Word: thrust
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...drive the intruders back. When the allied invasion came, the Iraqi plan fell apart. Coalition forces broke through in several places along the Kuwaiti border and swept into Iraq far to the west. Without air reconnaissance, neither Baghdad nor the Guard's division commanders knew where the main thrust was nor where they should direct a counterattack. They were unable to communicate with one another, and continuous air attacks kept them from moving out to reconnoiter. Though some of the Guards put up a fight and allied officers called them "good soldiers," they were destroyed piecemeal...
Khafji was already a ghost town when a sudden Iraqi thrust made it the site of the first large ground battle of the war. Six miles south of the Saudi border with Kuwait, the town had been abandoned two weeks earlier by residents who fled out of the range of Iraqi artillery fire. On Tuesday, Jan. 29, nine brigades of Iraq's 5th Mechanized Division -- regarded by the U.S. as one of Saddam's better units -- swept into Saudi Arabia. They entered along a stretch of border that began north of Khafji and ended at the town of Umm Hujul...
When a French force under General Jean Baptiste Rochambeau linked up with George Washington's revolutionary army in 1781 to fight the British, France became America's first wartime ally. Thus it was fitting that the code word assigned to the first target in the French-U.S. thrust into Iraq was Rochambeau. The choice not only saluted France's fighting commitment to the allied cause but also symbolized France's newfound solidarity with the U.S. when war came...
Later on G day, another Saudi force crossed into southwestern Kuwait, paralleling an Egyptian-led thrust. The 38,500 Egyptians, second in number only to Saudi Arabia's 40,000 among the allies, ran into Saddam's dreaded oil- filled fire trenches, according to Schwarzkopf; though the trenches were not aflame, it was a position the general called "not a fun place to be." Behind Egypt's two-division tank and paratroop contingents was the 19,000-man Syrian 9th Armored Division, with its 270 Soviet-made T-62 tanks. The two- pronged Arab attack took out Iraqi defenders...
Most of Iraq's front-line troops hunkered down behind minefields and barbed wire along the 138-mile Saudi-Kuwait border, awaiting what Baghdad obviously expected to be the main allied thrust. Coalition troops did in fact initially concentrate in front of them. But in the last 16 days before the attack, more than 150,000 American, British and French troops moved to the west, as far as 300 miles inland from the gulf, setting up bases across the border from an area of southern Iraq that was mostly empty desert. Part of that allied force was to drive straight...