By the time the January 15, 1991, deadline set by UN Security Council Resolution 678 had passed, the United States had mobilized a massive international coalition to force Iraq out of Kuwait. American forces accounted for over two-thirds the total, with 650,000 soldiers. The Arab world contributed nearly 185,000 soldiers, with 100,000 Saudi troops reinforced by units from Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. Britain and France headed the European contribution to the coalition, though Italy and eight other European states also contributed. In all, some thirty-four countries from six continents combined to make a world war against Iraq. The world held its breath as January 15 passed without incident. The next day, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm with a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad and of Iraqi army positions in both Kuwait and Iraq. Saddam Hussein remained defiant, threatening his adversaries with the “mother of all battles.” The greatest uncertainty facing the coalition was if Iraq might use chemical or biological weapons, as it had done against the Kurds in the Anfal campaign. U.S. commanders hoped to beat Iraq from the air without exposing their infantry to the risk of gas warfare. The Iraqis responded to the air war by firing long-range Scud missiles at Israel and against American positions in Saudi Arabia. Without warning, eight Scuds struck Haifa and Tel Aviv in the early morning hours of January 18, inflicting material damage but no fatalities. As sirens blared, Israeli radio stations advised citizens to don gas masks and take shelter in sealed rooms for fear that the Iraqis might deploy chemical warheads on the Scuds. Yitzhak Shamir’s government met in emergency session to decide how to retaliate, but the Bush administration managed to persuade the Israelis to stay out of the war. Saddam Hussein clearly hoped to transform the war for Kuwait into a broader Arab-Israeli conflict that would confound the American-led coalition. Mohamed Heikal recounted how Iraq’s missile strikes against Israel confused the loyalties of Arab soldiers in the coalition. When a group of Egyptian and Syrian soldiers encamped in Saudi Arabia heard that Iraq had fired Scud missiles at Israel, they celebrated with shouts of Allahu Akbar—“only to remember an instant later that they were supposed to be against Iraq. Too late—seven Egyptians and several Syrians were disciplined.”²⁵ In all, some forty-two missiles were fired at Israel, some falling short and striking Jordan and the West Bank, others intercepted by Patriot missiles. The Scuds provoked more fear than casualties. Many Palestinians in the Occupied Territories cheered Saddam Hussein’s strikes against Israel. Frustrated by the stalemate of the Intifada and Israeli iron-fist policies to break the popular uprising, and now confined to home by a strict twenty-four-hour curfew, the Palestinians were glad to see the Israelis under attack for a change. When journalists filmed Palestinians dancing on their rooftops, cheering on the Scuds, Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh explained their reaction to a British newspaper: “If Palestinians are happy when they see a missile going from east to west, it is because, figuratively speaking, they have seen missiles going from west to east for the last 40 years.? Nusseibeh was to pay for his missile-spotting comments; a few days later he was arrested on the spurious grounds of helping the Iraqis guide their Scuds against Israeli targets, for which he was given three months in Ramle Prison.²⁶ The Iraqis fired forty-six Scuds against Saudi Arabia. Most were intercepted by Patriot missiles, though one Scud struck a warehouse in Dhahran used as a barracks for American soldiers, killing 28 and injuring over 100, the highest number of casualties sustained by American forces in any single incident in the war. Analysis of missile wreckage reassured American commanders that the Iraqis were not using biological or chemical agents. The failure to deploy unconventional weapons emboldened coalition forces to take their war from the air to the ground, and on February 22, President George H. W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum to withdraw from Kuwait by noon the following day or face a ground war. By February, Iraq and its army had suffered more than five weeks of unprecedented aerial bombardment, which dwarfed the impact of its crude Scuds on Israel and Saudi Arabia. Coalition aircraft sustained a rate of up to 1,000 sorties a day, deploying laser-guided precision weapons with high explosives and cruise missiles against Iraqi targets. Baghdad and the cities of southern Iraq endured extensive bombing raids that destroyed power stations, communications, roads and bridges, factories, and residential quarters. Though there are no official statistics for civilian deaths in the Desert Storm Gulf War—estimates range from 5,000 to 200,000—there is no doubt that thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and wounded by the intense bombardment. In the worst single incident of the war, the U.S. Air Force dropped two 2,000-pound “smart bombs” on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriya district of Baghdad, killing over 400 civilians, most of them women and children taking refuge from the intense bombardment of the city. The Iraqi army too had suffered heavy casualties from the sustained bombardment, and morale was low by the third week of February. Facing imminent eviction from Kuwait, the Iraqi government responded with acts of environmental warfare intended to punish Kuwait and the neighboring Gulf states. Already in late January, Iraqi forces deliberately pumped four million barrels of oil into the waters of the Persian Gulf, creating the world’s greatest oil slick, a lethal mass 35 miles long and 15 miles wide (56 kilometers long by 24 kilometers wide). Given the fragility of the Gulf as an ecosystem, and coming after years of damage inflicted by the Iran-Iraq War, the oil slick was an environmental catastrophe of unprecedented scale. On the eve of the ground war, the Iraqis detonated charges in 700 Kuwaiti oil wells, creating an inferno. Jehan Rajab witnessed the explosions from the roof of her home in Kuwait. “We can hear for ourselves that the Iraqis have been setting off more of the dynamite placed around the well heads,? she recorded in her journal. ?The sky is a throbbing, burning red. Some of the flames rise and fall steadily, others shoot straight into the air to a great height and, I imagine, let out a mighty roar of theatrical proportions. Yet others are almost palpably alive: they spurt out in a swollen ball that pulsates steadily with evil intensity.? The next morning, the blue skies of Kuwait had been blotted out by the smoke of 700 burning oil wells. ?The entire sky this morning was black. It blotted out the sun.?²⁷ The Iraqis’ environmental war added urgency to the ground campaign, which began in the early morning hours of Sunday, February 24, 1991. The ground war proved brief and brutally decisive. Coalition forces swept into Kuwait and forced a complete Iraqi withdrawal within 100 hours. The intense fighting was terrifying for the inhabitants of Kuwait and the Iraqi invaders alike. Jehan Rajab described massive explosions and heavy fires across Kuwait City, against the background noise of blazing oil wells and hundreds of aircraft crowding the skies. “What an unbelievable night!” she wrote on February 26, two days into the ground assault. “The barrage lit up the lower sky with a blinding white light and blood red flashes.” The panicked Iraqi forces began a disorganized retreat. Soldiers sought rides on trucks and jeeps heading north to the Iraqi border, and commandeered whatever vehicles were still in running order (the Kuwaitis had sabotaged their own cars to deter theft). Many of those who found a ride out of Kuwait perished at Mutla Ridge, an exposed stretch of Highway 80 running from Kuwait north to the Iraqi border. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers in army trucks, buses, and stolen civilian vehicles caused a massive traffic jam on Highway 80. Coalition aircraft bombed the front and rear of the retreating column, trapping thousands of vehicles in between. Some 2,000 vehicles were destroyed in the ensuing carnage. It is not known how many Iraqis managed to flee their vehicles and how many were killed. Yet the images of the “Highway of Death” exposed the American-led coalition to accusations of using disproportionate force, even of war crimes. Concerned lest such atrocities jeopardize the international support they had built for their campaign, the Bush administration pressed for a complete cease-fire on February 28, bringing the Gulf War to an end.