Battle of Khafji
The Battle of Khafji was the first major ground engagement of the Gulf War. It took place from 29 January to 1 February 1991. It marked the culmination of the Coalition’s air campaign over Kuwait and Iraq, which had begun on 17 January 1991. The battle demonstrated the ability of air power to support ground forces.
About Battle of Khafji in brief
The Battle of Khafji was the first major ground engagement of the Gulf War. It took place from 29 January to 1 February 1991. It marked the culmination of the Coalition’s air campaign over Kuwait and Iraq, which had begun on 17 January 1991. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Saudi Arabia from southern Kuwait. Most of their attacks were repulsed by U. S. Marines as well as U.S. Army Rangers and Coalition aircraft. By 1 February, the city had been recaptured at the cost of 43 Coalition servicemen dead and 52 wounded. Iraqi Army fatalities numbered between 60 and 300, while an estimated 400 were captured as prisoners of war. The battle demonstrated the ability of air power to support ground forces. It was a propaganda victory for the Ba’athist Iraqi regime, but it was swiftly recaptured by Saudi Arabian ground forces, and Iraq was forced to withdraw from Kuwait. The United States redeployed the XVIII Air Corps and the VII Air Corps to the west of the al-Wafra oil fields. The U.N. Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait on 2 August 1990. In response, the Saudi Arabian government requested immediate military aid. As a result, the United States began marshalling forces from a variety of nations, styled the Coalition, on the Arabian peninsula. The Coalition launched a 38-day aerial campaign against Iraq and Kuwait, which crippled the Iraqi air defense systems and effectively destroyed the Iraqi Air Force, whose daily sortie rate plummeted from a prewar level of an estimated 200 per day to almost none by 17 January.
On the third day of the campaign, many Iraqi pilots fled across the Iranian border in their aircraft rather than be destroyed. The air campaign also targeted command-and-control sites, bridges, railroads, and petroleum storage facilities. In an attempt to provoke a ground battle, he directed forces to launch Scud missiles against Israel, while continuing to threaten the destruction of oilfields in Kuwait. These efforts were unsuccessful in provoking a large battle, so Saddam Hussein decided to launch a limited offensive into Saudi Arabia. The coalition’s leadership believed that an Iraqi force should be launched from the west, so it launched an offensive from the east. The Iraqi force launched an attack on the Saudi oil fields, but was unsuccessful. In the end, the coalition’s expectations of an Iraqi offensive decreased as a result of the reduced expectations. The Gulf War was won by the Coalition in the early hours of 1 February. It also led to the liberation of Kuwait and the end of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the late 1990s and the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in early 1991, and the beginning of a new era of democracy in Iraq and the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iraq. The war was also the first Gulf War to be won by a non-Arab nation, with the United Nations leading the coalition in the fight against Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime.
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This page is based on the article Battle of Khafji published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
