The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 ...

12 The Basra Highway
From Kuwait City, the four-lane road to Iraq
heads west, around the south side of Kuwait
Bay, for about twenty miles, then due north
for another fifty miles to the Iraqi border. 1 After a short stretch
on two-lane roads through the border area, it connects with two
different highways; one route continues north for another
twenty-five miles to Al Basra, the other northwest along the
south side of the Euphrates River. On the night of February 25,
1991, the second day of the ground war, as the allied coalition’s
forces attacked Kuwait from the south and enveloped it from
the west, the Iraqi Army began evacuating Kuwait City and
withdrawing from its southern defenses. Loaded with every
kind of loot imaginable from the Kuwaiti capital, Iraqi soldiers
made a run up the Basra Highway trying to get beyond the
reach of rapidly advancing American armored and mechanized
units. In some cases, this retreat turned into a rout as allied attack
aircraft turned this road into a “Highway of Death,” destroying
hundreds of Iraqi vehicles in their attempt to escape. 2
By early afternoon on February 27, the coalition’s air attack
on the Basra Highway ended when General H. Norman
Schwarzkopf’s headquarters, U.S. Army Central Command,
moved the imaginary line intended to prevent accidental air attacks
on friendly ground forces east to the Persian Gulf. Its
movement was premature as the advancing VII Corps was not
yet in position to send its own attack helicopters against the
Iraqis streaming north on the Basra Highway. 3 With an unintended
reprieve from air attack, and American ground forces
still too far away, Iraqi units and individual soldiers continued
their retreat north to Iraq. Within the VII Corps’s zone, much of
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