Image: AP

Known as Highway 80, the six-lane highway crossed the desert from Basra, Iraq, to ​​Kuwait City. Actually it was one of the main highways that gave Iraq quick access to Kuwait during its invasion of the country, however, the return trip would be much less triumphant than they expected. The return trip would be terribly lethal, becoming one of the most brutal massacres in the history of the war.

It happened more than two decades ago, on the night of February 26-27, 1991, when thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians retreated to Baghdad after a ceasefire was announced. A few days earlier, on Sunday, February 24, the Allied forces launched a combined land, air and maritime attack that surpassed the Iraqi army.

The day before the massacre, Baghdad had announced that the Iraqi foreign minister had accepted the proposal for a Soviet ceasefire, ordering all Iraqi troops to withdraw from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660.

However, President Bush refused to believe it and replied that " there was no evidence to suggest that the Iraqi army is retreating. In fact, Iraqi units continue to fight ... We continue to prosecute the war . "

By the fateful February 26, Iraq had announced that it would withdraw its forces from Kuwait, but refused to accept all the UN resolutions passed against it.

In this way, the tanks, armored vehicles, trucks and Iraqi troops fleeing the Allied onslaught formed a strange funnel on Highway 80, with huge lines of vehicles on the main highway to the north, from Kuwait, to the city of Basra, in southern Iraq.

Under this situation, Bush ordered his forces to massacre the Iraqi army in retreat. Fighter planes from coalition forces pounced on the unarmed convoy and disabled the vehicles in the front, and in the rear, so that it was totally impossible for them to escape what was coming their way.

Once they were handcuffed, wave after wave of planes began to arrive, hitting the trapped vehicles for hours and hours. The bombing was carried out with cluster bombs and incendiary rounds of A-10. The first is a weapon that contains multiple explosive submunitions.

This spreads the destruction over a much wider area and does not leave behind the great crater species. In this way, anyone within the attack area of ​​cluster munitions, whether military or civilian, is very likely to be killed or seriously injured.

The bombing began around midnight and any vehicle that deviated off the road was tracked, hunted and destroyed individually. Even the unarmed Iraqi soldiers who surrendered were shot down. Not a single Iraqi survived.

After the carnage, some 2,000 mutilated vehicles along with charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers lay along what was known as the Highway of Death .

Hundreds of them also accumulated on another road, the 8th, which led to Basra. The scenes of devastation in these two roads became some of the most recognizable images of the Gulf War, and possibly the history of conflicts due to its extreme crudeness.

Today it is still difficult to know the exact number of human casualties. It is known that most of the vehicles we see in the images were abandoned by the time they reached them. It is believed that in total, between 1,800 and almost 3,000 vehicles were destroyed.

Looking at the scenario in retrospect, most criticism of the allies' performance is similar: the Iraqi troops were defeated and posed no threat to the coalition forces at this point in the conflict.

You also have to keep in mind that they were going backwards. And in war, retiring is not the same as surrendering. If they did not surrender, then they were enemy combatants. Also, retreating or "backing out" is considered a tactical move.

This is precisely the defense and justification of the United States to what happened on the Highway of Death . According to US General Schwarzkopf years later, " this is not a group of innocent people trying to cross the border into Iraq. This was a group of rapists, murderers and thugs who had raped and looted the center of Kuwait City and now they were trying to leave the country before they caught them . "

They say that in war nobody wants to be the bad guy and executioner. The pity is that there are always innocents and victims. Hundreds of them. Although the worst of all is that in the war only people are buried who mostly never knew why the hell they were there.