On this date in 1991, the US committed a major war crime by unleashing the full force of US air power on a highway full of retreating Iraqi army vehicles & civilian refugees, massacring at least 1000 people on the “Highway of Death”. 
The attack began w/ US jets bombing the front of a major column of vehicles heading out of Kuwait, thus trapping the vehicles behind. Over the next 10 hours, US jets repeatedly strafed, bombed, & incinerated 2000 vehicles & their occupants w/ US weaponry.
A survivor described the scene: “There were 100s of cars destroyed, soldiers screaming. It was nighttime as the bombs fell, lighting up charred cars, bodies on the side of the road and soldiers sprawled on the ground, hit by cluster bombs as they tried to escape."
British journalist Robert Fisk said he "lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smoldering wreckage or slumped face down in the sand.“ One US pilot said the attack had been like "shooting fish in a barrel.”
In the following days, US troops buried the charred corpses from the massacre in shallow, mass graves.
Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark described the attack as a violation of the Geneva Convention, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who "are out of combat." Saddam Hussein had ordered a withdrawal from Kuwait, however George H. W. Bush refused to accept it.
Bush preferred instead to exact the maximum amount of damage on a defeated and defenseless country & its population.
