ted to die. The munitions dump of the 68th Tank Battalion exploded. A cannon shell fell on one of the soldiers' positions, but, thank God, no one was there. The soldiers were somewhere else. The attack lasted about 15 minutes, but it seemed like a year to me. I read chapters in the Qur'an. How hard it is to be killed by someone you don't know, you've never seen and, can't confront. He is in the sky and you're on the ground. Our ground resistance is magnificent. After the air raid, I gave great thanks to God and joined some soldiers to ask how each of them was. While I was doing that, another air attack began. 2 February at 2000 hours." The ground war began at 8:00 p.m. on February 23 and lasted exactly 100 hours. This phase featured a massively successful outflanking movement of the Iraqi forces. Schwarzkopf used a deceptive maneuver by deploying a large number of forces as if to launch a large amphibious landing. The Iraqis apparently anticipated that they also would be attacked frontally and had heavily fortified those defensive positions. Schwarzkopf instead moved the bulk of his forces west and north in a major use of helicopters, attacking the Iraqis from their rear. The five weeks of intensive air attack had greatly demoralized the Iraqi front-line troops, causing wholesale desertions. Remaining front-line forces were quickly killed or taken prisoner with minimal coalition losses. Iraqi front-line commanders had already lost much of their ability to communicate with Baghdad, which made their situation even worse. On the final night of the war, within hours of the cease-fire, two U.S. Air force bombers dropped specially design ed 5,000-pound bombs on a command bunker fifteen miles northwest of Baghdad in a deliberate attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. President Bush's decision to terminate the ground war at midnight February 28, 1991 was criticized, because it allowed Baghdad to rescue a large amount of military equipment and personne...
