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
Casualties of the Iraq War in towns across Iraq. National Public Radio, iCasualties.org, and GlobalSecurity.org have month-by-month charts of American troop deaths in the Iraq War. The combined total of coalition and contractor casualties in the conflict is now over ten times that of the 1990–1991 Gulf War. In the Gulf War, coalition forces suffered around 378 deaths, and among the Iraqi military, tens of thousands were killed, along with thousands of civilians. See the overview chart at the top of the page for recent numbers. On August 29, 2006, "The Christian Science Monitor" reported: "Because of new body armor and advances in military medicine,