That meant a real command problem for me, of escalating proportions. I felt we needed to do something.
The day after XVIII Corps moved back to Saudi to begin redeployment, I came to this realization: I am the senior American in occupied Iraq. Orders or not, as American soldiers and according to the laws of land warfare and the Geneva Convention, we have responsibilities in an occupied country. So we acted.
I assembled the VII Corps civil affairs officer and G-5, Colonel Art Hotop, and VII Corps SJA, Colonel Walt Huffman. "Picture this on the day we leave," I told them. "What should we have done as an occupying force in a foreign country up to that time? We will use your determination as the basis for what we will do until we leave." They laid out the normal responsibilities of an occupying force, such as law and order, medical care, the clearance of unexploded ordnance around populated areas, and the provision of emergency food and water.
Though occupation duties had not been part of the mission we had been ordered to execute, for the next seventy days, VII Corps performed them de facto. Afterward, the official VII Corps report to ARCENT, CENTCOM, and the Department of the Army said, "While occupying Iraq, U.S. forces incurred certain legal obligations under international law. VII Corps has aggressively sought to meet these obligations."
For most of us, it was our first experience at occupation duty and large-scale humanitarian assistance.
How did we accomplish it?
We had already divided the occupied area into unit sectors, with each unit responsible for its particular sector--usually where the individual units had ended the war. Thus, 1st INF Division was in Safwan. The remainder of the units, however, were still in the desert, where there was no populated area, and so we shifted them. First we moved the 1st CAV into the area south of the Euphrates that had been vacated by the 24th Division. Next, we put 2nd ACR in the west, and the 1st INF northwest of the 1st CAV along Highway 8. South of them we assigned the entire western sector to the 11th Aviation Brigade, with the French regiment (it was actually battalion sized) under their operational control. When the 1st CAV left, soon after the departure of the XVIII Corps, we assigned the 1st AD to Highway 8 west of Basra. And when 1st INF left to fill the more western area, we assigned the Safwan area to the 3rd AD.
Our work fell into two periods. The first lasted from the beginning of the refugee influx, on about 15 March, to the signing of the UN-sponsored peace treaty, on 12 April. The second lasted from 12 April to 9 May, when all refugees under U.S. protection were settled in a camp in Saudi Arabia.
With the beginning of the refugee movement and the return of the indigenous population, Safwan's population returned to its prewar size of about 11,500. Soon, more than 8,000 refugees arrived, with no place to go, and began to build temporary shelters for themselves on the southern outskirts of town. The other towns of significance along Highway 8 (in what had been the XVIII Corps sector) were ar-Rumaylah and as-Salman, each with about 2,500 people. About 300 people returned to al-Busayyah, but they soon left again.
About 200 kilometers west of the corps TAC, about eighty kilometers north of the Saudi town of Rafha, and just north of the Saudi-Iraq border, the Saudis began a settlement similar to the one in Safwan, which we eventually called Rafha I, after the closest Saudi town. Gathered there were close to 12,000 people, with all the worldly possessions they could bring with them, including automobiles.
While this population and refugee movement was beginning, on 7 March, 1st INF helped to transfer 1,181 Kuwaiti citizens formerly held in Iraq back to Kuwait. During the time up to the cease-fire, we also processed more than 25,000 additional EPWs--Iraqi military who were either escaping the civil war or who otherwise wanted out of Iraq (we stopped this after the signing of the cease-fire agreement on 12 April).
At the corps TAC, I established a special task force to run this operation, consisting of the G-5, Colonel Art Hotop; his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Nick Marsella; two lawyers, Captains Dan Smith and Jorge Lorenzo; and a logistician, Major Bob Corbett. To command the civil affairs operation, we had Colonel Bob Beahm, commander of the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade out of the Reserve component. Each division commander ran operations in his sector. In Safwan, Butch Funk put Colonel Bill Nash and the 1st Brigade in charge of the town.
Meanwhile, Ron Griffith established a series of checkpoints along Highway 8 leading toward Safwan. At these checkpoints, troops of the 1st AD both screened and assisted Iraqi civilians and others moving through the area. Checkpoint B, about eighty kilometers west of Basra on the way to Baghdad, soon grew into a sizable way point, complete with medical treatment facilities.
On 27 March, I visited Lieutenant Colonel Steve Smith and 1/7 INF, who were manning Checkpoint B and providing medical help. Inside the medical treatment tent, I saw Major Dr. Rodriquez, U.S. Army, obviously dog-tired, but continuing to treat Iraqi civilians (General Powell later awarded him the Humanitarian Service Medal, on our recommendation). He was treating a little two-year-old girl named Nura, who had a gunshot wound in her shoulder, and another little boy, about six or seven, with a wounded leg.
There was an enormous crush of refugees needing medical treatment, brought about by the countless atrocities committed by the Iraqi army upon its civilians. What I saw with my own eyes confirmed reports we had been getting from about 24 March of atrocities in Basra and all over the south--reports of people hanging from lampposts, mass executions, and starvation.
Afterward, I called John Yeosock to tell him, "It's bad enough that this is happening at all. But why are we so slow to react? Let's get observers into the Iraq side of the DML," I went on, "and get the UN to help us with displaced persons."
"I'll see what I can do," John answered.
I then asked my SJA, Colonel Walt Huffman, to start collecting evidence about atrocities from the Iraqi people for whom we were providing care; and Walt had the 1st AD make video- and audiotapes of their firsthand accounts, with their permission. This information was collected according to the rules of evidence, and sent to Third Army a few weeks later. From there it went to CENTCOM and the State Department, for further analysis and use.
THE 3rd AD ran Safwan. They not only supervised the refugee camp, but essentially reopened the town: they established law and order. They cleared unexploded munitions within the town and to a distance of 500 meters outside it. They opened schools . . . and even got textbooks and school lunches. They reopened medical clinics, using both our own medical supplies and some captured from the Iraqis (one of our first sergeants told me he and his troops particularly enjoyed using Iraqi medical supplies to stock the civilian health clinic in Safwan). According to our doctors, the health treatment we provided to the over 8,000 people in the camp near Safwan dramatically improved the overall health of the refugees there. By the end of April, daily requests for medical assistance were few.
On 22 March, on a visit with Bill Nash and Butch Funk to the Safwan health clinic, I asked CW4 Joe Hatch, the 3rd AD head physician assistant, if I could do anything for them (his assistant was CW2 Ben Beaoui, who spoke Farsi).
"Get us some baby food!" he answered, holding up an infant. "This baby will die soon if we don't get it food and get it treated."
We got them the baby food via C-130s, and the child survived. For his work in that clinic, General Powell awarded Joe the Humanitarian Service Medal.
WITHDRAWAL
At 0230 on 13 April, Toby woke me for another middle-of-the-night phone call from Riyadh. At a little past midnight (our time) of the day before, the peace treaty and the UN resolutions had been signed. This phone call was from ARCENT: the President had ordered us to move the rest of our troops out of Iraq by 19 April. I did not mind being awakened for that call at all.
I had estimated it would take us five days to get out of Iraq, and that was the time we had. We swung into action, with first-in, first-out still my rule. First out of Iraq had been the 2nd ACR, on 9 April. On the twelfth, we moved the 1st AD, followed on the fifteenth by the 1st INF. By the nineteenth, everyone was
out, including all of our own equipment. At each stage, our units had moved into redeployment assembly areas near KKMC, where they had begun the tedious procedures necessary to prepare the vehicles and equipment for shipment back to Germany or the U.S.A.
Since the UN-sponsored treaty included no provision for the protection of the refugees who had fled the Iraqi civil conflict and who (rightly) feared government reprisals, I asked Major General Greindl (the Austrian commander of the UN force) what he planned to do about them. "Since that's not in my orders," he informed me, "I can't do anything."
"General, we have a problem," I said. "We are not leaving until we get this settled. We are not abandoning these people to Iraqi government atrocities."
That same day I told John Yeosock we had a responsibility to ensure the continued protection of the refugees, and he ordered us to protect the refugee sites. In fact, during this period, John constantly went out on a limb for us in order to authorize our humanitarian activities. "Fred, do what you think is right," he told me again and again; and he backed us up.
Meanwhile, on 7 April, we had changed command in 3rd AD. Much to his, and my, disappointment (since he would not be with us for the redeployment and homecoming in Germany), Butch Funk was pulled out of command to become the deputy J-3 on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. He was replaced by Major General Jerry Rutherford, who had been an ADC in the 1st INF. I assigned to Jerry Rutherford the mission with 3rd AD in Safwan.
In the western part of our sector, 2nd AD (Forward), which I had pulled from the 1st INF, replaced the 11th Aviation Brigade (the French remained). I assigned the protection mission to them.
Under Jerry Rutherford, 3rd AD continued to provide assistance to the refugees at the camp in Safwan and to the inhabitants returning to the town, as well as protection to a second camp just over the Kuwait border that was run by the Red Cross.
Our protection mission put us in an awkward situation, since U.S. troops were no longer supposed to be in Iraq after the treaty went into effect. In order to avoid that, the plan was for the governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to take in the refugees. But that plan did not work; both governments initially refused to take in any Iraqi refugees.
Meanwhile, John Yeosock had been talking to officials in the Saudi government, and on 17 April they committed to building a camp sixty kilometers north of Rafha in Saudi Arabia, just south of the Iraqi border. This timely and compassionate move by the Saudi government was widely reported in Arab regional newspapers, but not, to my knowledge, in the West.
The Saudis then hired a contractor, who told us it would take them sixty to ninety days to build a camp.
"No way," I said. I didn't want us to have to wait around while they took their time to build the camp. "Our engineers will build a temporary camp, if you will agree to build a more permanent one." They agreed, and from 21 to 27 April, our engineers built Rafha II. Our temporary camp was roughly 1.4 kilometers by 1.1 kilometers. Around its perimeter were placed twelve 5,000-gallon water bladders that our engineers kept full. Our engineers (the 588th out of Fort Polk) also placed bottled water and food inside the camp, as well as 250 wooden showers and 250 latrines. These were urgently needed.
In the meantime, we notified Iraqi refugees at both Safwan and Rafha I that we were setting up the temporary camp inside Saudi Arabia, and camp leaders were allowed a visit there. They then had to make a choice: since the U.S. force was leaving soon, they had to make up their minds whether they wanted to stay in Iraq or go to the new camp, with the Saudi government's promise to build a more permanent camp. Most decided to leave. We gave those who chose to stay in Iraq seven days' worth of food and water.
The Kuwaiti government erected a fence around the Red Cross site with the only exit into Kuwait. The government of Iran accepted some 350 refugees a day from this camp flown out of Kuwait City International Airport.
Our VII Corps official report says:
"Movement of refugees from Rafha I to Rafha II began on 28 April. 11,500 refugees were moved, with the final closing of refugees in Rafha II on 8 May. Refugees from Rafha I were allowed to bring automobiles across the Saudi border and park them outside the camp. . . . During the period 28 April to 7 May, a total of 8,430 refugees were flown by USAF C-130 aircraft from Safwan to Rafha," a distance of about 500 kilometers. For all those going to Saudi, our personnel soldiers made new ID cards with photos. It was a masterful operation by both 3rd AD and CENTAF. Likewise, 2nd AD (Forward) did a superb job in moving refugees to Rafha II.
I vividly remember, during the transfer, scenes of U.S. soldiers digging into their own belongings and providing food, blankets, or even Army sweatshirts. As our report puts it, "The individual soldiers' generosity is evidenced by the number of government-issued blankets among the refugees and the U.S. Army sweatshirts hanging from the arms of the children."
The results were staggering: almost 20,000 refugees were resettled. Safwan was reopened as a village, with civil affairs soldiers helping local inhabitants regain self-sufficiency. Total meals of all types distributed during this entire period reached well over a million. Tons of flour, rice, and beans were distributed. Over 1.5 million gallons of water were produced, and close to a million gallons of bulk and bottled water were transported and distributed. Seven hundred cases of baby food were provided. In the hospitals we set up for the Iraqi people, corps doctors, nurses, and medics treated 29,450 Iraqi patients, with 601 of these evacuated to Saudi for further treatment. Many of them were returned and reunited with their families.
Our last message on this operation closed with the words: "The same soldiers and leaders who a short time before had relentlessly attacked and destroyed the Iraqi army in sector turned to and accomplished this humanitarian mission with compassion, discipline, and pride in being American soldiers. Doing both so well is a mark of who we are and what we stand for. JAYHAWK. Franks."
RESIDUAL FORCE
But we were not done.
As the signing of the cease-fire came closer, there began to be talk that we would have to leave a residual force in Kuwait, and I was informed that it was true when Secretary of Defense Cheney visited on 7 May. He told me the Kuwaitis wanted us to stay until the end of the year, but that the President would decide that, and that another force would replace the brigade as soon as possible. He also made it a point to visit the soldiers who would have to stay.
The brigade Jerry Rutherford selected to remain was a composite 1st Brigade commanded by Bill Nash (made up of units from other brigades). Because the decision had come so late, some of the soldiers were on airplanes about to leave, and we had to get them off and take them back to their equipment in Kuwait. It was not a good time for the troops. They had come on no notice, trained hard, won a great victory, done unexpected humanitarian work in and around Safwan--and now this.
I told 3rd AD to pick out a spot for the brigade that had something more than temporary facilities. Bill Nash looked around and recommended a place north of Kuwait City called Doha that had large warehouses for troop shelter and a large hardstand for equipment storage. It also had running water. Jerry Rutherford agreed, and after I took a look, I said that is it, move in.
By this time, CENTCOM HQ had departed the theater and were back in Tampa. John Yeosock departed with ARCENT on 10 May (John had been in-country from the first in August 1990). The CINC left Gus Pagonis in command of CENTCOM forward.
On my last day in-country, 11 May, I flew the 400 kilometers from King Khalid Military City to Kuwait to visit with the soldiers whom I had ordered to stay. I wanted to look them in the eye and explain why. It was not an easy meeting. They were hostile at first and had many questions: Why had they been told at the last minute? What about their families in Germany? Who would tell them? What else after this? How long? I told them we had won a great victory, and that, in the judgment of our government, a residual force was needed to continue to ensure that it lasted. It was a matter of trust. The soldiers accepted it, and said OK, we'll get on with it, it's
our duty. It only intensified my sense of urgency to get them home. I told them we'd have them out in thirty to forty-five days, which was going out on a limb, because at that point we did not know who was coming to replace them. I also told them I would personally talk to their families in Germany.
That night I burned up the phone lines with Lieutenant General Denny Reimer in Washington, along with General Gordon Sullivan, to get a replacement force named fast. Sully promised me that he and General Vuono were dedicated to getting the 3rd AD troops out as quickly as possible. Earlier, there had been talk about sending the 199th Light Armored Brigade from Fort Lewis, Washington, but I was against it because they would have to bring their own equipment from Fort Lewis and they would take forever to get there. I had proposed the 11th ACR out of Germany, and General Butch Saint had agreed. They would be here the fastest of any unit, and they were a perfect match for the equipment and the mission.
One of the first things I did when I got back to Germany was to visit the families in Giessen whose military spouses had remained in Kuwait while the rest of the VII Corps had gone home. They were just as hostile as the brigade had been in Kuwait. I could not blame them. Yet all they wanted was some straight information. I identified myself as the one who had made the decision on the brigade of the 3rd AD, and explained the reason. Like their military spouses, they accepted it without question.
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