Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...allied troops had built in Saudi Arabia sand berms and replicas of the other Iraqi entrenchments and practiced breaching them until they could virtually do it blindfolded. Among the tactics: Remotely piloted vehicles, or pilotless drone planes, guided soldiers to the most thinly held spots in the Iraqi lines. Line charges, or 100-yd.-long strings of tubing laced with explosives, blasted paths through minefields. Tanks and armored personnel carriers drove through those paths in long, narrow files, observing strict radio silence. Their drivers communicated by hand signals -- even in the dark, when night-vision devices worked perfectly...
Much had been written about the inferno the Iraqis would create by filling trenches with burning oil. But in the Marines' sector, U.S. planes had burned off the oil prematurely by dropping napalm. The Saudis did encounter trenches filled with blazing petroleum and in some cases with water, but crossed them by the simple expedient of having bulldozers and tanks fitted with earth- , moving blades collapse dirt into the trenches until they were filled. It took only hours for the allied troops to burst through the supposedly impregnable Iraqi defenses and begin a war of maneuvers, sweeping right past some...
...western reach of the allied line, the French 6th Light Armored Division jumped off before dawn Sunday, attacking across the Iraqi border with the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division toward a fort and airfield named As Salman, 105 miles inside Iraq. On the way, American artillery and French Gazelle helicopter gunships firing HOT antitank missiles subdued a force of Iraqi tanks and infantry, many of whom surrendered...
...toward the north; American Army units toward the Euphrates; British, other American, Egyptian and Syrian forces to the east. The French, having taken As Salman in 36 hours, stopped at midday on Schwarzkopf's orders to set up a defensive position guarding the units to their right against any Iraqi attack from the west...
Mass surrenders began almost with the first breaches of the Iraqi lines Sunday and by Tuesday had reached 30,000; the allied command stopped counting then. By war's end the number had easily passed 100,000. They came out of collapsed bunkers, waving handkerchiefs, underwear, anything that was white. Everyone on the allied side had a favorite surrender story...