Gulf War they set fire to nearly 700 oil wells and placed land mines around the wells to make extinguishing the fires more difficult. The war's ground phase was officially designated Operation Desert Saber. The first units to move into Iraq were three patrols of the British Special Air Service's B squadron, call signs Bravo One Zero, Bravo Two Zero, and Bravo Three Zero, in late January. These eight-man patrols landed behind Iraqi lines to gather intelligence on the movements of Scud mobile missile launchers, which could not be detected from the air, as they were hidden under bridges and camouflage netting
Governmental positions on the Iraq War prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq what it was like living under Soviet Communist rule, which during stalinist times was comparable to Saddam's brutal Iraq regime. Perhaps the only major regional ally that supported the US' action was Kuwait, whose hostility towards Saddam's Iraq stemmed from the events surrounding the first Persian Gulf War. The public appeared to consider Saddam to be as much of a threat in 2003 as he was in the past, and were particularly interested in attempts to repatriate many Kuwaiti citizens who had disappeared during the Gulf War, and were presumably languishing in Iraqi jails up until Saddam's fall from power.