67 Fun Facts About Gulf War

Which US president sent troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990?

George H. W. Bush. Victory pushed his approval rating to nearly 90 per cent, yet he lost the White House to Bill Clinton in 1992.

After Saudi Arabia, which Arab country sent the largest force to the coalition?

Egypt. The Arab world split over the war: Egypt sent tens of thousands of troops to fight Iraq, while Jordan, Algeria and Sudan took Saddam Hussein's side.

Operation Desert Storm was the attack, so what did the US call the months of troop buildup that came first?

Operation Desert Shield. It was announced as a purely defensive mission to guard Saudi Arabia, but in November the force was almost doubled so that it could go on the attack.

What name did Iraqi officials give the 1991 Gulf War?

Mother of all battles. Saddam Hussein's boast gave English 'the mother of all' everything, and the American Dialect Society voted the phrase its Word of the Year for 1991.

What did Britain call its military operations in the 1991 Gulf War?

Operation Granby. It was then the largest deployment of British troops since the Second World War, and its armoured division took about 7,000 Iraqi prisoners during the ground advance.

Iraq invaded Kuwait while deep in debt from an eight-year war against which country?

Iran. Iraq had borrowed billions from its Gulf neighbours to fight it, and Saddam argued the loans were payment for protecting them; Kuwait's refusal to cancel the debt fed the crisis.

Iraq accused Kuwait of slant-drilling into which giant oil field straddling their border?

Rumaila. After annexing Kuwait, Iraq redrew the map so that the north of the country, the Kuwaiti end of the oilfield included, became part of a neighbouring Iraqi province.

Which US ambassador told Saddam Hussein the US had 'no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts' in 1990?

April Glaspie. She said it eight days before the invasion, but Saddam's deputy Tariq Aziz later insisted Iraq had 'no illusions' that America would stay out, whatever she had said.

Which cousin of Saddam Hussein was made governor of occupied Kuwait in August 1990?

Ali Hassan al-Majid. He was already known as 'Chemical Ali' for ordering poison-gas attacks on villages in northern Iraq, crimes for which an Iraqi court had him hanged in 2010.

Which permanent UN Security Council member abstained in 1990 on authorising force against Iraq?

China. By abstaining instead of using its veto it let Resolution 678 pass by 12 votes to 2, giving Iraq until 15 January 1991 to leave Kuwait or be forced out.

Which British prime minister told the US president it was 'no time to go wobbly' over Kuwait?

Margaret Thatcher. She said it by telephone in August 1990 but never led Britain in the war: she resigned that November, and John Major was prime minister when the fighting began.

Which former heavyweight champion flew to Baghdad in 1990 to ask Saddam Hussein to free American hostages?

Muhammad Ali. Saddam was holding Westerners at military sites to ward off attack, and Ali was one of several famous visitors who pleaded for them; every hostage was freed by the end of the year.

Which country pledged up to 100,000 troops to the coalition after Baker visited Damascus?

President Hafez Assad had a personal enmity toward Saddam, who 'had been trying to kill him for years'.

Which two countries stayed out of the fighting but paid billions toward the cost of the Gulf War?

Japan and Germany. Constitutions drawn up after their defeat in 1945 kept their soldiers out of combat abroad, so they paid instead; Japan alone gave about $13 billion.

Which US Army general commanded the coalition forces in the Gulf War?

Norman Schwarzkopf. He staged Marine landing rehearsals so that Iraq would expect an attack from the sea, then sent his main force through the desert instead.

Which film follows American soldiers hunting stolen Kuwaiti gold just after the Gulf War ceasefire?

Three Kings. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube play soldiers who slip away to steal the gold, then trade it to get Iraqi refugees to safety.

Who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War?

Colin Powell. He advised that America should fight only with overwhelming force, clear goals and a way out, conditions soon known as the Powell Doctrine.

Which PR firm did the Kuwaiti-funded group Citizens for a Free Kuwait hire to win American support for war?

Hill & Knowlton. Its star witness, a tearful 15-year-old called Nayirah who described babies taken from incubators, turned out to be the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter, and her story collapsed.

Which human-rights group endorsed, then withdrew, the false story of Kuwaiti babies taken from incubators?

Amnesty International. It repeated the claim in a report before the war, and senators cited the story when voting; once Kuwait was free, no evidence could be found and Amnesty retracted it.

Which ship-launched American cruise missile first saw combat in the Gulf War?

Tomahawk. Warships fired about 300 of them, beginning in the war's first hours, and after that debut the ship-launched cruise missile was used widely in America's later conflicts.

Which stealth aircraft became famous for its raids on Baghdad in the Gulf War?

F-117 Nighthawk. It had already flown in combat over Panama in 1989, but it was the Gulf War, where radar-evading design let it reach the capital's thick ring of anti-aircraft defences, that made the angular black jet famous.

Which unit's AH-64 helicopters fired the first shots of the Gulf War on 17 January 1991?

101st Airborne Division. Eight of its Apache helicopters slipped into Iraq before the bombers and destroyed two early-warning radar sites, opening the door for every plane that came in after them.

Which Israeli city did Iraq hit with Scud missiles during the Gulf War?

Tel Aviv. Saddam hoped that Israel would hit back and that Arab states would then quit the coalition rather than fight on Israel's side; under American pressure, Israel held its fire.

Which Israeli prime minister agreed, under pressure from Washington, to hold back from retaliating for Iraq's Scud attacks?

Yitzhak Shamir. He agreed to hold fire so that Arab states would not walk out of the coalition, and in exchange Washington rushed American missile-defence batteries to guard Israeli cities.

Which US missile-defence system failed to stop the Scud that killed 28 Americans in a Dhahran barracks?

Patriot. After four days of non-stop running, a software fault had let the battery's clock drift by a third of a second, enough to lose the Scud; later studies also cut its claimed success rate sharply.

Whose national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl, sung days into the Gulf War, became a hit single?

Whitney Houston. The country was ten days into the war, and demand was so great that her label released the anthem as a single, though the vocal the crowd heard had been recorded in advance.

Which river did the coalition's flanking force reach to cut off the Iraqi army's retreat from Kuwait?

The Euphrates. Helicopter-borne American troops landed deep inside Iraq and cut the main highway along the river valley, shutting an escape route for the army in Kuwait.

Which Saudi border town did Iraqi troops capture and briefly hold at the end of January 1991?

Khafji. Saudi and Qatari troops, backed by US Marines and air power, took it back within days, a win the coalition's American commander said taught the Arab allies that the Iraqis 'were not 10 foot tall'.

Which ill-fated SAS patrol was sent into Iraq to hunt Scud launchers?

Bravo Two Zero. Three of its eight men died and four were captured; the one who got away, Chris Ryan, and the patrol's leader, writing as Andy McNab, both turned the mission into books.

Which Soviet leader asked Washington to delay its attack on Iraq for one last appeal to Baghdad?

Mikhail Gorbachev. James Baker recalled that less than an hour before the bombing began Moscow relayed the Soviet leader's personal plea for a delay; Baker replied that too much was already in motion to call it off.

The coalition's ground war against Iraq was halted after roughly how many hours?

100 hours. The round number was no accident: with Iraq's army in flight, the White House chose to stop the fighting when the ground campaign reached the hundred-hour mark.

What nickname was given to the coalition's wide flanking sweep through the desert west of Kuwait?

Left hook. Iraq had braced for a frontal assault on Kuwait and a landing from the sea; instead the main force swung far out through empty desert and came in behind its army.

The Battle of 73 Easting was named after what?

A north–south map grid line. The desert had no landmarks, so units measured their advance by the numbered 'eastings' of the map grid, and the battle was named for the line where it was fought.

Which future White House national security adviser led a US tank troop at the Battle of 73 Easting?

H. R. McMaster. He was a captain when his troop's nine tanks ran into dug-in Iraqi armour and destroyed it in 23 minutes without a casualty; 26 years later he became national security adviser.

Which Saudi king took the unprecedented step of inviting American troops into his kingdom in August 1990?

King Fahd. Iraqi troops stood on his border and Islam's two holiest cities lay in his kingdom, so he opened it to foreign armies, a decision his critics held against him.

Which tank was the mainstay of the US Army's armoured divisions in the 1991 Gulf War?

M1A1 Abrams. Its gun outranged Iraq's tanks by hundreds of metres, so crews often won the fight before the enemy could reply.

Which Second World War nickname did Britain's 7th Armoured Brigade carry into the Gulf War?

Desert Rats. The name was earned in the North African desert in the 1940s, and half a century later the brigade's tanks were sent back to the sand, this time to Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Which US jet, built around a tank-killing cannon, first saw combat in the Gulf War?

A-10 Thunderbolt II. Better known as the Warthog, it flew more than 8,000 missions, and its pilots even turned the big gun on two Iraqi helicopters, shooting both down.

The Tawakalna, Medina and Hammurabi divisions belonged to which elite Iraqi force?

Republican Guard. Saddam's best-equipped troops were held in reserve behind the front, and weeks after the ceasefire the units that survived spearheaded his crushing of the uprisings inside Iraq.

What did two US brigades use to overrun the trenches of Iraq's 'Saddam Line'?

Anti-mine plows on tanks and earthmovers. In what became known as the 'bulldozer assault' they simply filled the trenches in over defenders who had not surrendered; counts of the dead run from dozens to thousands.

Roughly how many Kuwaiti oil wells did retreating Iraqi forces set ablaze in 1991?

About 700. Experts warned that the fires might burn for years, but crews from several countries had capped the last well by that November, about nine months after they were lit.

The oil Iraq released into the Persian Gulf in 1991 was many times the spill from which tanker two years earlier?

Exxon Valdez. Iraq opened the taps at a Kuwaiti oil terminal, reportedly to foil a landing by US Marines, and the flow was stemmed only when American jets bombed the pipelines feeding it.

Which Texan firefighter, the model for a John Wayne film, helped put out Kuwait's oil-well fires at 75?

Red Adair. His was one of the first crews sent in, and by one firefighting engineer's estimate nine fires in ten were put out with nothing more exotic than sea water, piped in from the Gulf.

Which two US battleships bombarded Iraqi positions on the Kuwaiti coast in 1991?

USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin. Their gunfire helped persuade Iraq that Marines were about to storm the beaches, and when two anti-ship missiles were fired at Missouri a British destroyer shot one of them down.

What caused about a quarter of American combat deaths in the Gulf War?

Friendly fire. Thirty-five Americans were killed by their own side, more than the 28 who died when an Iraqi Scud hit their barracks at Dhahran.

The drone that Iraqi soldiers surrendered to in 1991, a first in warfare, is kept by which museum?

The Smithsonian. Its Air and Space Museum asked for the very aircraft, a small Pioneer with a television camera that soldiers waved white flags at as it flew low to check what a US battleship's guns had hit.

Whose flight after Saddam crushed the 1991 uprisings brought allied troops and aid into Iraq within weeks?

The Kurds. The coalition had stood aside while Saddam's forces put the revolt down, but when well over a million people fled toward the Turkish and Iranian borders the allies sent aid and barred Iraqi aircraft from the north.

Which network's live broadcasts from Baghdad, notably by Peter Arnett, defined television coverage of the 1991 Gulf War?

CNN. Its reporters described the first raid live from a Baghdad hotel, and even America's own war leaders, the secretary of state among them, followed the opening of their attack by watching the channel.

Peter Arnett had earlier won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from which war?

Vietnam. He won the 1966 Pulitzer for his Associated Press dispatches from the war, and a quarter of a century later he stayed on in Baghdad to report the bombing from underneath it.

Which CBS correspondent was captured by Iraqi troops after slipping away from the military's press escorts?

Bob Simon. Reporters were meant to travel only in escorted pools; he and his crew set off on their own, were seized, and spent 40 days in Iraqi prisons, an ordeal he later turned into a book.

Which bombs, under a tenth of those dropped, starred on Gulf War television?

Smart bombs. Film from the bombers' own targeting cameras was shown around the world, yet more than nine in ten of the bombs dropped were ordinary unguided ones, much like those of earlier wars.

Which navigation technology, in combat for the first time, let coalition troops cross featureless desert in 1991?

GPS receivers. Military sets were so scarce that many troops carried ordinary commercial ones, and the Pentagon left the satellite signal uncoded so that those would work.

Iraq's Scud missiles were originally developed and deployed by which country?

Soviet Union. The Scud was a descendant of Germany's wartime V-2, and Iraq stretched its range by shrinking the warhead and adding fuel, which left it so unstable that it often broke up on the way down.

Where did US Secretary of State James Baker hold last-minute talks with Tariq Aziz in January 1991?

Geneva. Baker brought a letter from the president spelling out for Saddam what war would cost him; the talks got nowhere, and that failure helped win Congress's vote for war three days later.

Four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, what did the UN Security Council impose on Iraq?

A trade embargo. Resolution 661 cut Iraq off from world markets within the week, and because Saddam never fully met the ceasefire terms the sanctions stayed in place until he fell in 2003.

One day after the ceasefire, a revolt against Saddam broke out in which Iraqi city?

Basra. The revolt raced across the south, but at the ceasefire talks Iraq had been allowed to go on flying its helicopters, and Saddam's gunships helped crush the rebels within weeks.

After its liberation in 1991, Kuwait expelled most of which long-settled community, whose leaders had backed Saddam Hussein?

Palestinians. The PLO had sided with Iraq, and a community of several hundred thousand was driven out within months; in 2004 Mahmoud Abbas went to Kuwait and apologised for that stance.

Which US defense secretary argued after the Gulf War that marching on Baghdad would have left America bogged down in Iraq?

Dick Cheney. He said that going on to Baghdad would have left America 'bogged down there for a very long period'; in 2003, as vice president, he was a chief architect of the invasion that did take the city.

A 2022 study traced Gulf War syndrome largely to troops' low-level exposure to which nerve agent?

Sarin. Coalition bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons stores released it in a cloud that drifted over the troops, and veterans whose genes break it down poorly were the likeliest to fall ill.

Anthony Swofford's memoir of serving as a sniper in the Gulf War became which film?

Jarhead. Trained as a sniper, Swofford saw very little combat, and both the book and the film are mostly about boredom and waiting in the Saudi desert.

Which 2024 video game set partly in the Gulf War was banned in Kuwait?

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. It features Saddam Hussein, and although Kuwait never publicly explained the ban, Activision cancelled and refunded every pre-order there.

Parading Western hostages on Iraqi TV, Saddam Hussein asked British boy Stuart Lockwood if he was getting his what?

Milk. Saddam ruffled the boy's hair on camera and told the hostages they were 'guests' whose presence was 'meant to prevent the scourge of war'.

Which comedian spent Christmas 1990 entertaining American troops in Saudi Arabia?

Bob Hope. He was 87 and had been entertaining American forces since 1941, and in 1997 Congress thanked him by naming him an honorary veteran of the armed forces.

Which was the only South American country to take part in the 1991 Gulf War coalition?

Argentina. It sent a destroyer and a corvette to enforce the blockade, sailing in the same coalition as Britain only eight years after the Falklands War.

Which airline flew home over 100,000 people stranded by the 1990 invasion of Kuwait?

Air India. The stranded Indians were bussed across Iraq to Amman in Jordan, and from there it made 488 flights to Bombay in about two months, which Guinness listed as the largest civilian evacuation.

During the Gulf War, Americans tied ribbons of which color to trees and front doors in support of the troops?

Yellow. The custom echoed the 1973 hit 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree' and had taken hold during the embassy hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981.

Which Arab leader flew to Baghdad and Kuwait shortly before the invasion to try to defuse the crisis?

Hosni Mubarak. He proposed direct talks between the two neighbors and pronounced his visits a success, only for Iraqi tanks to roll across the border days later.