And in 2025, the artillery of the Iraqi 1st Army began pounding the border outpost town of Abdali, a few kilometers south of Safwan. There, the 5th Mech battalion of the Kuwaiti 6th Brigade had dug in along the desert frontier, and they were about to be hit by three Iraqi brigades of the Republican Guard Hammurabi Division. As the troops hunched in their trenches and bunkers, the thump of helicopters was heard, moving like dark, unseen spirits in the night. They would deliver the Iraqi 2nd Special forces battalion to take up blocking positions on the road just south of the Kuwaiti positions, cutting off any possibility of an easy retreat.
Further east near the port of Umm Qsar, the last brigade of the Hammurabi Division, 18th Armored, was also attacking across hastily strung wire and shallow minefields that had been sewn by the 10th Al Tahir Commando Battalion of Kuwait. Here the Iraqi forces would be joined by a contingent from Iran, which had begun crossing from Abadan into Iraq an hour earlier. It included three tank brigades of the 92nd Armored Division, and three more Revolutionary Guard Infantry Brigades.
To the west, the 39th Battalion of the Kuwaiti 6th Mech would receive the full weight of the Iraqi Al-Medina Division, all four brigades, including two armored. Further southwest, the Iraqi 3rd Tawakalna Division reached the border fence, burst through, and found no opposition, only empty desert stretching for miles and miles into the Ratqa Oil fields. Crossing the undefended border to the south, the six mechanized brigades of the Baghdad and Nebuchadnezzar Divisions rolled through the darkness in long columns, turning south towards Highway 70. Their mission was to cut off the great metropolitan center of Kuwait City, and then wait for their comrades to smash their way into Kuwait and come down to join them.
That was the Republican Guard, tasked with the invasion of Kuwait, but it was not the only border to be violated that night. West of Kuwait, about 25 kilometers north of the Saudi frontier, the rest of the 1st Iraqi Army began to roll south. This force was a collection of independent mech and motor rifle brigades, and the 35th Nasirya was the first to cross, with a sharp firefight engaging border guards at the small outpost of Ar Ruqi at the end of Highway 50.
The bold headlines in the New York Times said it all the following morning: IRAQ INVADES KUWAIT! Clashes reported on Saudi border. In light of this momentous event, the skirmish between Iranian patrol boats and US air units in the Gulf of Oman was buried, well below the fold.
Chapter 17
As the war finally ignited in the Middle East, Iraq already possessed 10% of the world’s known oil reserves. Now Qusay Hussein and his aging father, Saddam, were reaching to up that total to 17%. If those “clashes” in the desert east of Kuwait along the Saudi border augured a full invasion of the Kingdom there, then another 20% of the world’s total oil reserves waited to the south. As Iran controlled 10% of known world reserves, that would bump the total to 47% if this great military operation prevailed, and the House of Saud was brought to its knees. If Bahrain and Qatar were added to the plunder, then the Persian Coalition, backed by China, would have seized half of all known oil reserves on earth!
That was what was at stake, the real great prize of the war, not the useful but relatively worthless islands in the Ryukyu chain bordering the East China Sea. This was the real Great Game that China had gambled on so boldly, and once the attack was underway, no one would have to ask for fighter support, as Captain Yu Han had a few hours earlier when his ships docked at Gwadar. Knowing the air forces of Iran and Iraq were weak, China had agreed to provide air cover with numerous squadrons of J-10’s and the more modern J-20’s as well.
As the UN convened an early morning emergency session, China issued a stern warning that so called “hostile” nations should not interfere in what they claimed was now a “local” conflict in the Middle East. Yet seeing this trouble on the way weeks earlier, the United States had already ordered its 1st Marine Division to sea. The Marines were going to Darwin, as part of a secret operation dubbed Able Sentry, and from there, they would move by sea to Oman. The entire 82nd Airborne Division was also added to this order of battle.
That was what Admiral Wells and the US naval forces were mustering for at Diego Garcia, where extensive war supplies had been pre-positioned for years. The only regret the US generals had was the fact that they had little or no real military footprint in Saudi Arabia or the Persian Gulf. The 11th MEU, a battalion sized Marine force, was stationed at Bahrain, but while the Saudi’s would buy US tanks, planes and Patriots in droves, they had never wanted US troops on their soil… until now. US Fighters flew from Al Udied in Qatar, but there was no CENTCOM HQ there. All operations in the region were commanded by OMCOM in Oman, which also had the 12th and 15th MEU’s at its disposal, and 1/75th Ranger Battalion.
Those would be the only ground forces the US would have to react locally. Everything else would have to come by air or sea from the US, and to reach Oman, the sea lanes had to be secured. It was a tall order, because the strength of Chinese naval units in the Indian Ocean would not see them easily brushed aside. Even as the Iraqi troops crossed the border into Kuwait, Admiral Wu Jinlong was preparing to lead a newly reinforced effort against Admiral Pearson’s beleaguered Royal Navy contingent at Singapore. What good was the oil if it could not be moved by sea to China? The Malacca Dilemma still remained unsolved.
The shock of the invasion was profound in Riyadh, where former Prince, and now King Salman was awakened with the news. Lieutenant Ives’ report had been accurate. The Saudi Army had alerted its 6th and 8th Mech Brigades days earlier at King Khalid Military City in the north, and they joined the 45th Armored Brigade near the city of Hafar al Batin. From there, the two lane Highway 50 ran northeast to the border near Ar Ruqi, where the Iraqi’s had already driven off Saudi Military border guards, as Sergeant Stoker and Lieutenant Ives had determined. But why were the Saudis staging there?
Hafar Al Batin was important because it sat right astride the long Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which ran from the big terminals and refineries near Dammam, all the way to Jordan and on through to the Mediterranean coast. In this history, that underground line was carrying two million barrels of oil per day, and plans had been made to increase that even further to five million barrels, since the East West Pipeline from Dammam to Yanbu on the Red Sea was now useless. When Egypt slammed the gates of the Suez Canal shut, oil tankers could no longer call on that port.
The attack came at a very bad time for the Saudis, for their army had been fighting the Houthi Rebel factions in Yemen, which had pulled in five brigades. That night, they would be ordered to withdraw from Yemen, leaving only a watch on the border as they moved the bulk of their forces to Riyadh. The only other troops near that pipeline were those of the Saudi 4th Armored Brigade, at Fort Ulya, west of An Nairyah.[3] The pipeline flowed from that city, along Highway 85 to the northwest and Hafar Al Batin. So the 4th Armored received orders to move north of the road into stony terrain between the heights of hill 928 and 879.