Meanwhile, as President Bush announced the end of war in Kuwait, British special forces landed in the city to secure the British embassy. Local people took to the streets to celebrate the departure of what had been an occupying force. Armed members of the Kuwaiti resistance posed for pictures, but the Kingdom’s infrastructure was shattered. Iraqi tank units had blasted buildings, turned off the power and left hundreds of bodies in the streets. There was little food and while some garages had petrol the pumps did not work due to the power failure. Troops and media who arrived in Kuwait the night before liberation was declared, described the city as ‘silent and like something from a futuristic movie, no lights, no humans walking around, just lots of wild dogs’. Within days, people visited the morgue to try and locate their relatives, but there were hundreds of missing people. Rumours quickly circulated that they had been taken away from the city and executed and marches took place in Kuwait for what they called the missing. The conflict in the Gulf had been an overwhelming success for the United States. This was Washington’s first major military victory since their exit from Vietnam which had clouded military confidence for many years. The war in the Persian Gulf had been planned and directed with the support of Arab nations, but while there was no immediate indication of the terrorist actions that would follow, it was clear that Saddam remained a potent force. The war in the Persian Gulf unleashed powerful- and contradictory-forces in the Middle East. The American policy believed that defeating Saddam Hussein would discredit radicalism, strengthen moderates and enhance regional stability. But it was about to be questioned.
At the time, few people were aware that the political and social tinderbox of religions in Iraq was about to explode. The Iraq military were literally chased out of Kuwait by Coalition forces with Saddam’s troops trapped
