Saddam had warned the West that he would destroy Kuwait and its oilfields in the face of a ground assault. He was making good on his word a little early. By Sunday, about 500 wells were burning (including some 50 ignited earlier), roughly 50 percent of the nation’s total. A thick stream of soot darkened the sky over more than a third of the Kuwaiti battlefield and beyond into Saudi Arabia. “Saddam has now launched a scorched-earth policy against Kuwait,” an angry George Bush announced Friday.
Saddam Hussein was confronting his high-tech enemy with primitive tactics: literally scorching the sand and leaving nothing behind for the enemy but ashes and spite. Even after the scars of invasion and systematic looting by Iraq, the oilfield blasts came as a startling offense - especially to the people who have to clean up the mess. “This is just pure meanness,” says Raymond Henry, executive vice president of Red Adair Co. Inc. of Houston. “If he can’t have it, you can’t have it.” The fires could take as long as six months to extinguish. And while the allied forces say the acrid smoke screen would not significantly sidetrack the ground phase of Operation Desert Storm, it temporarily hindered the air war by obscuring targets: many pilots were returning to bases without having dropped all their bombs.
The strike had long been planned - last fall American intelligence first spotted Iraqi Army engineers lacing the Kuwaiti oilfields with mines and explosives. By the time Desert Storm began, “most if not all the oil wells had been rigged with demolition charges,” says Rear Adm. Mike McConnell, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When Saddam gave the word the charges went off systematically, destroying not just wellheads but also storage installations and tanker-loading facilities, pipelines were ruptured at precise 20-yard intervals. “If he wants to he can destroy the entire oil capacity of Kuwait,” says a U.S. intelligence official. “Wouldn’t that be a graceful exit. " (The Iraqis blame allied bombings for the well fires.)
The explosions are just the latest jolts to hit Kuwait. Iraq has stripped the small state of everything from computers to cars and hospital supplies. The allies have been scorching huge chunks of Kuwait, too: more than a month of incessant bombing has turned the desert into a burning wasteland. “The whole military machine is burning,” said Capt. Bradley Seipel, an F-111 weapons system officer. “It’s amazing. You look at Kuwait, at the whole area. It’s just fire.” According to Kuwaiti resistance sources, soldiers have transformed Kuwait City, so far little scarred by battle, into a killing place for the ground war by mining streets, digging concealed trenches and setting up bunkers in apartment blocks.
The destruction isn’t limited to oilfields and buildings. Reports of atrocities against Kuwaiti citizens abound. More than 100 Kuwait City residents have been executed in recent days during searches for food and communications equipment, says exiled Information Minister Badr Jassim Al-Yaqoub. U.S. Central Command believes many of the dead were torture victims. “They’re sort of destroying the evidence,” said U.S. Brig. Gen. Richard Neal at a Riyadh briefing. “This is terrorism at its finest hour.” U.S. military sources think that while the soldiers doing the killing are acting under orders from Baghdad, the strain of war may be pushing their behavior to new levels of depravity. The Pentagon has also received reports that as many as 100,000 Kuwaitis have been detained as human shields. And Iraq could be arming Palestinian residents of Kuwait who want to continue the war after the Iraqis leave. “Saddam is turning the Palestinians into a sort of militia,” one civilian Pentagon source said.
The atrocities won’t be verified until after the war, but the vast cloud is obvious today - and could boost Saddam’s efforts. “Smoke is a major problem,” admitted British briefer Group Capt. Niall Irving. Thick smoke hides potential targets from the air, and the hydrogen sulfide fumes from the northern blazes are highly toxic. Yet senior U.S. and British commanders say the smoke might actually help advancing troops in a ground attack by screening allied troop movements - and the toxic fumes may sicken Iraq’s troops long before they affect the allies. While Neal admitted the clouds had “degraded our operations” in some areas, he said the allies could easily bypass the smokiest areas. Said U.S. Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly: “If we have to go through the smoke, we’ll know how to do that.”
While the massive cloud might not do much damage to battle plans, it could pose risks to the environment. Scientists who downplayed fears of ecocalamity when 50 wells burned are revising their estimates somewhat as the number of blazes climbs. Still, says Richard Small of the Sierra Research Institute in California “this is a case where the news is only terrible and not catastrophic.” So far the damage is limited to the region: black rain washes the soot out of the sky, polluting water and damaging Crops. But according to some estimates, the well fires might not be quenched for several months, which “potentially could be very serious,” says Richard Turco, a professor of environmental science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Turco says the dry spring weather will allow the soot to hang in a stable pall that could rise to the high-speed winds of the upper atmosphere, spreading as far as Asia.
The latest round of destruction can’t help making Kuwait’s eventual rebuilding even more expensive than present $60 billion estimates. One refinery, a new complex at Mina al-Ahmadi, was only recently completed. “The cost of equipment alone was $500 million,” says Kuwaiti oil official Sheik Ali al-Sabah. “Labor costs would push its replacement cost up to around $1 billion.” As the repair bill grows, the means to pay it is going up in smoke: estimates of the value of the burning oil range from $11 million to more than $40 million each day. Saddam Hussein might come to regret this latest tactic. Beyond the reparations Iraq could eventually be forced to pay, the Kuwaiti fires have opened the door for allied leaders to consider taking out Iraq’s own wells. Warplanes have knocked out Iraq’s oil-refining capability to prevent any more gasoline from getting to his Army. But they have so far held off hitting Saddam’s wells so as not to destroy his oil-production capability. “The Iraqi fields certainly become a legitimate, quid pro quo target,” says one Pentagon official. If so, Saddam’s Iraq could much resemble the Kuwait he leaves behind.
