images of the highway (http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_index.html)
- A page which contains one of the most famous images of the highway, Kenneth Jarecke's photograph of a burned truck driver (http://www.calicoweb.net/gateway/horrors_of_war.html)
- Photographs of destroyed military equipment taken by a contemporary American serviceman (http://home.alltel.net/roedder/abdali/abdali.html)
- A high-resolution map of Kuwait. Highway 80 leads north from Kuwait city, via al-Jahra (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/kuwait_rel96.jpg)
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