Standing Down after Victory
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Photo by PO2 Milton R. Savage, USN. Defense Imagery DN-ST-92-09843
During Operation Provide Comfort, a Navy corpsman with Marine Expeditionary Unit Service Support Group 24 provides medical services to a Kurdish boy in a medical clinic in northern Iraq.
Postwar Iraq: Operations Provide Comfort, Northern Watch, and Southern Watch Yet the end of combat operations in the Kuwaiti theater of operations did not end the armed confrontation between the United States and Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government. Marines remained involved with the ongoing confrontation over the next 12 years. Throughout the war, the Coalition had expressed the desire that Iraqis overthrow Saddam’s government, encouraging the Iraqi military in particular to overthrow their president. In the aftermath of the Coalition’s destruction of the Iraqi military, the government’s foes attempted to do just that. On 1 March, an uprising began in Basrah that was apparently begun by soldiers who had fled from the Coalition in Kuwait, and it soon spread to most of the southern cities dominated by the Shia. On 4 March, another uprising began in the north among the Kurds, beginning in the town of Rania and soon spreading throughout Iraqi Kurdistan.26 In keeping with his belief that the United States had been maneuvering to destroy Iraq (or, even worse, to bring about his downfall) throughout the
1980s, Saddam Hussein believed that these uprisings were planned by America. In fact, he believed that they were the intended “next step” following the Coalition military operations that liberated Kuwait. As he told his senior military officers in April, “The entire siege that happened, the air bombardment until the land attack began, they were all methods used to create the appropriate environment for the operation [uprising] to take place.”27 Faced with insurrection in 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, the Republican Guard and the Iraqi military (which remained predominantly loyal to Saddam) responded fiercely and effectively. They had been ineffective in the face of Coalition military power, but smashing poorly armed civilian uprisings was an Iraqi military specialty in 1991. Artillery was used widely and indiscriminately to smash the rebels, and helicopters were also operated on a widespread scale. Many believed that this use was why the Iraqis had insisted on obtaining the right to fly helicopters within Iraq in the Safwan Accords. By 15 March, the Iraqi military had essentially crushed the nascent rebellion of the Shia in southern Iraq, often in full view of the U.S. Army’s VII
