The Human Shield, Part 1 and Part 2

Key Skills – Communications – Level 3, Part B3.3.
Extended Document
Allies or All Lies

Cliff Jefferies
Cliff Jefferies © i Human Shield

Key Skills – Communications – Level 3, Part B3.3. Extended Document
Dedications
I am aware that this document is for the purpose of examination; however, the writing of this
document meant that I had to relive a difficult episode of my life that enhanced traumatic
memories which time had eroded. In those dark days, there were people who unselfishly helped me
and other hostages; none of them had to do what they did. They were not seeking glory, what they
did was from the heart; each of them knew that they were jeopardising their own lives and two of
them paid the ultimate price.
Yet had it not been for the invisible driving force of my two sons, perhaps none of these people
would have played any significant part in my life for surely, as so many others had done, I would
have given up at the start.
My sons were at home in UK not knowing if their father was dead or alive but yet excelled in
their education. Perhaps they were drawing strength from me.
To my sons, Darren and Richard who suffered more anguish from

my downfall than I did.
To Theresa, a Filipina who unselfishly risked her life to assist British

women.
To Yousef Al Hoss, a Palestinian who cared enough to help British

people.
To my dear Kuwaiti friend, Mundah ‘Monday’ Al Rabiyah, a brave

resistance fighter. RIP Monday.
To the Iraqi (Kurdish) lieutenant who captured me and lost his life
sparing mine.
To Dave, a dear friend. I could not have had a better buddy in

those desperate times.
During the time that we were running and hiding from the Iraqi soldiers, Dave and I spent days
hiding in complexes that they were searching. We talked only when we had to and then only in
whispers. On a subject of which has long since been forgotten, Dave and I had an argument and
whispering was essential; soldiers were often on the other side of the wall. So frustrating was it
arguing in that manner, that we ended up laughing aloud potentially revealing our location. We said
sorry and then toasted each other with G & T.
I have not seen or spoken to Dave since December 1990. My third colleague in hiding, Don, I never
saw again after the release flight. Such is the power of PTSD.
Cliff Jefferies © ii Human Shield

Index
Title page ........................ Page i
Dedications ..................... Page ii
Index ............................... Page iii
Chronicle ........................ Page iv
Mahboula ....................... Page vi
Preface ........................... Page vii
Prologue ......................... Page 1
The Beginning ................. Page 5
The Build-up .................. Page 6
The Invasion ................... Page 8
The Occupation .............. Page 10
Liberation ...................... Page 16
Epilogue ......................... Page 17
Diagrams
Ottoman Empire Maps .... Page 18
Kuwait Shifting Borders .. Page 19
Kurdistan ........................ Page 20
Cliff Jefferies © iii Human Shield

Chronicle of Iraq
10,000 - Mesopotamia – Earliest Records

340 - Byzantine Empire (Christian) – Encompass Mesopotamia
2 - Iraq formed in part of Mesopotamia
The Year of Christ
7 - Iraq conquered by Arabians forming three provincial areas of Mosul, Baghdad, Basra
1300 - Ottomans take over Byzantine Empire
1534 - Ottomans take Iraq and extend into Arab peninsula on coast of Persian Gulf
1672 - Bedoun families settle in peninsula of bay south of Basra. The area eventually becomes
known as Al Qurain (Al Grain), (Later to become Kuwait).
1752 - Al Sabah family, non-merchants, appointed to oversee and protect Al Qurain whilst
merchant families fished and traded with India
1756 - Al Sabah contact British for help after Persians attack Basra which was governing Al
Qurain. Britain establishes base in the area.
1773 - Plague in Al Qurain kills most inhabitants.
1881 - Ottomans demand Al Qurain and Qatar pay additional revenue as Ottoman Empire
declines
1846 - Sheikh Muhammad Al Sabah assassinated by his half brother, Mubarak Al Sabah.
1897 - Mubarak Al Sabah recognised by Ottoman Sultan as the provincial sub-governor of Al
Qurain.
1897 - Al Qurain crisis. Ottoman demand British stop interfering with their empire. Ottomans
back down to avoid war they could not afford.
1899 - Mubarak Al Sabah signs agreement with British which gave Britain control of Al
Qurain’s foreign policy and their national security. In return, Britain gives annual
subsidy of £1500.
c1900 - Under British supervision, wall built around Al Qurain town. Al Qurain becomes known
as Kut, later Kuwait, meaning little fort in Arabic.
1913 - Anglo-Ottoman Convention. British concur in defining Kuwait as an ‘autonomous caza’
of the Ottoman Empire. Sheikhs of Kuwait not independent but qainmaqams (provincial
sub-governors) of the Ottomans.
1914 - World War 1
1915 - Mubarak Al Sabah dies. His son, Jaber II Al Sabah takes over
1917 - Jaber II dies. Succeeded by his brother, Sheikh Salem Al Mubarak Al Sabah
1918 - World War 1 ends with British victory over Ottomans. Anglo-Ottoman Convention
invalidated by British.
1920 - Shi’ite uprising. Manchester regiment all but wiped out; over 10,000 people killed.
1920 - Wahabi Bedou of Nejd (Saudi Arabia) attack southern Kuwait and then Jahra in north,
declaring Kuwait as not extending beyond walls of the city.
Cliff Jefferies © iv Human Shield

Chronicle continued/...
1922 - Ottoman Empire split up by British into Turkish Republic, Iraq, Kuwait, Gulf States,
Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon. British negotiate Nejd border with substantial loss to
Kuwait.
1922 - Modern Iraq – British protectorate. Faisel crowned king.
1923 - Britain set out the border of Iraq based on an unratified 1913 convention.
1932 - Britain grants independence to Iraq
1938 - Decline of pearl diving in Kuwait due to introduction of cultured pearls elsewhere.
Kuwaitis poverty stricken. Britain gives annual financial subsistence to Kuwait.
1938 - Discovery of oil in Kuwait.
1939 - World War II
1941 - Britain takes over Iraq, Kuwait and other Gulf States. Britain and Russia take over
Iran.
1945 - World War II ends
1958 - Iraq’s monarchy bloodily deposed by General Abd Al Karim Al Qasam.
1961 - Britain grants Kuwait independence. Official name; Dawlat al-Kuwayt – State of
Kuwait.
1963 - Qasem overthrown by a Ba’at Party take-over.
1968 - Ahmad Al Bakr takes over leadership of Iraq with Sadam Hussain his deputy.
1979 - Sadam officially takes over control of Iraq.
1980 - Iran-Iraq war
1985 - Opposition group formed in Kuwait .
1986 - Amir’s motorcade attacked on city coast road. Wrong car blown up. Amir’s car shot
by automatic gunfire. Amir injured but survived.
1988 - Iran-Iraq war ends with Iraq victorious.
1990 - February; Arab Council meet in Amman. Sadam demands money from Kuwait and
the UAE to compensate for horizontal drilling and oil price drop.
1990 - 15 July; Sadam sends Republican Guards to Kuwait border.
1990 - 16 July; Iraq’s Foreign Minister, Tarek Aziz, sets out Iraq’s demands of Kuwait to
Chadley Klibi, Secretary General of Arab League.
1990 - 19 July; Kuwait forces stood down from alert.
1990 - 24 July; Sadam assures Hosin Mubarak that he will not invade Kuwait.
1990 - 25 July; Sadam meets with April Gillespie in Baghdad and reasserts lack of intention
to invade Kuwait.
1990 - 30, 31 July, 1st August; Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi delegates meet in Jeddah but fail to
reach agreement. Prince Saud, Kuwait Crown Prince, hurls abuse against Sadam.
Iraq delegates walk out and return to Iraq.
1990 - 2 August; Shortly after midnight, Iraqi troops advance into Kuwait
Cliff Jefferies © v Human Shield

To Ahmadi & Saudi Border To Kuwait City

Fahaheel Expressway
Street 310
Mahboula
To Mutla Ridge
N
Open Space Open Space 0 100
Metres
Collection Point for Latifa Towers

Lemming Run Street 309
Sultan Ben Essa Complex

Aziwan North
My First Flat Al Madawi Complex Open Space
Open Space Unfinished Mosque
vi
Legend
Aziwan South Open Space Escape route
from soldiers
Dumped
Rubbish Gaza Complex Resistance
Mahboula Complex Fighters Direction
Low-income flats (Ants Block) of fire
Persian Gulf
‘W’ Complex Alia & Ghalia Iraqi Trenches
Complex
Union Centre [sic]
Small Farm
Flat 4B
Scene where Kuwaiti

woman drove car bomb Private Kuwaiti Beach Villas
into Iraqi trenches
Machine gunner
facing Union Centre Field and machine
Tanks Concreted in
guns concreted in
Cliff Jefferies © vi Human Shield
Preface
On 2 nd August 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait subsequently forming a shield of
humans around key military and civil sites to protect them from the onslaught of Western
military attack. British, American and Japanese civilians, who were trapped in Kuwait and
Iraq at the time of the invasion, formed the Human Shield. I was one of those people.
I was born in a four-house hamlet in the Staffordshire countryside. World War 2 had not
yet started. During my childhood, I developed a love of aircraft and subsequently took a
design apprenticeship with an engineering company in Wolverhampton that manufactured
aircraft flying control systems. In 1964, I became their technical representative operating
from Heathrow serving, amongst others, BOAC and BEA. Later, I was also appointed as
Technical Liaison Engineer for the Middle East and served Pakistan International, Kuwait
Airways, Iraqi Airways and Cyprus Airways. I first travelled to the Middle East in 1968 and
over the next two years developed an affection for the people and the area, so much so, that
in mid 1971, I took up a post with Kuwait Airways Engineering based in Kuwait and there I
lived until 2001
On 26 th July 1990, I returned to Kuwait from a summer vacation. My two young sons,
both pupils of the Kuwait English School, planned to return on 10 th August.
This writing is an account of my personal observations of the invasion of Kuwait by the

Iraqis and to some extent, of my despair. It is an account of what I believe lay behind the
invasion and how the Human Shield was promulgated. It is based on my time in Kuwait
during the Iraqi occupation of 1990 which I spent, for the first part, in hiding in the Kuwaiti
suburb of Mahboula and later, after capture, being processed as part of the Human Shield
located in a specially built prison camp at a munitions factory in the ancient Babylonian
area of Iraq. It is supplemented by my personal knowledge of the area and of the people,
which I acquired during my visits 1968 to 1971 and my residence in Kuwait from 1971 to
2001. My job with Kuwait Airways also put me in a position to know all aircraft movement,
their flights and their destinations and who was flying, particularly with regard to the VIP
aircraft. I have written without bias and without guidance or influence of any other
documents other than established bona fide historical facts.
The document is not intended as an account on the grief and strife of what I or any of the
other hostages suffered or of the stories within stories that we have to tell. Neither have I
included the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Arabs, even though
argument may have it that this is the primary cause of unrest in the Middle East.
Although I state that I do not take into consideration historical conflicts, I have included
recent historical events, circa 1900 – 1922, which shaped Mesopotamia into the new Iraq
and the new Kuwait at the fall and demise of the Ottoman Empire. I have included it
because, in my opinion, it had a great bearing on the events that led up to the three
invasions of Kuwait by the Iraqis during my time there and in particular, the invasion that
lay behind the first Gulf War.
Whilst in Western world writings, the spelling of Sadam Hussain’s name is commonly
Saddam Hussein: Arabic is purely phonetic and bears no direct relativity to the English
language; therefore, I choose to use the Gulf Arabic translations, that is on the
pronunciation, viz, Sah-dam Hussane, hence Sadam Hussain, the h is relatively silent and
softens the pronunciation of Sa. It will be observed that there are other variations in my
writing. The word emir as used by writers in English is always spelt and pronounced, Amir
in Kuwait and the prefix of a name indicating family is never As (or as), it is always Al,
Cliff Jefferies © vii Human Shield

hence, ‘Al Sabah’, not ‘as Sabah’ or ‘As Sabah’. I also use the Arab names for the nomadic
Arabs, those of Bedou and Bedoun, rather than the French derivation, Bedouin.
Those who constituted the human shield were never given counselling for PTSD and such
was the impact on them that several have since committed suicide. My counselling was done
on my own initiation by returning to Kuwait soon after liberation.
In reality, seeing such devastation of a country that I loved, I sometimes wonder if that
was the right way to go about it. To see the immense destruction that had been carried out
by Iraqis and Allies alike. Where buildings had been blown apart or burnt out. Of seeing the
burning oil fires that were spewing out dense, black acrid smoke blotting out the sun, where
day was night and night was utterly silent and black; where blackened sands replaced the
golden desert and I would no more see, in
those magic moments of springtime, the
beauty of the carpets of blue-purple desert
orchids and the myriads of yellow dahlias.
Where eye-catching domino beetles
clamber between the stems of sporadic
self-seeded plants and green and yellow An oil lake burns in the Kuwait
dab scurry across the plains. Where now Desert
destroyed military vehicles, incinerated by missiles and rockets, their
Desert Orchid metal bent and distorted by heat that cannot be imagined, clutter roads
and sands alike. But worse, seeing the fate of those poor wretches at
Mutlah as they attempted to return to Iraq, the unnecessary destruction of the life of
thousands * of people who would have gladly given themselves up without so much as firing
a bullet and in all probability with deep gratitude. Most were civilians and those that
weren’t, were conscripted Kurds.
I at least was able to reflect that as a prisoner of Sadam Hussain, I had not suffered the
horrors that these people had, for should Sadam have chosen, this same fate could so easily
have been mine.
Of one thing there is no doubt, my life and attitude changed significantly because of the
invasion and occupation of Kuwait, but why, I do not know; perhaps because I had to suffer
from the lies and deceit of the West, particularly my own country, or perhaps because that is
what war does to a foreign civilian caught up in someone else’s war.
* The figure is contentious between amounts of people 1,000 and 20,000, although my own
belief is more like the higher figure, if not more, I saw the dessication afterward.
Cliff Jefferies © viii Human Shield

THE HUMAN SHIELD
PART 1
Prologue
As the steel clad doors clattered closed and clanking chains manacled doors to posts, my hope of
freedom had gone. I could see that there would be no escape except by death, which now seemed
inevitable and imminent.
With the light of hope now extinguished, my thoughts turned to my family who were safe at home
in England. Uncharacteristically I said a silent prayer for them that they would not suffer by my
demise. For myself I asked only that death would be painless and quick.
I looked out of the small barred window of my cell where I could see but a high wall of unpainted
corrugated steel sheets topped with barbed wire onto which the December Tauz* had blown
numerous plastic bags. Entangled on the barbs, the jaded bags fluttered wildly as if in a forlorn and
hopeless bid of a saddened truce on my behalf. Weary, I turned away and lay on the hard wooden
bed; I closed my eyes and remembered...
I had not been aware that the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqis
had taken place that morning, Thursday 2nd August 1990. The
two low flying military aircraft that had awoken me from my sleep
at 5.20 a.m. as they skimmed the roof of my villa, I had thought
were Kuwaiti. ‘More Talks Needed, Says The Amir’, read the
headlines of the local English language newspaper that morning.
I was unaware that the troops and war machines around me were
Iraqi. In five short hours as the citizens slept, the Iraqis had MIG 29’s prepare for takeoff.
captured Kuwait.
If only the borders had not been closed so quickly by the Iraqis as we had been informed by the
British and American Foreign Offices. If only the Kuwait army and air force had not fled to Saudi
Arabia but had stood and fought; if only the wardens had not hidden away but instead had stood to
their posts and kept us informed; then I could have fled to Saudi just forty minutes south – so near,
yet so far.
I suppose I must have been lucky. How easily I could have been picked up at the checkpoints as I
drove around looking for untrashed shops; after all the embassies said that the Iraqis were lifting all
Brits, they had urged that we stay in doors. When the soldiers came to the flat asking for water they
could have taken me prisoner, particularly the two red bereted Republican Guards who came into the
flat with rifles at the ready; perhaps they would have done had they not been looking for Resistance
Fighters that day.
How I laughed when the two Kuwaiti Resistance fighters, (the ones who the two Republican
Guards were looking for), had fired shots from the eighteenth floor of Alhia and Ghalia Towers into
the soldiers dug in close to the beach as they prepared for an assault by the Allies from the sea: when
those soldiers had then turned and, not knowing where the shots had come from, fired wildly inland.
Then, believing that the Allied invasion had begun, the dug-in inland troops fired bullets and mortar
back at them. Yousef said eight Iraqis had been killed in that exchange and the two Kuwait
Resistance fighters had escaped. Perhaps I should not have laughed; war is not funny.
Perhaps I should have taken my chances with the planned escape convoy that day on the 16th
August. Perhaps I would have been lucky enough to get across the border at Selmi… but without a
four-wheel drive vehicle, I would not have got far through the soft sands. Even those with four-wheel
drives did not make it; either the Iraqis had turned them back, or had taken their vehicles and in
some cases, taken them prisoner. No, I stick to my name for that convoy, the Lemming Run; it was
doomed to failure from the start. I’m glad I didn’t go.
Cliff Jefferies © 1 Human Shield

‘British women and children will be allowed to leave Kuwait’, I must admit, I did not believe that
when I first heard it; so many promises made, so many broken. When was that, 26th August… no,
that was when it was announced… 28th is when they were allowed to leave… but Yousef, my
Palestinian friend was right, the Iraqis in the field would not have been notified: another British
* Seasonal wind.
Foreign Office cock-up. I wonder what happened to the young Filipina. What was her name? Ah, yes,
Theresa -- Saint Theresa of the Roses I called her, the British women being the Roses -- such a
courageous woman. The Iraqi officer commanding the Iraqi troops in the southern part of Kuwait had
claimed her as his only the previous day, before she had managed to escape and flee. It was the
habaya that Yousef’s wife had given her which hid her identity. She did not have to do it, she didn’t
know any of us, there was no need for her to volunteer to drive our women and children to Salmiya,
she knew how risky it was helping British citizens for which the penalty was death. What a brave
woman, she could so easily have been recognised when the four vehicles transporting our women
and children were picked up at the checkpoint just round the corner. What was it that she had said
when I suggested that this was not her responsibility when we were so desperate for a fourth driver?
Ah yes, it was when she had looked at the two mothers with their children and then, in her Tagalog –
English accent said, “They are four, I am only one. I will be the one to drive them,” and then she
made a Hail Mary across her chest; such faith, she knew the risk she was taking.
Thank God that Yousef had managed to convince the Iraqis to contact Baghdad to verify the
authorised release of British women and children. I wonder what happened to Theresa after she
dropped the women and children off at the Iraqi bus. Yousef said he had last seen her driving away
into the backstreets of Salmiya.
When they had picked up our women that same day, the Iraqis acquired our location from the
Civil ID’s that they had taken from them and then four platoons of Republican Guards stormed our
complex with guns blazing and boots flaying; that was terrifying. My friend Dave and I escaped by
hiding in a cupboard. They captured the other British men, eighteen in all. Four motionless hours
cramped up in a cupboard barely big enough for the two of us. In the cupboard oxygen became rare
and breathing difficult and our fears were high with the expectation of bullets splintering through the
wooden doors when soldiers came near. How relieved I was when stepping out of the cupboard after
two hours of silence had indicated that the soldiers had gone; the satisfaction I felt after beating the
soldiers was exulting; the loss of my colleagues, depressing.
Nevertheless, they were still searching for us and several times, we came close to capture as we
fled from flat to flat and complex to complex. How relieved I felt when finally we shook them off and
settled in a flat on the fourth floor of a walled complex of four blocks that surrounded a large
courtyard, just two hundred metres from the coast. All we had to do then was sit back and wait for
the allies to liberate Kuwait as they constantly said they would. Of course there was still looting to be
done, we needed food and cotton clothing for protection from bomb blast; helmets were required to
protect from falling debris and knives for defence against desperate soldiers, who too may have been
hiding in the concrete fire escape where we planned to take cover.
We were anxious but we became complacent; reading and writing, when there was enough light,
and waiting and that was to be our final undoing. The Iraqis commandeered the building and
commissioned it as their Southern Operations HQ with us still on the fourth floor completely cut off.
Why had we not heeded the warnings of Yousef who had told us that the Iraqis planned to clear the
entire area of civilians and prepare for an assault by the allies from the sea? But it was too late now,
with two hundred soldiers below us we were going nowhere.
What awful days those were, three months of living with the Iraqis, living in total silence and often
in total darkness. And when our food reserves ran out, raiding the apartments on the lower floors
and stealing theirs by sliding on our bellies in the early hours of the morning, dragging black plastic
bags of spoils with us slowly and silently within yards of their night-watch platoons. I was fearful of
making the slightest noise, expecting hot metal to tear into my flesh at any moment; such relief I felt
when I was finally back inside flat 4B battening the door.
I suppose it was inevitable that we were lifted; we had held on for three months and had survived
several attempt of looting soldiers trying to kick and prise the door open. Then with sixty-one of the

sixty-two apartments trashed, it was only a matter of time before our battens yielded and that time
came at 3 a.m. on 27th November, just ten days ago.
That night when the Iraqi soldiers battered the door down I expected choleric reaction from them
as they found three Englishmen sat at a table drinking gin and tonic in total defiance. Thankfully, I
suppose, we had been captured by a Kurdish lieutenant, had it have been an Iraqi officer I know we
would have been shot. Hiding British citizens was punishable by death and we had ‘lived’ with them
for three months; how did that look?
What were those soldiers thinking as we were led down the steps and across the courtyard? This
was the very courtyard where daily I had inspected ‘my troops’ through a gap in the curtains. Now we
were the curiosity as more than a hundred soldiers were bustling around to get a better view of us,
wondering just whom we were and how we had lived amongst them for three months undetected.
As men dressed in black suits, blue shirts and black ties, thrust me into the back seat of a large
black American limousine, I chanced to look back
and see the sergeant that had given the command
for a firing squad to execute a young Kuwaiti
resistance fighter. I wondered if this time he felt
cheated.
It was too late now, but why hadn’t I tried to
escape when I was held at the Mansour Meliah Hotel
in Baghdad, I had my chance? After persistent
pestering, I had persuaded them to let me take
exercise by walking around the gardens. I had no
immediate guard that day and those on duty at the
gates would not have seen me get through the chain-
link fence that separated the gardens from the
banks of the Tigris. There were small boats on the
banks, I could have reached the British Embassy,
perhaps, or even have drifted downstream with the
current, a mere five days to the Persian Gulf and
into Kuwait waters. Perhaps that was not a good
idea, but why had my defiance suddenly waned?
A Kuwaiti Resistance fighter is executed just
Had I succumbed to circumstance and inevitability? below the window of the writer’s flat. Sketch by
writer.
I wait, as on my bed I lie, not now afraid. I accept the inevitable for death is part of life and I thank
God that mine was meaningful. My sons I know will grieve, but they are strong and they will prosper.
Come allies I am ready, drop your bombs and guide your missiles. Now I sleep. I am tired, very tired.
It has been a long five months. I dream...
“Good morning, Mr Cliff, wake up, you go now.”
My guard is nice to me, he is pleasant and he has no guns. I am in heaven.
“Good morning, Mr Cliff, you go now, you go to Baghdad.”
Baghdad, where are we? Heaven has no Baghdad, no London, no anywhere, only heaven?
“You go to Baghdad, you go home, Sadam release you. Get ready, the bus is waiting.”
As I walk across the small yard towards the steel clad gates now wide open, chains hanging
limply, a guard calls, “Mr Cliff, you forget this.” I turn and he tosses a football to me, I catch it.
The ball is grazed and scuffed from contact with the fine-gravel of the exercise yard and it
reminds me of the kindness of this guard when I had asked for a football and in response he had
driven to the town and, using his own money, bought it for me to kick around the yard.
“Shukeran, Habibi,” I say, thanking him as I toss the ball back to him, “Give it to your son, soon
he will play for Iraq in the Gulf Cup.”
“Mashkour, Inshallah, Mr Cliff,” he replies, if God wills it, thank you.
I turn to leave as the guard calls out, “Mr Cliff…” he hesitates and then he says, “Mahbrouk.”

I look back at him and he is smiling. “Yallah, Habibi. Allah Akhbar!” I reply (Let us go now my
friend. God is great].
As the small blue bus pulls slowly away, this time with curtains drawn open, I look through the
dirty window and through the open gates into the yard. A lonely figure stands immaculate in his
military issue black suit, blue shirt and black tie, legs apart, one arm dropped at his side and the
other clutching the ball; I cannot really tell, but I think he is confused; he is happy, but he is sad.
Like most Iraqis, he had not wanted this military issue promulgated by two desperate and misguided
men, Sadam Hussain and George H W Bush.
The three main players in the Middle East conflict
Margaret Thatcher. George H W Bush. Sadam Hussain.

British Prime Minister American President. Iraq President.
The victims

PART 2
The Beginning
There are many reasons that led to the Iraqis invading Kuwait in 1990, but was Sadam a tyrant, an
evil man hell-bent on destruction of those around him, as his critics would have us believe, or as
some might have it, as shown in history? On the other hand, was Sadam essentially a good leader
doing the best that could be done in a difficult country, in a difficult part of the world – the centre of
three major religions and the centre of the world’s greatest oil reserves? Had Sadam once again
become the victim of duplicity by the Americans and British? Sadam’s regime is accredited with mass
genocide of his own people, the Kurds, but even on this, there is evidence to suggest that the
Iranians, under Americans influence, were involved. So how accurate are the accounts of the history
of Mesopotamia or new Iraq? Are they historical, historic or merely histrionic?
Many accounts of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait have been produced with most of these
being included in comprehensive writings of modern Iraq, or of Sadam Hussain. Whilst the core
history of Iraq is well chronicled, interim periods are left to authors’ interpretations – and to some
extent, imagination – and readers’ naivety.
The entire Middle East region has been subject to wars and conflict for millenniums by empire
builders. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Western countries, primarily Great Britain, France
and the USA, have interfered endlessly with the domestic politics of the region albeit most of that at
the end of the two World Wars. It is not my intention to go into any depth of the historical and
degenerate conflicts that have occurred in the area over the centuries. However, the invasion of
Kuwait was rooted by British political activity in the southern parts of the Ottoman Empire at the
beginning of the Empire’s decline, circa 1890, when the British afforded a small group of trading
families’ protection from marauding Bedou in the interests of trade routes and later, the search for
oil. This area, known as Al Qurain, (pronounced Al G’rain), which lay on a peninsula of a sheltered
bay south of Basra, was given autonomy by the British and protection given by the building of a wall
around the dwelling area circa 1899, parts of which remain to present day. The area became known
by the Arabs as little fort, (in Arabic, Kut or Kuwayt). A few years later, the British proclaimed the
surrounding areas as the territory of Kuwait but this was not ratified until the British defined the
new area boundaries after World War 1 which has caused contempt, disagreement, resentment and
uprisings ever since. In reality, ratification is questionable; the British merely cancelled the 1913
agreement with the Ottomans, which was never agreed to by the Iraqis. Now, under the (involuntary)
control of the British, they had no say in the matter.
During the First World War, the British conquered the Ottoman regions of Iraq, Palestine and
Syria and then, after the war, created and transformed the area into Transjordan (later Jordan), Iraq
and the Gulf States. The whole issue was complicated by underhand deals that Britain struck with
France including the Sykes-Picot agreement, which gave Lebanon and Syria to the French while
Britain took control of Iraq, Palestine, Kuwait and other Gulf States.
To placate Sharif Hussein of Mecca, the leader of Hejaz (later Saudi
Arabia), the British wanted to make his sons heads of Transjordan, Syria
and Iraq. The old king refused to sign Churchill’s agreement that set out
structure of the new Middle East, but the king’s sons had no such qualms
in assuming their new positions. In Baghdad this meant that Faisel
Hussein’s third son became the first king of Iraq.
King Faisel 1. First
This was not a popular move with the newly liberated citizens of Iraq
king of Iraq
most of whom were opposed to the creation of a new state. When it had first
been proposed in 1919 that the provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra be joined together to form
one nation, most British politicians had argued that it was a ludicrous idea. Arnold Wilson, the Civil
Administrator in Baghdad, said it was a recipe for disaster because it meant trying to force three

distinct groups – the Shi’ite, Sunnite and Kurds to work together, even though it was well known that
they detested each other.
Tension amongst the tribes at the time was so great that in July 1920 the country suffered the
greatest revolt in history. The revolt was caused by a combination of factors, but Britain’s failure to
fulfil a wartime promise of allowing the Arab leaders’ self-determination was significant.
The uprising, which lasted until 1921, was suppressed, but not before almost an entire battalion
of the Manchester Regiment was wiped out by the Shi’ite guerrillas. At least 10,000 people died in the
revolt and, if nothing else, it persuaded the British that it would be far better to establish a puppet
regime to run the country for them, rather than burden themselves with the huge cost in men and
resources that would be required to subdue warring tribes.
The rival warlords in Baghdad and Basra made efforts to patch up their differences and presented
the British with a viable local leadership in Sayid Talib, the pre-eminent local leader of Basra, but
Britain had already resolved that Faisel would be king.
The emergence of a genuine secular contender caused alarm in the British government. The
resourceful Sir Percy Cox, the British Resident in Baghdad, who invited Talib to afternoon tea at the
British Residence to discuss his plans, resolved the crisis. When Talib arrived at the Residence Sir
Percy was nowhere to be seen and so Lady Cox entertained him. As Talib left the Residence party,
other guests, acting on the advice of Sir Percy, arrested him. Talib was then exiled to the island of
Ceylon (Sri Lanka), leaving Faisel free to ascend the throne. His coronation took place in Baghdad on
23rd August 1922. Add to this, the creation of Israel in 1947 at the expense of Arab land and the
subsequent desecration and occupation of Palestine that had American support, the cauldron of
wrath was bubbling to the rim.
The Build-up
Factually, despite popular Western belief, there is not an Emirate or Kingdom in Arabia that practices
democracy. All, at some time or other even up to present-day, have committed genocide by executing
opposition members and insurgents. Each country is ruled by a dictator, either as a sheikh or emir
(Amir in Kuwait), or a king and that is the way that the people want it; they are tribal and each tribe
is headed by its own sheikh. Tribal disputes cause most of their conflicts and beyond that, religion. A
few countries have a government in place, but in all instances these are puppet governments and
they are there only to appease the West. If they attempt to exercise any authority, they are quietly
disbanded.
Kuwait, up to the time of the Iraqi invasion, was involved in the genocide of an opposition group,
most of who came from the area in which I resided, Mishrif. In 1988, this group was banned from
meetings or gatherings of more than twelve people and consequently they set up their operating base
in Cyprus and used a facsimile system for means of communication. In 1989 the ruling family, the Al
Sabah’, formed a special security police group to counter the opposition who rounded up members of
the opposition group imprisoning many. At the time of the 1990 invasion, more than 600 members of
the opposition had disappeared. The Iraqis immediately released those still in gaol. The opposition
group had approached Iraq for help; a coup or civil war was imminent. In view of the fact that the
Kuwait Military was made up almost entirely of foreign nationals, mostly from Pakistan and
Bangladesh, it is highly unlikely that they would have played any significant part in civil strife, one
way or another.
The build up to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait had many contributory factors. Certainly, the result
of the extended Iraq-Iran war bore significance in as much that Iraq was left in a state of virtual
economic disaster and was now entirely dependant on oil revenue to supplement the economy and to
pay off their war debts. As the oil prices stood then even that would cause them to struggle to
balance their payments. In response to a request from the American and British governments who
were planning between them to undermine the Iraqi economy as an assurance against acquisition of
military weapons, the Kuwaitis added fuel to the fire by deliberately over-producing oil causing a
considerable drop in international oil-price, from $30 per barrel to less than $20. The Anglo-

American plan had backfired as Kuwaiti greed ran amok and they produced even more oil than they
had been asked to do which resulted in them being expelled from OPEC. As a direct consequence of
that action, the Iraqis were unable to produce enough oil to meet their obligations. Added to that, the
Kuwaitis were performing horizontal drilling taking oil from the Iraqi oil reserves. Nevertheless, as
dire as those issues were, they alone were not the direct cause of the invasion.
I had experienced two previous Iraqi invasions of Kuwait during my residence there in the early
seventies. Both of those invasions were to fulfil claims that the Iraqis had been making since the
dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the reformation of Iraq and Kuwait in 1921-22. From when I
first visited Kuwait and Iraq in 1968, the Kuwait-Iraq border had been moved north from Mutlah
Ridge, slightly north of the city, a few years previously. Using this as a natural border divide, Mutlah
ridge was still operative as the Kuwaiti border post even though the new border had been established
some forty miles north. The information that I had from good and reliable Kuwaiti sources was that
when Kuwait was granted independence from Britain in 1961, Britain re-established the border to its
new and present position. Taking it from Iraq, this gave Kuwait part control of the largest oilfield in
the world, but at the same time, the relocation of the border had a much greater effect on Iraq by
passing ownership of the strategic and disputed islands of Bubiyan and Al Warbah to the Kuwaitis.
Whilst the low-lying barren desert of the islands is virtually worthless and effectively uninhabitable
except for mudskippers, flamingos, and an occasional shepherd and his flock, it has a value to Iraq
much higher than the Rumaylah oil field. Geographically, Iraq has little coastline and what they have
is shallow water, worthless for development of deep-sea ports. This necessitates transfer of oil to sea
tankers through pipes routed across Syria and Saudi Arabia, which is both expensive and politically
volatile. Bubyian could provide the deep-sea port that Iraq so desperately needed. When Sadam
Hussain in 1990 responded to President George W Bush’s demand to withdraw from Kuwait to the
borders, he responded cynically by asking, ‘Which border do you mean, the walls of Kuwait City,
Mutlah Ridge or the present location?’
During the Iraq – Iran war, the Kuwaitis were assisting the Iranians financially and by providing
resources via Dhow across the waters of the Persian Gulf. When Sadam found out, he was angry. He
pointed out how the Iraqis had historically assisted Kuwait and he threatened them with aggression.
The British were fearful of the Iranians winning the war and they advised the Kuwaitis to put their
loyalties with the Iraqis, which they did in 1988 towards the end of the conflict. There was another
way in which the Iraqis believed Kuwait owed them some form of compensation, in fact, Sadam
stated that one of his reasons for declaring war on Iran had been to defend the interest of Kuwait,
and there was a element of truth in that when prior to that war, Iran had been threatening Kuwait
with invasion. The Iranians had even fired missiles into Kuwait. I remember once sitting on a
southern beach one Friday afternoon when a missile exploded in the sea some quarter mile away. My
wife, in response to a conversation we were having about the danger from Iran, with nothing more
than a bat of her eyelids, said, ‘’See! They can’t even hit Kuwait’. Other than keeping his troops
occupied there was no other explanation: unless Sadam considered that should the Iranians occupy
Kuwait then his claim for the northern oilfields and the disputed islands would be lost.
During May 1990, top Iraqi officials visited Cairo and met with the American CIA where the
subject of the invasion was discussed. Around the same time, the CIA had met with the Kuwaitis and
the plans for evacuation of the Royal family were orchestrated along with the plans for the removal of
all monetary reserves, civil registers and banking databases that were transferred to other countries,
primarily Great Britain. On the day of the invasion at around 9 a.m., hours after the Iraqis had
captured Kuwait, I withdrew two hundred and fifty Dinars (five hundred pounds sterling) from an
ATM in Salmiya. In August 1991 after I had returned to Kuwait, my account had been debited with
the withdrawal, yet all banks in Kuwait were supposedly possessed or trashed by the Iraqis.
On the 29th and 30th July, the Kuwait Amir, Sheikh Jabir Al Ahmad Al Jabir Al Sabah, had
travelled to Saudi, subsequently staying there, taking part in discussions between delegates from
Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi, he knew an invasion was imminent, both the British and the Americans
wanted it that way. The Amir was under strong guidance, particularly from the British government,
not to give in to the Iraqis by compensating them for their war losses. Arabic newspaper reports

indicated that the Kuwaitis wanted to settle the issue peacefully and were on the threshold of
agreeing to a settlement with the Iraqis which they suggested was both monetary and territorial,
perhaps the leasing of Bubyan. However, that is not what the Americans or the British wanted. They
insisted that the Kuwaitis hold out and promised full military
backing. Usually placid but now bold with his knowledge that
the British were behind him, the Kuwaiti Crown Prince not
only refused outright to compensate the Iraqis, but on the 1st
August at the meeting table, he insulted Sadam Hussain by
telling him to send his women on the streets to earn money.
This was a direct inference on Sadam and his mother. Sadam,
it is believed, was an illegitimate offspring and his mother a
kahbuta [prostitute]. This was an insult worse than that of
calling an Arab, Yakmahri [donkey]. Ali Hussain Al Majid Sadam with his son, Uday
[Chemical Ali] and Uday, Sadam’s son, stormed out of the meeting returning to Baghdad to report to
Sadam. When Sadam was told of the Crown Prince’s slur he was furious and immediately ordered the
invasion to commence. He planned to take the north of Kuwait and push the borders back to Mutlah
Ridge, thus giving him the oilfields and the Islands of Warbah and Bubyan.
However, the Americans considered that should Sadam invade and occupy only the north of
Kuwait there would be nothing they could do about it. Under such circumstances, it is highly
unlikely that they would have deployed any military at all. The Arabs did not want them in their
territories and besides, arguably, the disputed land belonged to Iraq. International support would not
be forthcoming for a full-scale war. The best that could have been hoped for would have been UN
sanctions and as I saw, they certainly did not work. The only way that the Americans could get
involved and bring the oil wealth of the Arab nations under their control would be if the Iraqis
occupied all of Kuwait and they could convince other Arabians that Sadam would not limit his
military action to Kuwait. The CIA had planned for the Kuwait military to flee the country leaving the
Iraqis unopposed. This served a dual purpose, the Americans could get a military foothold in the area
and, as one American senior military officer told me after liberation, “These God dam cock-suckin’
mother-f*****s will never hold the world to ransom with oil prices agin.” He was talking about the
Kuwaitis.
April Glaspie, the American Ambassador in Baghdad, gave Sadam her blessings for him to invade
Kuwait although later she qualified this as saying that she never thought for one moment that he
would occupy all of Kuwait instead of just the north. At around the time of the invasion, she was
summoned to Washington and it was more than two years before April Glaspie was heard from again;
she had mysteriously disappeared from the American political scene.
The Invasion
That morning, 2nd August, when I was awoken by the Iraqi warplanes on their low-level strike
missions, I had no idea that the Iraqis had invaded Kuwait; the media, published that same morning,
assured citizens that a peaceful settlement was close at hand. The air-raid siren located within a few
yards of my villa had not been sounded, neither had any of the others. There was an element of
deceit going on. Numerous eminent Kuwait families, including the Royal Family, had already left
Kuwait in the preceding days; most by driving into neighbouring countries and many by air to
countries further a field. Expatriates, British included, were left to face the invading forces even
though it is known that their respective governments knew days before, if not weeks, that the
invasion would take place. Several expatriate oilfield workers were on location less than a kilometre
from the Kuwait - Iraq border and were overwhelmed within minutes by Iraqi tanks and troops with
no warnings and no chance to flee. Immediately they had been interned and sent for processing to
the Mansour Meliah Hotel in Baghdad. Their families stayed at home waiting in futility for them to
return unaware that their husbands had become sacrificial lambs.

The Iraqi military was unopposed. The entire Kuwait army had fled, except that is, for a half dozen
Kuwaiti tanks whose crews had refused to retreat but instead, faced the 300 tanks of the Iraqi army
and fought. They were gallant men but they perished quickly. All Kuwaiti military vehicles and
aircraft were moved into Saudi on the advice of the Americans, they had been ordered not to fight but
to allow the Iraqis to enter Kuwait without any resistance. The Kuwait navy had stood down from full
alert to standby, unarmed and without fuel. Weeks before the invasion all military personnel had
been issued with civilian (Civil) ID’s and ordered to destroy their Military ID’s should an invasion take
place. Those that remained on duty had been ordered to take civilian clothes with them and destroy
their military clothing should the Iraqis invade. One of my Kuwait Air Force friends, a sergeant at the
northern airbase of Jaber Al Ali, was on duty that morning when he was given the alert that the
invasion had begun. He changed his clothes, burnt his uniform, destroyed his Military ID and then
drove out of the camp to return to his home in Salwa. As he turned out of the airbase gates an Iraqi
tank and then a group of soldiers confronted him. He was taken back into the camp for interrogation,
but he withstood the questioning and convinced the Iraqis that he was a civilian. They let him go but
without his vehicle. He had to walk the forty miles back to Salwa. With no civilian vehicles around a
lift was not available and there was little shade from a hot, searing sun beating down at some eighty
degrees. It took him two days to get back. He visited us soon after checking that we were okay before
he left for Syria after first obtaining a large bag of Arabic unleavened bread for us.
On that first day, after my entanglements with the military believing them to be Kuwaiti, I decided
to stay with my good friend Dave and his family in their flat in Mahboula, a small coastal district to
the south of the city and south of my area Mishrif. Mahboula was a popular residential area for
expatriates with most buildings being large apartment complexes popular with both British and
Americans, a situation I thought would be a better option than staying amongst Kuwaitis who may
be subject to aggression* by the Iraqis.
From that first day, the British embassies were relaying news over shortwave and satellite TV,
(BBC World and CNN), that the Iraqis had closed all borders between Kuwait and Saudi and that all
British and American citizens should, “...take a low profile and stay indoors to avoid being lifted and
processed... do not attempt to escape via the borders.” The British embassy wardens whose job it was
under such circumstances to relay information given by the British Embassy should have contacted
us. No one in our complex or those adjacent had heard anything at all from the wardens for the
Mahboula / Mangaf / Fintas areas and the news we had of them was that they had gone into hiding
and had either disconnected their telephones or were not answering them. It was apparent that these
people, who were volunteers from the British expatriate community, had only become wardens to
enjoy good time drinks and socialising at the British Embassy, brown-noses as we were now referring
to them. When it came to being commissioned in their real purpose, they failed miserably
jeopardising British Citizens lives. The only news of the situation that we had was via the very
unreliable media reports on the airwaves who for most part, were guessing.
There were still several British people in the complex, most of who were families, but several
apartments were unoccupied; either the residents had fled to other parts of Kuwait or had not yet
returned from summer vacation and in the worst cases, had not returned from the oilfields. Dave and
I looted those apartments which we knew had been abandoned; our looting was confined strictly to
food and tools and hardware that may be useful at a later time should the occupation become
extended. We took care to lock the apartments up after us, which meant changing the lock where we
did not have a key. Other foreign nationals were free to move about and that became a problem for
us. Foreign nationals, mostly from Central and South Asia, North Africa and Palestine, were roaming
around looting on a large scale in what was now an anarchy State. The threat to our building from
looters for the time being was greater than that from the Iraqi troops. Dave and I set about repairing
the complex perimeter gates and the electronic locks to the access doors of each building. For the
next few days, the embassy was still advising that we take a low profile and stay indoors. However, as
food ran low, there was a need to visit the Cooperative Society supermarkets which remained open. I
also had to relocate my cars. A large complex not too far from ours was the Union Center [sic], a four-
block complex with a large courtyard between them, where some of our British and American friends
* I was wrong on that issue; the Iraqi troops left the Kuwaitis alone.
were staying. The complex had a large basement car park with security gates, which were manned by
the few Western residents, an ideal location for my cars.
I had driven to Dave’s local supermarket in Mangaf but had to abort due to Iraqi soldiers being on
duty at the entrance. I was not to know they were there only to enforce law and order. I drove to the
coop in my district some twenty minutes away as a reconnaissance trip. There were soldiers along
the route but they gave me little heed as I drove almost full throttle in my Daimler Sovereign XJ6. At
the coop complex there was a long queue waiting to enter the supermarket but no soldiers. I could
not afford to risk queuing where I would stand out like a sore thumb. I parked as close as I could to
the entrance door and got out of the car. Immediately, a Kuwaiti rushed up to me, took my arm and
ordered the shop door to be opened to let me in. All items were rationed but the Palestinian women
running the shop allowed me, as an Inglaise (Englishman), to take what I wanted. My extra large
trolley was half-filled with Cola and Baked Beans. I was allowed out without paying, such was the
respect and concern for British citizens, I felt humble. I took the opportunity to visit my villa with the
intention of taking all the food I had there. As I loaded the last case of bottled home-brewed beer into
the boot of my car, I was approached by the two qadama [maids] of the villa next to mine. They were
Indian women and in distress. Their Kuwaiti kafil [employers] had left Kuwait days before the
invasion leaving the maids behind with no food or money. Trembling and with tear soaked faces they
pleaded that I take them with me, but that was impossible. The best I could do was to give them a
hundred pounds and suggest they travelled to Salmiya where there was a large community of Asians.
I returned to Mahboula but was stopped at a checkpoint on the way. Winding my way around the
barbed wire trestles, I drew up to two soldiers wielding AK47’s and I opened the window. One of them
opened the passenger doors and looked inside, the other stared at me and asked for identification. I
gave him my Civil ID. ‘Ah, Inglaise,’ he exclaimed. ‘Welcome.’ He lowered his rifle whilst the other
soldier closed the door and then said ‘Yallah,’ I drove off soaked in perspiration, but not because of
humidity. This was not the last time I encountered a military checkpoint but each time the outcome
was the same.
A strong community atmosphere developed in the complex as Dave and I organised evening
community gatherings at the bar that quickly transformed into daily happy hours -- a much-needed
tonic for our morale. Without onsite news, it was difficult to know what the best action for us to take
was. Should we sit tight and wait for the Iraqis to leave Kuwait or make a dash to the border? The
media, particularly CNN, was suggesting an imminent withdrawal by the Iraqis would take place and
they showed footage of what they claimed was Iraqis with their military equipment withdrawing from
Kuwait. We knew better. Unless road signs, as shown in their footage, had been turned around then
the Iraqi military build-up was more intense with extra troops, tanks and artillery pouring in through
Mutlah.
The Occupation
News was coming in that a British civilian had been shot and killed in an attempt to escape across
the border and an American civilian had been shot and wounded trying to escape from the Iraqis in
the city. Since the embassies were still claiming that the borders were closed and sealed, an attempt
for us to cross the border was no longer a viable option and besides this, none of our group had four-
wheel drive vehicles. We had to wait and hope that UN resolutions and embargos would be sufficient
to cause the Iraqis to withdraw.
One thing was certain, the Iraqis were not picking us up on the highways. I had driven through
military checkpoints on several occasions, not only without problems but also with extreme courtesy
from the Iraqi soldiers. On several occasions, soldiers had come to the door of the apartment. With
their rifles on their shoulders and hats in their hands, they asked only for water. On one occasion,
two soldiers of the Republican Guard did come to the door with rifles at the ready; they searched the
apartment looking for Kuwaiti Resistance fighters and finding none, shouldered their rifles and left
politely.
I began to wonder why the American and British Foreign Offices were constantly reminding their
citizens to take a low profile advising that the Iraqis were lifting and processing them. From my
experience, this was certainly not the case. I had driven openly on the highways frequently, I had
driven through checkpoints and I had spoken to Iraqis on the street; soldiers had frequently called at
the apartments and taken water: there were no instructions with the Iraqi military to pick up either
British or American nationals.

The Western media was reporting that the Iraqi troops were looting, raping and pillaging. There
was no truth in this accusation at all, in fact, the Iraqi troops were well disciplined and once
organised, they were behaving in nothing other than a professional manner and I remember thinking
that the American military could learn a lot from them. The Iraqis did have a problem from the few
Kuwaiti Resistance Fighters and they had to respond accordingly. Occasionally this meant shelling
private residences where the snipers were operating from, but given the circumstances of war, this
was not an unreasonable response.
Western propaganda was rife, such as the lies told by the fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl in America,
Nayariah, who had been coached by Hall and Knowlton an American PR firm before she had made
her tearful accusations before American television and other media. She told of the Iraqis removing
over three hundred babies from their incubators, leaving them to die on the floors of the Al Adan
hospital and then taking the incubators to Baghdad. The girl was the daughter of Saud Naser Al
Sabah, the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the USA. Human Rights investigations attempted to confirm
Nayariah’s story but found no witnesses or any evidence to support it. When John Martin of ABC
World News visited the Adan after liberation and Interviewed Doctor Mohammad Matar, Director of
Kuwait Ministry of Health and his wife, Doctor Faiz Yousef, who ran the obstetrics unit at the Adan,
both stated that Nayariah’s charges were false. The fact was that Nayariah had left Kuwait before the
invasion and had been residing with her father in USA. After liberation, both she and her father
admitted the lie and retracted it, but the lie remains in history. The truth is that the Kuwaitis never
owned that amount of incubators, they owned less than thirty and these were fully accounted for
after liberation, remaining functional in the hospitals. Transportation of air ambulatory passengers
was part of my domain with Kuwait Airways prior to, and indeed after liberation. I was the engineer
responsible for the design and development of stretcher and incubator installations on the KAC fleet.
Initially, such was the shortage that I had problems getting incubators from the ministry to install
into the aircraft to carry critically ill neonates to foreign hospitals. To solve the problem KAC
procured four incubators and these were still within Kuwait Airways workshops when I returned to
Kuwait in 1991, albeit they had repairable damage from falling debris caused by liberation missiles.
The Western media was reporting that the Iraqis had taken the Kuwaitis gold bullion and dollar
reserves from the vaults of the Kuwait National Bank and showed considerable footage of this alleged
event. In truth, the bullion and dollar reserves had been moved to London weeks before the invasion.
In fact few of the Kuwaiti banks had been damaged or looted and most were operative within weeks,
if not days of the liberation. I was informed that some of the banks had remained operative
throughout the occupation, managed by the Kuwaitis, serving the Kuwaitis.
Reports that the Iraqis were torturing Kuwaitis is also open to question. I saw some of the so-
called torture rooms after I returned after liberation, one such place was a room in a sports stadium,
Qadsia, another, a basement of a Kuwaiti Villa. Neither of these areas was occupied by the Iraqi
troops who tended to stay clear of inland areas and concentrate their manpower and headquarters
close to the coast and inland borders. My own impression was that these rooms were being used
before the invasion and almost certainly against the opposition group by the Kuwait Special Police;
the torture equipment was too well setup to have been established in the first few weeks or even
months of the occupation as was alleged.
In another show of propaganda, the Western media had reported in the first few days that Sheikh
Fahad Al Ahmad Al Sabah, the Minister of sport and manager of the Kuwait national football team,
had been shot gallantly defending Dasmah Palace, the old residence of the Amir. The reports were
that he had refused to leave Kuwait and had stood on the palace steps with a few of his guards and
fought the Iraqi troops.
The truth is nothing like this. Sheikh Fahad had remained at the palace, the reason for which no
one other than the Al Sabah family knows, leaving it late to flee. As he fled in his car, approaching
the palace gates, he defied Iraqi commands to stop and was shot, the bullets penetrating thorough
the rear window of the car.
As a testimony to Sheikh Fahad, who was a brash and rather arrogant man, his car was
untouched other than painted gold and then mounted on a plinth and located on the side of the
coast road between Dasmah and Raz Salmiya as a monument. It was a couple of years before anyone
realised the implications of the bullet holes through the rear of the car.
After liberation, the Kuwaitis announced that over 600 Kuwaiti citizens were missing and that
they had been incarcerated in Iraq, which the Iraqis strongly denied and no evidence has been found

since to support this. Indeed, I have no doubts whatsoever that this number is too coincidental with
the number of Kuwaitis missing from members of the opposition group prior to the invasion and that
the two groups are the same.
When the Iraqis annexed Kuwait, they announced the installation of a provincial government and
most of the members were from the Kuwaiti opposition. This suggestion was given no credence by the
Western press but it was a fact. When Kuwait returned to some normality after liberation, eight of the
Kuwaitis who sat on the provincial government were put on trial. Their defence was that they had
been coerced. Most were found guilty and sentences of imprisonment and hanging were imposed,
however, months later, with pressure from the USA, the sentences were commuted and the men
released without explanation.
Fourteen days after the invasion, we heard that an escape attempt was being made across the
border at Selmi, which lay on the Kuwait-Saudi border close to the southern border of Iraq. The
report was that a British embassy official would be at the border to meet the convoy and lead them
through Saudi to Riyadh. At our end, our so-called Wardens were organising the run. Immediately
this had alert bells sounding. From what we had already seen of the behaviour of these wardens, the
mission was doomed to failure before it began. I was dubious. The Selmi Road ran from Mutlah all
the way south along the Iraqi border until it reached Selmi on the Saudi border. The entire road was
intense with military and police posts, and part of the Selmi Road formed an emergency runway for
the northern airbase of Jaber Al Ali. To believe that the invading force did not occupy these posts was
nothing less than folly. Vehicles that were not captured would have to drive off-road and the whole
area was comprised of sandstone crags and sand dunes. I was anything but convinced and
immediately named it as the Lemming Run, but I remained open-minded.
A frequent visitor to Dave’s flat was an American friend who was working with the Kuwait Navy.
He told us that the Navy had been stood down from alert to standby the day before the invasion
began. Tim L Harris, rank Ensign, had suffered horrific
physical and mental torture when, as “Radio Officer” of
the American Navy spy ship, SS Pueblo, in the late
sixties. His captors, the North Koreans, placed him
before a firing squad on several occasions, he was not to
know that each time the rifles were unloaded and the
firing pins would strike against empty chambers. The
Americans were denying that the ship was a spy ship
and the crew was refusing to confess. Now, Tim’s nerves
were fragile to say the least. We advised him of our
thoughts but I can understand why he, normally a
sensible man, could not resist the urge to escape. He
left with the seventy-vehicle convoy that morning on
16th August, two weeks after occupation. As expected, Sailors from the United States intelligence-
the convoy failed to escape; they had been forced to flee gathering vessel Pueblo greet their families in
December 1968 after spending a year as
into the desert soon after navigating the Selmi Road and prisoners in North Korea. Tim is in foreground
encountering military checkpoints. Some of the left. Henry Kissinger who negotiated the
scattered vehicles were turned back by the Iraqis, some release is centre.
captured, some families left without vehicles and others fled aimlessly in wrong directions. Eventually
most had returned to their dwellings telling their stories of anguish. One escapee group was our
infamous wardens who turned into the desert and followed a track west towards Iraq. They drove
straight into an Iraqi military camp and were arrested. Tim, now in trauma after the aborted escape
attempt and his two colleagues in his car decided to give themselves up to the Iraqis at Mutlah and
they were last seen waiting in a long traffic queue to the fortified ridge checkpoint.
At the time of the Lemming Run, the idea that a member of the Saudi British Embassy meeting
the refugees at the border was so strong it seemed unquestionable that this would not be the case
and yet after liberation, the British Foreign Office emphatically denied it. Had the British citizens yet
again been duped?
I was seriously concerned for the welfare of Tim; I had seen the state of his nerves when he
frequented the bar. I could not imagine him surviving internment under canvas in the searing heat.
After my release and return to UK in December, on the 23rd my house telephone rang. When I
answered, I was greeted by the voice of an American woman; it was Tim’s wife, Linda. Immediately I

asked about Tim and a voice came from the receiver, “Hi good buddy, howz yawl doin’?” After Tim
had waited for almost an hour at Mutlah, with the engine temperature of the car moving into red the
occupants decided to give up and “...return to Cliff and Dave’s for a G and T.” As they neared the
turnoff for our building in Mahboula, hastily they decided to give themselves up at the Saudi border
and so drove on. Forty minutes later, they were at the Saudi border checkpoint and were stopped by
soldiers. They were Saudi Arabian soldiers; there were no Iraqi troops anywhere near. They were
allowed to drive on to Bahrain where they boarded an aircraft to London, thence back home to
Virginia, USA. I blurted out some good old-fashioned English expletives, but the fact was that during
those first few weeks, both the British and American foreign offices had been telling their citizens
that the Iraqis had closed all borders and that they should not attempt to escape. Either their hi-
tech satellite tracking systems and intelligence units were utterly defective or we were caught up in a
very serious game of political chess where Western expatriates were the pawns.
This border control was the same one that CNN had been showing in their footage a few days after
the invasion claiming that the fleeing Kuwaitis were being forced by the Iraqi military into exchanging
their passports for Iraqi passports before they were allowed to leave the country.
At around the third week of occupation, according to Western media, the Iraqis were tightening
their nets on the Western detainees and we heeded their warning. Now happy hour was transferred
to afternoons and evening lights were dimmed. We took
the warning seriously; at that point the media advised
us that the Iraqi government was instructing all British
citizens to report to the Regency Palace Hotel in Salwa
and Americans to report to the Sheraton Hotel in
Kuwait City. Most of us were in total defiance of the
order but many British and Americans did respond.
When they arrived at the hotels they were turned away
by the military, the Iraqis had made no such order.
However, it was not long after this announcement that
7-year-old Stuart Lockwood with Sadam
the Iraqi government did start issuing instructions for Hussain.
British and Americans to be picked up; they were going
to accommodate us in Baghdad as guests. Later the Iraqis began to place British, American and
Japanese citizens at strategic military target sites as part of a human shield, a move that without
question had been promulgated by Britain and America by the constant speculation that the Iraqis
would do just that.
In my own analysis there were potentially two options for the outcome of the pre-invasion
discussion between the Iraqis and the Kuwaitis. One way or another, the Iraqis had to have money.
Either Kuwait or the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), pay the money the Iraqis believed that they
owed (not without good reason), or Iraq would take the land that they believed they had the right to
and from this, generate the funds Iraq so desperately needed. Knowing this, the Kuwaitis, as was the
Arab League, were prepared to appease rather than antagonise and were heavily biased to conceding
to Sadam by leasing Warbah and Bubyan, writing off his war debts and ceasing horizontal drilling.
As much as the slur on Sadam and his mother had promulgated a spontaneous start to the
invasion, had Kuwait and UAE not agreed to at least some of Sadam’s demands, the invasion was
inevitable.
Invasion in the hottest month of the year when shade temperatures reached the mid-fifties
centigrade is not conducive to ground warfare where it has considerable negative impact on both
troops and equipment. I believe the reason for this timing, as Sadam stated, was that this was a time
when the Western schools were closed for the summer months and Western Expatriates were taking
vacations escaping from the intense heat. Instead of the usual three thousand western expatriates,
only around four hundred were in Kuwait. This consideration is hardly the thinking of a despot who
planned to use Western civilians to form a human shield. Instead of between six and twelve people on
each site, he could have had a hundred and forty.
On 26th August, 25 days after occupation, the Iraqis announced that they would release British
women and children on the 28th August, news that was received by us in great jubilation. The Iraqis
had organised buses that would depart Salmiya for Baghdad at 0630 hours but unfortunately, they
had not informed the soldiers in the field of this. When the convoy of four cars carrying our women
and children left on that morning, within a few hundred yards it was stopped at a checkpoint. The

occupants were taken to the Iraqi Intelligence HQ for interrogation. From that, the Iraqis were able to
establish the whereabouts of their husbands and, after releasing the women and children, they made
a charge on our building booting flat doors open. They captured all of the men except for Dave and I
who hid in a hidey-hole cupboard we had prepared days earlier. They took the eighteen men away for
processing and continued the search for us. We fled and hid in another complex not far away, the
Union Center [sic] where we had three British and two American friends residing. Apart from those
and two Jordanian families, (and an emu and a llama), there was no one else residing there. The
three British men gave us a key to flat 4B next door on the same floor, and this became home for the
next four months.
Above and joining the two blocks A and C at the opposite end of the complex was a suspended
row of flats, or villas, as they were known but in essence, penthouses. Since these were the highest
flats, we deemed one of them appropriate to set up
Villa V4
with a gas proof room and, possibly, a hidey-hole.
Because there had been the odd one or two C A
soldiers roaming around the complex, we
requested one of the other occupants to keep a Shops
D
lookout for us whilst we set about modifying a B
room of Villa V4. Don had been ‘volunteered’. As
we were hammering our way into the project, Don
called for silence and beckoned us to the large
patio window. Soldiers were on the landing of our Flat 4B
flats and they were escorting the two British and
two Americans away. With them was the Kuwaiti
owner of the complex, Omar Ben Essa. He took
some soldiers to our flat and attempted to open
Swimming Pool
the door from a bunch of keys he had chained to
his clothing. Unbeknown to him I had changed The Union Center [sic]. I was located in the right hand
foremost block on the fourth floor. Sketch by writer.
the lock; he took the soldiers to all the flats in that
block with more frustration. I had changed the locks in all doors. Once again, I felt the strains of
despair and depression as more of our comrades had been lifted.
Suddenly, the situation had turned from sombre to inexorably serious. Now the full effects of
Western politics was becoming transparent; we had become sacrificial lambs in the politics of the
governments of our own countries who, by any means, were desperate to turn the world against
Sadam Hussain in the battle for control of the world’s major oil resources. The Americans were
desperate to get UN resolutions to authorise war where they could test their new military technology,
which until now remained untested on a battlefront.
There was a massive influx of Iraqi troops and equipment. They were swarming the coastal areas
to a distance of half a kilometre inland. By early September, thousands of troops had dug in on the
coastline and in the open inland desert patches surrounding us. They occupied all buildings close to
the coast and, as if that was not bad enough for us, they adopted the building that we were in as
their Southern Headquarters; we were penned in on the fourth floor with two hundred soldiers
immediately below us. Nevertheless, British obstinacy prevailed; we would
never surrender. From that time on, with curtains drawn closed, we lived
without artificial lights or sound, we limited our conversations to whispers of
essential, brief discussion and for most of the time, sat and read or wrote.
Since the kitchen was adjacent to the landing, cooking was taboo other than
microwaving in a bedroom and this at a time, twice a day that coincided with
the soldiers’ meals of which they ate five times a day (so much for sanctions).
After two weeks, all soldiers had been issued with new AK47 rifles. New
uniforms replaced the old tattered mismatched uniforms — remnants of the
Iran-Iraq war; new boots replaced trainers, sandals and flip-flops. Several Ali Hussain Al Majid,
days later, Ali Hussain Al Majid (Chemical Ali), the new governor of the 19th alias Chemical Ali.
Province, toured the area after shanghaied Pakistani and Indian civilians had swept beaches and
streets. Peering between a gap between the curtains, I watched as Chemical Ali visited our building
through a guard of honour. I do not know how I felt by seeing him in the flesh, certainly contempt,
but I must admit to an element of excitement bubbling inside me. Here, just a few feet away, was

perhaps, next to Hitler and Sadam, the most notorious man in recent history. I could so easily have
shaken his hand, or killed him! As it was, I merely uttered a profanity. I must admit, he looked
bravura in his dark, immaculately tailored dark-green uniform bedecked with gold-braided lanyards
and brown leather belts and straps around his mid and upper torso with colourful battle medals
sewn in several rows on his chest.
Military activity became intense as more sanctions and UN resolutions were made. Old broken-
down tanks were pushed by bulldozers into dugouts on the groins just in front of us and then
concreted in, old artillery was treated the same. We were in the middle of a very large and potentially
ballistic battlefield and it worried us. Two heavy machine guns had been bunkered in sandbags on
the roof of a beach villa facing the balcony of our apartment a mere hundred metres away and that
worried us more.
As our food ran low and since we had taken the food from the flats above us, looting from flats on
the landings below where the Iraqi soldiers were accommodated and had food and where we had
stashed food prior to their arrival, became necessary. By crawling snakelike on our bellies past the
brown tinted plate-glass partitions of the access balcony, even with the soldiers only few feet away,
we were successful. All we could do then was to sit and wait. Outside there was almost complete
silence as the Iraqi troops consisting of Kurds, and a few disabled Iraqis who were veterans of the
Iraq-Iran war, waited for the Allies to invade.
Inevitably, the deprived Kurds began to loot
the buildings in which they were stationed. I
watched, as nightly in our complex, more flats
had lights switched on. Each night soldiers
attempted to break our door down but the
battens held. Inevitably, with sixty-one of the
sixty-two flats trashed, our time was limited.
With heavy tools and brute force, our door
finally yielded on 27th November, two days
before UN resolution set the date of Allied
invasion to be 15th January. An Iraqi
Lieutenant, a Kurd, who, until conscripted by
the Iraqis, had been teaching English in Early morning looting of food whilst the Iraqi soldiers relax
Kurdistan, captured us. He sat with us just below. Sketch by writer.
showing remorse for our capture, trying to think of ways that he could let us go. He drew a chair up
to the table at which we were sat and, rejecting our offer of a gin and tonic, told us how the Kurds
had been forced to join the Iraqi army against their will with threats of death to them and their
families. It was virtually all Kurds now in Kuwait and few, if any, wanted to be involved in the
dispute. He had no choice but to call the Iraqi intelligence and after a night in the Regency Palace
Hotel, I was flown to Baghdad to the Mansour Meliah Hotel and thence to the prison camp in
Babylon.
In so many ways, my capture was a great relief, finally I was able to talk in other than a whisper,
and I could watch television, have the lights on, eat well and walk around and even play football.
Reflecting on my time in hiding in Kuwait, I realise that I was just as much a part of the Human
shield there as I was in Iraq, only my subjugators were different and in many ways that was a much
harder time than being held in the camp in Babylon. Yet, at the time that I was taken to the prison
camp, I had resigned myself to death, I never believed from then on that there was to be a different
ending, but thankfully to Yousef Arafat and the good will of Sadam, the ending for me was what it
was. My love and respect for the Iraqi people has not waned; I have always found them the most
generous and friendly of the Arab peoples. Even during my visits to Baghdad in 1968 I never felt
threatened despite there being strong anti-British feelings subsequent to the seven-day Israeli war in
which the British and Americans were accused (rightfully) of assisting the Israelis.

I was freed on the 10th December 1990 when I returned quietly home to my wife and children. At
Gatwick airport, I was swarmed over by the media, but I wasn’t interested in them, all they wanted
was lies and sensationalism. All I wanted was a big hug and somewhere private to cry.
Liberation.
On 29th November, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force against Iraq unless it
withdrew from Kuwait by 15th January 1991. With UN resolutions in place, Desert Storm, the
liberation of Kuwait, began on 17th January
1991. With the capture of 150,000 Kurds, who Bush’s decision [suspending offensive combat
operations] was taken after allied aircraft conducted a
quickly and voluntarily gave themselves up, particularly devastating attack on a defenceless Iraqi
liberation was complete, but not without Iraqis convoy retreating from Kuwait at Mitla Ridge, a key
intersection on the road to Basra. Believing that the
and Kurds paying an awful price as those not convoy was an Iraqi unit attempting to link up with
captured by the Allies, attempted to flee Kuwait the Republican Guard, Allied commanders ordered
American warplanes to attack it. The attack became
through the ridge at Multlah. what one American commander later described as a
The scene at Mutlah was sickening. ‘turkey shoot’ with American aircraft lining up in the
skies above Kuwait to attack the defenceless convoy.
Thousands of road vehicles had been strafed
Hundreds of vehicles were destroyed and many
with bullets and Rockwell Hellfire anti-tank casualties inflicted.
missiles fired from AH-64A Apache helicopters. Con Coughlin. Sadam. The Secret Life.
Even as I saw it five months later, it was utterly
distressing and when added to this, the photographs that Kuwaiti citizens had taken immediately
after, displayed the last torturous, painful moments of life of those inside the vehicles. They had been
incinerated; many bodies were fused to the
Aircraft from the USAF and the RAF had caught the
metal of their vehicles their faces distorted in last column of trucks to leave Kuwait City on the part
hideous smiles as roasted flesh and tightened of the road leading up to the Ridge and blasted away
until every one of them was destroyed.
skin had twisted their jaws and stretched open
The drivers were for the most part the last of the
their mouths showing bony jaws of teeth. Skulls looters... As they left, a number of these and the other
were wrapped in heat-tightened skin with wide- remaining Iraqis grabbed people from the streets... So
of the 400 or so bodies burned to a crisp in the trucks
open-eyeless eye sockets. Decapitated and or lying on the sand beside the road at Mutla Ridge,
mutilated bodies lay around the site; the stench some will have been those of entirely innocent people.
The coalition forces insisted that until there was a
of burned flesh still hung in the air. These formal stop to the fighting, the trucks which were
10,000 bodies {contention} were not only heading for the Iraq border were part of a retreating
army, the men in them would be safe only if they
Kurdish soldiers, most were civilian men, stopped, abandoned their weapons and left the
women and children. Innocent Iraqi citizens vehicles. The retreating Iraqis knew nothing of this of
course. Caught in a long traffic jam on the road, they
caught up in the lies and deceit of Hussain, were easy targets for the pilots who attacked them. By
Bush and the British government, people who doing so, the coalition force was not contravening the
Hague Convention of 1907, which merely forbids
had believed that Kuwait had indeed been attacks on soldiers who have already surrendered.
returned to Iraq. The American Army pilots who These men had no chance to surrender. But it was an
ugly cruel business and the pilots who came back
flew the Apache strike helicopters that had
exulting in the ‘turkey shoot’ often found that their
inflicted the horrendous damage at Mutlah, had own comrades disapproved of what they had done...
the deaths of the terrible grinning corpses lying curled
enjoyed it. The actual words of the American
up alongside the vehicles or still gripping the
pilots are recorded; said one, “Hell man, this is carbonised steering wheels.
a God-damn turkey shoot.” He was laughing John Simpson.. The Wars against Saddam.
jubilantly as he spoke to his command over his
radio, still firing his 1,200 round, 30 mm (1.2 inch) diameter bullet, M230 chain gun and no doubt
pressing the fire button releasing the 16 Hellfire missiles.
Sadam Hussain has since been executed for the war crimes against twenty members of an
opposition group, and yet no one has stood trial for the horrors of Mutlah, let alone the
indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Iraq. One has to wonder why the Americans were pushing the
Iraqi puppet government into the speedy trial of Sadam Hussain for so-called war crimes of a handful
of men before they had a chance to put him and Chemical Ali on trial for the genocide of the 5,000
Kurds. Did this have anything to do with the belief that the Iranians with American backing were
involved in the gassing?

Epilogue
My woes and problems did not end at the time of my release from the Babylonian Prison Camp. I was
driven back to the Mansour Melia Hotel and allocated a room. Over 100 hostages were collected
there, mostly British. Noticeably there were several Japanese and it was remarkable to see the strong
bond that had formed between these and the British hostages. I spoke to the British Embassy officer
and reminded him that I did not have my passport. This was in the possession of my employer,
Kuwait Airways at the time of the invasion, all I had
was a worthless paper receipt. The officer told me On 4th December 1990, Sadam held a conference
that he would issue a 24-hour passport, which in Baghdad with King Hussein of Jordan, Yousef
would take little time to make out. Arafat of the PLO and Ali Saker Al Bibh, Vice
President of Yemen. Arafat, with the others,
It was Thursday 9th December and we were
pleaded for the release of all remaining hostages.
scheduled to fly out of Baghdad at 1200 hours the
Two days later, Sadam announced that those
following day. The British had wanted to send British held against their will would be released. Once
aircraft to fly us back, but in a show of ‘goodwill’, the war had begun, he regarded this as an error
Sadam rejected this and insisted Iraqi Airways would and blamed Arafat for persuading him to do it.
transport us, which presented a major problem since He was wrong to think that if he had not let the
there was an embargo by U.N. Resolution on Iraq hostages go, the coalition would not have bombed
international flights. The following morning, Friday key sites in Iraq because the hostages were held
there; as early as September, the Allies had
10th December, the Islamic Sabbath, all British
already decided that the presence of hostages at
hostages were mustered for transport to Baghdad
major targets would not stop the bombing.
International Airport. I asked the Embassy Officer for John Simpson. The Wars Against Saddam
my passport. He told me that it had been made out
and taken to the residence of the Iraqi Emigration Minister for issue of an exit visa. The passport, he
assured me, would be handed to me at the airport.
At the airport, all hostages, with the exception of me, proceeded to the departure lounge whilst I
waited outside of departures awaiting my 24-hour passport. From where I stood, I could see the
others as they waited at the departure gate. Midday, the departure time approached and still my
passport had not arrived. The embassy officer stayed with me, assuring me that ‘any minute’ the
passport would be here. At 1300 hours, my passport had still not arrived, but neither had the others
boarded. At 1400 hours, relief, another embassy officer ran towards us across the car park but my
relief was short lived, he did not have my passport. He had found the Emigration Manager but he
had refused to issue the visa since the passport did not have an entry visa. The Embassy Officer who
had stood with me exploded into profanities and raced off to the car with the other officer. I was
utterly fraught with despair but still the others had not yet boarded.
An hour later, the Embassy Officer returned, still fuming, he had been to see the British
Ambassador who was in contact with the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tareq Aziz. The delay with the flight
was because neither the French nor the Germans were agreeing to allow Iraqi Airways to fly through
their airspace and were arguing with the British government.
At 1600 hours, I was devastated, my passport had not arrived and the other hostages were filing
through the departure gate to board the flight: at that moment I felt sick. The Embassy Officer tried
to comfort me by saying that he would take me back to the embassy and get diplomatic immunity for
me. It was no consolation. Then, shortly after the last passenger disappeared from sight, the other
embassy officer ran across the car park towards us waving a piece of paper in the air, it was my 24-
hour passport. But had I missed my flight to freedom?
The Embassy Officer grabbed my arm and dragged me along as he raced into the terminal and to
emigration. He cursed the officials loudly as they tried to process me through normal procedures. He
thrust the passport before an emigration officer and commanded him to stamp it.
The flight attendant had just begun to swing the aircraft entrance door closed; the embassy officer
pushed me past the ground engineer and through the narrow door gap and shouted good luck. I
would not have minded falling inside but I could so easily have broken the half-gallon bottle of
Gordon’s gin the vicar of Ahmadi had given me the day before!

Note. Kuwait was part of

Ottoman acquisition circa
1520 – 66 by Suleyman the
Magnificent
The rise of the Ottoman Empire. At this time, there was no Kuwait. Later, seven settler families formed
the area of Al Qurain, circa 1800. Al Qurain became Kuwait circa 1900.
Kuwait given
autonomy by
British circa
1900
The fall of the Ottoman Empire. Al Qurain became Kuwait circa 1900 after the British built a wall to keep
out marauding Bedou. (The borders of Kuwait territory are not accurate).

Cliff Jefferies ©
Mutlah Ridge
– Circa 1961
Bubiyan
New borders ratified 1961/62
when Britain gave Kuwait
independence
19
City Wall circa 1900
Mishrif
The shifting borders of Kuwait.

In the Anglo-Ottoman convention of
1913, the British concurred with the

Ottoman Empire in defining Kuwait as
an ‘autonomous caza’ of the Ottoman
Empire and that the Kuwait Sheikhs
were not independent leaders but
provincial sub-governors of the Neutral Zone operated
Ottoman qainmaqams government. jointly between Kuwait
The convention ruled that Sheikh and Saudi until 1962
Mubarak had authority over an
extended area to a radius of 80 km
Human Shield
from the city. This area was marked
by a red circle and included the
islands of Auhah, Bubiyan, Failakah
and Warba.
Map showing Areas of Kurdish settlements in Southwest Asia spreading across Turkey,
Iran, Syria and Iraq.

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Key Skills – Communications – Level 3, Part B3.3.

Allies or All Lies

Cliff Jefferies © i Human Shield

To my sons, Darren and Richard who suffered more anguish from

To Theresa, a Filipina who unselfishly risked her life to assist British

To Yousef Al Hoss, a Palestinian who cared enough to help British

To my dear Kuwaiti friend, Mundah ‘Monday’ Al Rabiyah, a brave

To Dave, a dear friend. I could not have had a better buddy in

Cliff Jefferies © ii Human Shield

Dedications ..................... Page ii

Index ............................... Page iii

Chronicle ........................ Page iv

Mahboula ....................... Page vi

Preface ........................... Page vii

Prologue ......................... Page 1

The Beginning ................. Page 5

The Build-up .................. Page 6

The Invasion ................... Page 8

The Occupation .............. Page 10

Liberation ...................... Page 16

Epilogue ......................... Page 17

Ottoman Empire Maps .... Page 18

Kuwait Shifting Borders .. Page 19

Kurdistan ........................ Page 20

Cliff Jefferies © iii Human Shield

10,000 - Mesopotamia – Earliest Records

Cliff Jefferies © iv Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © v Human Shield

To Ahmadi & Saudi Border To Kuwait City

Collection Point for Latifa Towers

Sultan Ben Essa Complex

Scene where Kuwaiti

This writing is an account of my personal observations of the invasion of Kuwait by the

Cliff Jefferies © vii Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © viii Human Shield

THE HUMAN SHIELD

Cliff Jefferies © 1 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 2 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 3 Human Shield

The three main players in the Middle East conflict

Margaret Thatcher. George H W Bush. Sadam Hussain.

Cliff Jefferies © 4 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 5 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 6 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 7 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 8 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 10 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 11 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 12 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 13 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 14 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 15 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 16 Human Shield

Cliff Jefferies © 17 Human Shield

Note. Kuwait was part of

Cliff Jefferies © 18 Human Shield

The shifting borders of Kuwait.

1913, the British concurred with the

Cliff Jefferies © 20 Human Shield

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