We even destroyed an Iraqi gunboat. One day, Tom Rhame called and said, 'Boss, we've got an Iraqi gunboat just off the coast by Umm Qasr. We'd like to destroy it.'
'Is it occupied?' I asked.
'No.'
'Go ahead.'
A few 120-mm tank rounds later, the gunboat went to the bottom of the Gulf.
Near Umm Qasr on 10 March, the 1st INF uncovered a huge cache of cruise missiles, Exocets and Silkworms. The unit not only destroyed the concrete facility that housed them, but set off the missiles in a spectacular explosion near the coast (they used remote fusing from five kilometers away).
HUMANITARIAN OPERATIONS
It was in the area of humanitarian operations that we were least prepared, and experienced the most frustrations — and, in the end, the greatest satisfaction — of anything we did in the postwar period.
We were genuinely surprised by the magnitude of this mission.
Immediately after Desert Storm, there were few civilians in the VII Corps sector. The largest towns were Safwan and al-Busayyah. When Moreno and the Big Red One had taken it, Safwan had been largely deserted, while al-Busayyah was now mostly rubble, and completely abandoned. Shortly after the beginning of the XVIII Corps withdrawal on 9 March, and while the talks continued at the UN, a civil war broke out in the south of Iraq, when the Shi'ite Muslims in the region rebelled against the Baghdad regime.
As a direct result of that civil war, and the Iraqi government's indiscriminate and deliberate acts of violence against the civilian population along the Euphrates, a large number of refugees began arriving in the VII Corps sector, starting on about 15 March. Many of these refugees were drawn to Safwan, the only significantly built-up area in U.S.-occupied Iraq, and refugees thought that from there they would have quick access to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (Safwan was only a few kilometers north of the Kuwaiti border). Soon after the war, however, both of those countries closed their borders to these refugees, and VII Corps faced a growing refugee population.
That meant a real command problem for me, of escalating proportions. I felt we needed to do something.
The day after XVIII Corps moved back to Saudi to begin redeployment, I came to this realization: I am the senior American in occupied Iraq. Orders or not, as American soldiers and according to the laws of land warfare and the Geneva Convention, we have responsibilities in an occupied country. So we acted.
I assembled the VII Corps civil affairs officer and G-5, Colonel Art Hotop, and VII Corps SJA, Colonel Walt Huffman. 'Picture this on the day we leave,' I told them. 'What should we have done as an occupying force in a foreign country up to that time? We will use your determination as the basis for what we will do until we leave.' They laid out the normal responsibilities of an occupying force, such as law and order, medical care, the clearance of unexploded ordnance around populated areas, and the provision of emergency food and water.
Though occupation duties had not been part of the mission we had been ordered to execute, for the next seventy days, VII Corps performed them de facto. Afterward, the official VII Corps report to ARCENT, CENTCOM, and the Department of the Army said, 'While occupying Iraq, U.S. forces incurred certain legal obligations under international law. VII Corps has aggressively sought to meet these obligations.'
For most of us, it was our first experience at occupation duty and large-scale humanitarian assistance.
How did we accomplish it?
We had already divided the occupied area into unit sectors, with each unit responsible for its particular sector — usually where the individual units had ended the war. Thus, 1st INF Division was in Safwan. The remainder of the units, however, were still in the desert, where there was no populated area, and so we shifted them. First we moved the 1st CAV into the area south of the Euphrates that had been vacated by the 24th Division. Next, we put 2nd ACR in the west, and the 1st INF northwest of the 1st CAV along Highway 8. South of them we assigned the entire western sector to the 11th Aviation Brigade, with the French regiment (it was actually battalion sized) under their operational control. When the 1st CAV left, soon after the departure of the XVIII Corps, we assigned the 1st AD to Highway 8 west of Basra. And when 1st INF left to fill the more western area, we assigned the Safwan area to the 3rd AD.
Our work fell into two periods. The first lasted from the beginning of the refugee influx, on about 15 March, to the signing of the UN-sponsored peace treaty, on 12 April. The second lasted from 12 April to 9 May, when all refugees under U.S. protection were settled in a camp in Saudi Arabia.
With the beginning of the refugee movement and the return of the indigenous population, Safwan's population returned to its prewar size of about 11,500. Soon, more than 8,000 refugees arrived, with no place to go, and began to build temporary shelters for themselves on the southern outskirts of town. The other towns of significance along Highway 8 (in what had been the XVIII Corps sector) were ar-Rumaylah and as-Salman, each with about 2,500 people. About 300 people returned to al-Busayyah, but they soon left again.
About 200 kilometers west of the corps TAC, about eighty kilometers north of the Saudi town of Rafha, and just north of the Saudi-Iraq border, the Saudis began a settlement similar to the one in Safwan, which we eventually called Rafha I, after the closest Saudi town. Gathered there were close to 12,000 people, with all the worldly possessions they could bring with them, including automobiles.
While this population and refugee movement was beginning, on 7 March, 1st INF helped to transfer 1,181 Kuwaiti citizens formerly held in Iraq back to Kuwait. During the time up to the cease-fire, we also processed more than 25,000 additional EPWs — Iraqi military who were either escaping the civil war or who otherwise wanted out of Iraq (we stopped this after the signing of the cease-fire agreement on 12 April).
At the corps TAC, I established a special task force to run this operation, consisting of the G-5, Colonel Art Hotop; his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Nick Marsella; two lawyers, Captains Dan Smith and Jorge Lorenzo; and a logistician, Major Bob Corbett. To command the civil affairs operation, we had Colonel Bob Beahm, commander of the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade out of the Reserve component. Each division commander ran operations in his sector. In Safwan, Butch Funk put Colonel Bill Nash and the 1st Brigade in charge of the town.
Meanwhile, Ron Griffith established a series of checkpoints along Highway 8 leading toward Safwan. At these checkpoints, troops of the 1st AD both screened and assisted Iraqi civilians and others moving through the area. Checkpoint B, about eighty kilometers west of Basra on the way to Baghdad, soon grew into a sizable way point, complete with medical treatment facilities.
On 27 March, I visited Lieutenant Colonel Steve Smith and 1/7 INF, who were manning Checkpoint B and providing medical help. Inside the medical treatment tent, I saw Major Dr. Rodriquez, U.S. Army, obviously dog- tired, but continuing to treat Iraqi civilians (General Powell later awarded him the Humanitarian Service Medal, on our recommendation). He was treating a little two-year-old girl named Nura, who had a gunshot wound in her shoulder, and another little boy, about six or seven, with a wounded leg.
There was an enormous crush of refugees needing medical treatment, brought about by the countless atrocities committed by the Iraqi army upon its civilians. What I saw with my own eyes confirmed reports we had been getting from about 24 March of atrocities in Basra and all over the south — reports of people hanging from lampposts, mass executions, and starvation.
Afterward, I called John Yeosock to tell him, 'It's bad enough that this is happening at all. But why are we so slow to react? Let's get observers into the Iraq side of the DML,' I went on, 'and get the UN to help us with displaced persons.'
'I'll see what I can do,' John answered.
I then asked my SJA, Colonel Walt Huffman, to start collecting evidence about atrocities from the Iraqi people for whom we were providing care; and Walt had the 1st AD make video- and audiotapes of their firsthand accounts, with their permission. This information was collected according to the rules of evidence, and sent to Third Army a few weeks later. From there it went to CENTCOM and the State Department, for further analysis and use.
The 3rd AD ran Safwan. They not only supervised the refugee camp, but essentially reopened the town: they established law and order. They cleared unexploded munitions within the town and to a distance of 500 meters
