DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia — U.S. forces have engaged in minor skirmishes with Iraqi troops on the Kuwaiti border, prompting air strikes against positions north of the border that reportedly killed at least 40 Iraqis.
Reports from U.S. Marine units deployed near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border city of Khafji indicate Iraq's most sustained counterattack so far. And they indicate movement by the U.S. forces to engage the enemy along the border in possible preparation for a ground assault into Kuwait.
Though apparently very minor, the skirmishes represent the first known ground combat between Iraqi troops and the large coalition of allied forces poised to move into Kuwait.
Commanders in the field said the attacks by Air Force A-10s and Marine AV-8 Harrier jets were intended primarily to take out artillery positions that have shelled Marine units sporadically over the past three nights. But pilots returning from missions into Kuwait said they were also clearly directing their weapons at Iraqi troops.
"We're out there to kill," said A-10 pilot Capt. Eric Salomson, who was attacking Iraqi tanks lined up in defensive earth mounds across the Kuwaiti border. "The only way we're going to beat these guys is to keep all the jets flying all the time. I don't have a lot of hate for these guys, because I think they have bayonets in their backs. But . . . our job is to reap terror out there."
Pentagon officials have primarily discussed operations against Iraq's elite Republican Guards, the backbone of Iraq's massive military machine, deployed south of the Iraqi port city of Basra and in northern Kuwait.
"We're trying to hammer them just as hard as we can," Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon in Washington.
Four British-designed Harrier jets on Saturday destroyed an Iraqi communications center about 20 miles north of the Kuwaiti border, a facility that U.S. officials believe communicated instructions to Iraqi field commanders and directed the artillery fire that injured two Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force near Khafji, as well as a Navy hospital corpsman.
Most of the Iraqi rockets lobbed across the border, at the rate of three to four each night, have exploded harmlessly in the desert near Saudi positions and Marine Corps supply depots and other support units, including a field hospital, that have been deployed north near the border in preparation for a ground assault.
