The Legacy of the Legends: The Middle East War, Part 6
By the time the Iranians re-entered the Wars of the Middle East in June 1996, the situation for the Saudis and Iraqis had become a desperate one. Both sides were continuing to try to export oil (though this had become extremely dangerous for ships of other flags, leading to few tankers being willing to go anywhere near the Red Sea or Persian Gulf) but the war efforts of both nations were a pretty much hopeless cause owing to their two largest foreign suppliers of weapons - Russia and France - both being involved in the conflict. While both countries did their best to develop sanctions-busting techniques, it meant nothing for the weapons they needed most, namely aircraft and missiles. Both sides were continuing to make some weapons, but by this point they were having a hard time of this owing to the trade embargoes that both sides were trying to live with. These, of course, didn't matter a whit to any of the nations lined up against them - the Amigos, NATO, the Commonwealth, Iran, Israel - and it showed in one side being able to easily replace its losses. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran had vast numbers of weapons and soldiers who could use them, but they were burning through ammunition in a massive hurry, and the losses in their capabilities were substantial. Iraq made a an attempt to acquire aircraft from Kazakhstan that earned the ire of Moscow - and on an second attempt, the Russian Air Force intercepted some ten of these aircraft over the Caspian Sea, forcing them to divert to southern Russia. That ended such attempts, and companies in numerous countries were by mid-1996 learning the hard way about the consequences of attempting to break embargoes.
The Saudis' undisguised panic at the invasion of northwestern Saudi Arabia by Jordan and Israel led to a mad scramble to deploy units westwards, the House of Saud being absolutely sure the Hashemites would make an attempt to sweep down the west side of the Arabian Peninsula and take back the cities of Mecca and Medina. Countless zealot groups also believed this, including the infamous al-Qaeda group of millionaire construction magnate Osama bin Laden, and they also deployed to the areas around the holy cities to await the "Armageddon of the unbelievers" that they were sure was inevitable. In reality, Jordan and Israel both sought to end the war as rapidly as possible, and they (and by June 1996 they were fully engaged with several other countries in the region with regards to war goals and plans) felt that tying down tens of thousands of Saudi troops in area around Tabuk was likely to end the war more quickly. The rapid withdrawal from Iraq and Kuwait proved how true this point was almost certain to be, but the Iraqis' ability to take advantage of this had been shattered by the Iranian invasion. Saddam, left in a no-win situation, was forced to withdraw units north to face the Iranians attacking into Iraq proper. Saddam made a point of launching hundreds of Scud and Al-Hussein missiles at Iran in an attempt to forestall the inevitable, starting by firing on Iranian armed forces positions and, when that failed to do more than slow the Iranians down, Saddam began launching the Al-Husseins on Iranian cities, firing missiles as far as the Iranian capital of Tehran. The atrocious accuracy of the Al-Hussein made this little more than an attempt at terrorizing the Iranian population, and any possibility of the Iranians accepting limited victories over the Iraqis evaporated with the terror missile campaign.
On the night of June 28, 1996, five Al-Husseins were fired at the Iranian city of Esfahan, of which two were shot down by Iranian Army Patriot missile batteries and one slammed into a mountain west of the city, while the other two landed in an industrial zone north of the city, but it was soon found out that these missiles had warheads containing Sarin and Tabun. This knowledge quickly reached the desks of world leaders, and the result was the same from all of them - that would not be allowed to happen again. When Saddam made two more attempts at attacking civilian areas with chemical weapons on June 30 and July 3, the war got stepped up in a big way, courtesy not so much from Iran as from the United States.
On July 6, 1996, over fifty United States Air Force B-52J bombers took off from bases in the continental United States and flew all the way down the Mediterranean, who upon reaching over Jordan loosed over 350 cruise missiles at targets into Iraq. The massive air strikes were the first act of Operation Desert Storm, an operation that lasted just over 120 hours but saw co-ordinated air strikes by heavy bombers from the United States, Britain, Russia and Canada and strike aircraft from those nations as well as Iran, Israel, India, Mexico, France, Germany, Spain and Australia, with later operations seeing Japan, Vietnam, South Africa, Egypt, Italy and the Netherlands joining into the campaign. British and Canadian B-1Bs, escorted in by USAF "Wild Weasel" SEAD aircraft and Israeli fighters, introduced the Iraqis to the idea of bases being carpet bombed by bombers armed with JDAM bombs, while over 1000 attack aircraft - F-4s, F-15Es, F-16s, F/A-18s, A-6s, Tornados, Mirage 2000s and 4000s, Super Etendards, F-111s, TSR-2s, Su-24Ms, Su-30s - were involved in the attacks on Iraq. The attacks were so massive that Iraq's air force, already badly bloodied by the previous month's fighting with the Iranians, simply didn't have the aircraft or air defense weapons to even begin to counter the strike, and while their dramatically-overwhelmed air force made a desperate attempt to hold back the attacks, this accomplished little despite more than losing over 120 fighters in the space of just over 96 hours. Saddam's forces continued to fire ballistic missiles, and with the attacks on the country, there were multiple attempts to also attack the Iranians with bombs loaded with chemical weapons, despite the Iranian heavy units all using NBC-protected vehicles. The chemical Scud attacks also included firing on Israel, which led to Israel making a statement of their own on July 14, when they launched three Jericho II ballistic missiles armed with hard-target penetrator warheads on an Iraqi bunker complex in the middle of Baghdad, hitting the bunker directly with two of those missiles. Despite 50 feet of overhead earth and ten feet of reinforced concrete, the penetrator went into the bunker and detonated, killing everyone inside of it and turning the bunker's location into a pair of craters over one hundred and fifty feet across and fourty feet deep. The shot initially terrified much of the world - they felt that the strike may well have been a nuclear retaliation by the Israelis for Saddam's firing chemical weapons towards Israel - but the Israelis instead made a statement with the Jericho Mazkhalt (Mazkhalt roughly translating to 'Sledgehammer' in Hebrew), and Saddam fired no more chemical weapons on Israel, though he kept attempting to attack the Iranians with chemical weapons.
That continuation lasted only another few days, as by July 21 the air strikes had flattened all of the possible units that could deploy chemical weapons. By the end of July, though, the Iranians had a surprise of their own - unbeknownst to many, the Israelis and Iranians had been co-operating for years on the Jericho program, and while Iran's missiles had been scheduled for a 1997 delivery, in the aftermath of the attack by the Turks, Five Iranian missile batteries had trained in the shooting of the Jericho (the Israelis were surprised to discover that the Iranians had even created a first-class TEL for their missiles in a tractor-trailer unit) and Israel Aerospace Industries built an initial batch of 60 missiles for the Iranians. The first Iranian Jericho Battleaxe flew on July 22, armed with a 1000 kg conventional warhead, launched against an Iraqi military supply dump and fuel dump at Abu Gharib, northwest of Nasiriyah. The next day two more landed on Iraqi Navy's facilities on the Shatt al Arab, and one more day after that the 1st Corps HQ in Kirkuk ate another Jericho, this one killing two four-star Iraqi generals.
The destruction of the Iraqi Air Force hadn't been the biggest effect of Operation Desert Avenger, as the destruction of hundreds of Iraqi facilities during the bombing campaign had been matched by attacks of numerous logistics units and facilities, and the Iranian missile strikes had only made these problems worse. The new air superiority of the Iranians and their allies combined with logistics problems crippled the Iraqi war efforts. Having already cleaned up in the southern marshes and having cleared Basrah within a few days of the initial attack by the Iranians, the Iranian Army swung north, their armored units and huge artillery superiority adding to the damage done from the air to cripple the Iraqis. The Iranians captured the city of Nasiriyah on July 24, meeting units that had entered Iraq from launch points further north and then the whole army turning north. Iraqi units made multiple attempts at establishing defensive lines, each one being plastered by air power or Iranian artillery before they had a chance to fully form, and the vengeful Iranians made a point of destroying every piece of equipment they could, though they were much kinder to prisoners of war than many of the Iraqis expected.
Despite the huge effort and the threats posed by Iraqi missiles, the Iranian people were remarkably steadfast in their desire to finish off the Iraqis, not hurt by their country's being willing to put all they could on the line. Fuel was rationed for the first month (until improvements in the local oil refining and distribution systems allowed for this to be removed), many consumer goods were held off on in order to supply the armed forces and despite Tehran being willing to introduce conscription (and passing a law to enable this), it never needed to owing to there being a more than sufficient supply of volunteers. Iranian press were remarkably forthright on what happened in the war (both good and bad), Iran's industrial firms produced plenty of new equipment on their own and supply drives among the population gathered huge quantities of supplies for their soldiers. Reserve officers, some of whose service had been as far back as the 1960s, offered to return to the colours and lead their men, and the Iranians' well-known reputation for hospitality extended to foreign visitors as well, as foreign units . Even the Shah himself, who had qualified to fly the Tomcat and Viper in the 1980s, was able to get himself into the cockpit of a IRAF Tomcat and fly actual missions, something that had a marked positive effect on his popularity with his men. Iranian commanders, most of whom were trained in Britain or the United States, proved as a whole capable and effective leaders, and Iranian soldiers proved far better in pound for pound terms than their Iraqi rivals.
The success of Operation Desert Storm's crippling of the Iraqi Air Force and the Iranians' pushing through Iraq in July and August 1996 led to a gradual winding down of the allied air efforts, but this turned into merely an operational pause....something that became clear why on August 16, 1996.
Qatar's occupation by the Saudis had been anything but smooth, as the Commonwealth air forces - in particular the Indian Air Force - had harassed them to no end. But the slowdown of air operations in late July and early August 1996 had been a sign that something big was coming to observers, and while the Saudis had rushed units to stop the Israeli-Jordanian attack on Saudi Arabia and watched the blasting the allied nations brought down on the Iraqis, the Commonwealth had quietly pulled back a lot of its units to its Socotra, Israel, Cyprus, Lakshadweep, Mumbai, Diego Garcia and Zanzibar, with the Commonwealth carriers having withdrawn to Australia in April 1996 to plan for the amphibious invasion meant to make good on the Commonwealth's promises to liberate Qatar. The massive amphibious fleets of the Commonwealth gathered in Socotra and Mumbai to ready for an assault, and the operation gathered numerous support ships, ranging from the replenishment ships for the Navies all the way to numerous ships that had been requisitioned for support, famously including ocean liner SS Canberra and cruise ship MV Sovereign of the Seas, both of which were operating as troop ships. The operation also included British battleships Lion and Vanguard, operating together for the first time since their recommissioning in the mid-1980s, which famously fired the first shots of Operation Ascension on the early morning hours of August 16, their 16-inch guns firing on Saudi positions on the Qatari Peninsula. Both the battleships and numerous Canadian, British and Australian warships equipped with 155mm guns fired thousands of rounds of ammunition onto the shocked Saudi defenders, while carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth, HMCS Canadian Shield, HMAS Australia and INS Vikramaditya joined the Indian Air Force in countless air strikes on the Saudis. The Royal Saudi Air Force attempted to secure the air against amphibious assault but failed miserably at it, and while early landings were interdicted by artillery fire, the combination of air strikes, communications jamming and naval gunfire support finished off the Saudi artillery, allowing a flotilla of landing ships over thirty strong to land two complete divisions in Qatar. No sooner had the landings begun than a complete division of Canadian, British, Australian, South African and Indian airborne troops jumped into Qatar on their own, their attack aiming directly at the air base at Al Udeid, these units having dozens of attack helicopters and tiltwings for support.
The attack was a massive success, and it took just six days for the Saudi forces garrisoning Qatar to either run for their lives out of Qatar, be captured or be blown to bits by the giant amphibious and airborne assaults. Salwa Road between Abu Samra and Al-Kiranah became a scene of carnage as a massive convoy of Saudi defenders running for the Saudi border was bombed to bits by fighter-bombers from the carriers, hundreds of destroyed pieces of military equipment being mixed with in with hundreds of civilian vehicles carrying fleeing Saudi soldiers that had been looted from Qatari civilians. The landing of over three divisions of troops from the Commonwealth was followed rapidly by the arrival of heavy engineering crews to clear the docks at Doha, while in the meantime the successful airborne assault on Al Udeid resulted in the airfield being used as a vital supply station for aircraft of all shapes and sizes - even two Ukrainian An-225s, the largest jet aircraft ever built, made visits to the air base to help with supply efforts. The successful liberation of Qatar ended the Saudis' threats to the Persian Gulf and left it completely in allied hands, and Saudi units in coastal regions quickly got away from it to avoid attacks from the Sea. After the success in Qatar, the United States Army's 82nd Airborne Division was deployed to Dhahran and Ras Tanura, landing in the region from take-off points in southern Iran on August 27, capturing the vital supply facilities in the city almost completely intact, in part because of help from HMS Lion, the battleship's guns being used here as well. The 82nd Airborne took just over 36 hours to clear Dhahran and Ras Tanura and another three days to clear Jubail as well, gaining a wide foothold in northeastern Saudi Arabia.
The capture of Dhahran and Ras Tanura came the same day as the Iranians wiped out two Iranian Republican Guard divisions south of Abdali in northern Kuwait, ending the last possible line of resistance for the Iraqis now trapped in Kuwait. Four days later, the Iranian 21st Mountain and 88th Armored Divisions entered Kuwait City to a surprising jubilation from the Kuwaitis, and the day after that entry the commander of Iraqi Forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq surrendered to his Iranian counterpart, but in a highly-symbolic action (and meant to be a PR coup), the formal surrender of the Iraqi three-star General was done to Shah Reza Pahlavi II himself on September 10, 1996, who specifically flew to the Red Palace at Al Jahra to receive the Iraqis' surrender.
The surrender of the Iraqis allowed the Iranians to move up to the border with Saudi Arabia as far west as the Rafha border crossing, with Iranian infantry units being assigned to handle the security of this section of the border as the Al-Sabah Clan returned to their country - but not before making a point of meeting Shah Reza Pahlavi in Khorramshahr to express their sincere thanks to Iran for liberating their country. Indeed, while the predominantly-Shi'a Iranians and the predominantly-Sunni Kuwaitis had for some time been somewhat antagonistic towards each other, that relationship turned 180 degrees in the years after the liberation of Kuwait, with the Iranians growing to have a much better view of the Arabs of the smaller states of the Persian Gulf region and the Arabs gaining a considerable respect and admiration for the powerful, resourceful, intelligent Iranians. It was a similar story with the Commonwealth and Qatar, as the awe-inspiring assault on the Saudis who had taken over Qatar and who had managed to clear Qatar of the Saudis with remarkably little loss of innocent life - only five Qataris lost their lives in the amphibious assault - and stunning speed. Qatar formally made its application to join the Commonwealth at the meeting of the Commonwealth's heads of state in Jerusalem on October 22, 1996, and the Al Udeid and Sumaysimah bases becoming important transit points in the Middle East. As membership in the Central Commonwealth required a number of societal requirements (including a functional democracy and a wide collection of legally-enforceable civil rights) Qatar would be some way from the Central Commonwealth in 1996, it wouldn't remain that way for long. As with Kuwait, the Emirates, Bahrain and indeed Iran and the North African Arabs, the years after the Middle Eastern War would be marked by a steady increasing of civil and human rights in the region, and Qatar would ultimately join the Central Commonwealth as one of the new members in 2018.
By the time the Iranians re-entered the Wars of the Middle East in June 1996, the situation for the Saudis and Iraqis had become a desperate one. Both sides were continuing to try to export oil (though this had become extremely dangerous for ships of other flags, leading to few tankers being willing to go anywhere near the Red Sea or Persian Gulf) but the war efforts of both nations were a pretty much hopeless cause owing to their two largest foreign suppliers of weapons - Russia and France - both being involved in the conflict. While both countries did their best to develop sanctions-busting techniques, it meant nothing for the weapons they needed most, namely aircraft and missiles. Both sides were continuing to make some weapons, but by this point they were having a hard time of this owing to the trade embargoes that both sides were trying to live with. These, of course, didn't matter a whit to any of the nations lined up against them - the Amigos, NATO, the Commonwealth, Iran, Israel - and it showed in one side being able to easily replace its losses. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran had vast numbers of weapons and soldiers who could use them, but they were burning through ammunition in a massive hurry, and the losses in their capabilities were substantial. Iraq made a an attempt to acquire aircraft from Kazakhstan that earned the ire of Moscow - and on an second attempt, the Russian Air Force intercepted some ten of these aircraft over the Caspian Sea, forcing them to divert to southern Russia. That ended such attempts, and companies in numerous countries were by mid-1996 learning the hard way about the consequences of attempting to break embargoes.
The Saudis' undisguised panic at the invasion of northwestern Saudi Arabia by Jordan and Israel led to a mad scramble to deploy units westwards, the House of Saud being absolutely sure the Hashemites would make an attempt to sweep down the west side of the Arabian Peninsula and take back the cities of Mecca and Medina. Countless zealot groups also believed this, including the infamous al-Qaeda group of millionaire construction magnate Osama bin Laden, and they also deployed to the areas around the holy cities to await the "Armageddon of the unbelievers" that they were sure was inevitable. In reality, Jordan and Israel both sought to end the war as rapidly as possible, and they (and by June 1996 they were fully engaged with several other countries in the region with regards to war goals and plans) felt that tying down tens of thousands of Saudi troops in area around Tabuk was likely to end the war more quickly. The rapid withdrawal from Iraq and Kuwait proved how true this point was almost certain to be, but the Iraqis' ability to take advantage of this had been shattered by the Iranian invasion. Saddam, left in a no-win situation, was forced to withdraw units north to face the Iranians attacking into Iraq proper. Saddam made a point of launching hundreds of Scud and Al-Hussein missiles at Iran in an attempt to forestall the inevitable, starting by firing on Iranian armed forces positions and, when that failed to do more than slow the Iranians down, Saddam began launching the Al-Husseins on Iranian cities, firing missiles as far as the Iranian capital of Tehran. The atrocious accuracy of the Al-Hussein made this little more than an attempt at terrorizing the Iranian population, and any possibility of the Iranians accepting limited victories over the Iraqis evaporated with the terror missile campaign.
On the night of June 28, 1996, five Al-Husseins were fired at the Iranian city of Esfahan, of which two were shot down by Iranian Army Patriot missile batteries and one slammed into a mountain west of the city, while the other two landed in an industrial zone north of the city, but it was soon found out that these missiles had warheads containing Sarin and Tabun. This knowledge quickly reached the desks of world leaders, and the result was the same from all of them - that would not be allowed to happen again. When Saddam made two more attempts at attacking civilian areas with chemical weapons on June 30 and July 3, the war got stepped up in a big way, courtesy not so much from Iran as from the United States.
On July 6, 1996, over fifty United States Air Force B-52J bombers took off from bases in the continental United States and flew all the way down the Mediterranean, who upon reaching over Jordan loosed over 350 cruise missiles at targets into Iraq. The massive air strikes were the first act of Operation Desert Storm, an operation that lasted just over 120 hours but saw co-ordinated air strikes by heavy bombers from the United States, Britain, Russia and Canada and strike aircraft from those nations as well as Iran, Israel, India, Mexico, France, Germany, Spain and Australia, with later operations seeing Japan, Vietnam, South Africa, Egypt, Italy and the Netherlands joining into the campaign. British and Canadian B-1Bs, escorted in by USAF "Wild Weasel" SEAD aircraft and Israeli fighters, introduced the Iraqis to the idea of bases being carpet bombed by bombers armed with JDAM bombs, while over 1000 attack aircraft - F-4s, F-15Es, F-16s, F/A-18s, A-6s, Tornados, Mirage 2000s and 4000s, Super Etendards, F-111s, TSR-2s, Su-24Ms, Su-30s - were involved in the attacks on Iraq. The attacks were so massive that Iraq's air force, already badly bloodied by the previous month's fighting with the Iranians, simply didn't have the aircraft or air defense weapons to even begin to counter the strike, and while their dramatically-overwhelmed air force made a desperate attempt to hold back the attacks, this accomplished little despite more than losing over 120 fighters in the space of just over 96 hours. Saddam's forces continued to fire ballistic missiles, and with the attacks on the country, there were multiple attempts to also attack the Iranians with bombs loaded with chemical weapons, despite the Iranian heavy units all using NBC-protected vehicles. The chemical Scud attacks also included firing on Israel, which led to Israel making a statement of their own on July 14, when they launched three Jericho II ballistic missiles armed with hard-target penetrator warheads on an Iraqi bunker complex in the middle of Baghdad, hitting the bunker directly with two of those missiles. Despite 50 feet of overhead earth and ten feet of reinforced concrete, the penetrator went into the bunker and detonated, killing everyone inside of it and turning the bunker's location into a pair of craters over one hundred and fifty feet across and fourty feet deep. The shot initially terrified much of the world - they felt that the strike may well have been a nuclear retaliation by the Israelis for Saddam's firing chemical weapons towards Israel - but the Israelis instead made a statement with the Jericho Mazkhalt (Mazkhalt roughly translating to 'Sledgehammer' in Hebrew), and Saddam fired no more chemical weapons on Israel, though he kept attempting to attack the Iranians with chemical weapons.
That continuation lasted only another few days, as by July 21 the air strikes had flattened all of the possible units that could deploy chemical weapons. By the end of July, though, the Iranians had a surprise of their own - unbeknownst to many, the Israelis and Iranians had been co-operating for years on the Jericho program, and while Iran's missiles had been scheduled for a 1997 delivery, in the aftermath of the attack by the Turks, Five Iranian missile batteries had trained in the shooting of the Jericho (the Israelis were surprised to discover that the Iranians had even created a first-class TEL for their missiles in a tractor-trailer unit) and Israel Aerospace Industries built an initial batch of 60 missiles for the Iranians. The first Iranian Jericho Battleaxe flew on July 22, armed with a 1000 kg conventional warhead, launched against an Iraqi military supply dump and fuel dump at Abu Gharib, northwest of Nasiriyah. The next day two more landed on Iraqi Navy's facilities on the Shatt al Arab, and one more day after that the 1st Corps HQ in Kirkuk ate another Jericho, this one killing two four-star Iraqi generals.
The destruction of the Iraqi Air Force hadn't been the biggest effect of Operation Desert Avenger, as the destruction of hundreds of Iraqi facilities during the bombing campaign had been matched by attacks of numerous logistics units and facilities, and the Iranian missile strikes had only made these problems worse. The new air superiority of the Iranians and their allies combined with logistics problems crippled the Iraqi war efforts. Having already cleaned up in the southern marshes and having cleared Basrah within a few days of the initial attack by the Iranians, the Iranian Army swung north, their armored units and huge artillery superiority adding to the damage done from the air to cripple the Iraqis. The Iranians captured the city of Nasiriyah on July 24, meeting units that had entered Iraq from launch points further north and then the whole army turning north. Iraqi units made multiple attempts at establishing defensive lines, each one being plastered by air power or Iranian artillery before they had a chance to fully form, and the vengeful Iranians made a point of destroying every piece of equipment they could, though they were much kinder to prisoners of war than many of the Iraqis expected.
Despite the huge effort and the threats posed by Iraqi missiles, the Iranian people were remarkably steadfast in their desire to finish off the Iraqis, not hurt by their country's being willing to put all they could on the line. Fuel was rationed for the first month (until improvements in the local oil refining and distribution systems allowed for this to be removed), many consumer goods were held off on in order to supply the armed forces and despite Tehran being willing to introduce conscription (and passing a law to enable this), it never needed to owing to there being a more than sufficient supply of volunteers. Iranian press were remarkably forthright on what happened in the war (both good and bad), Iran's industrial firms produced plenty of new equipment on their own and supply drives among the population gathered huge quantities of supplies for their soldiers. Reserve officers, some of whose service had been as far back as the 1960s, offered to return to the colours and lead their men, and the Iranians' well-known reputation for hospitality extended to foreign visitors as well, as foreign units . Even the Shah himself, who had qualified to fly the Tomcat and Viper in the 1980s, was able to get himself into the cockpit of a IRAF Tomcat and fly actual missions, something that had a marked positive effect on his popularity with his men. Iranian commanders, most of whom were trained in Britain or the United States, proved as a whole capable and effective leaders, and Iranian soldiers proved far better in pound for pound terms than their Iraqi rivals.
The success of Operation Desert Storm's crippling of the Iraqi Air Force and the Iranians' pushing through Iraq in July and August 1996 led to a gradual winding down of the allied air efforts, but this turned into merely an operational pause....something that became clear why on August 16, 1996.
Qatar's occupation by the Saudis had been anything but smooth, as the Commonwealth air forces - in particular the Indian Air Force - had harassed them to no end. But the slowdown of air operations in late July and early August 1996 had been a sign that something big was coming to observers, and while the Saudis had rushed units to stop the Israeli-Jordanian attack on Saudi Arabia and watched the blasting the allied nations brought down on the Iraqis, the Commonwealth had quietly pulled back a lot of its units to its Socotra, Israel, Cyprus, Lakshadweep, Mumbai, Diego Garcia and Zanzibar, with the Commonwealth carriers having withdrawn to Australia in April 1996 to plan for the amphibious invasion meant to make good on the Commonwealth's promises to liberate Qatar. The massive amphibious fleets of the Commonwealth gathered in Socotra and Mumbai to ready for an assault, and the operation gathered numerous support ships, ranging from the replenishment ships for the Navies all the way to numerous ships that had been requisitioned for support, famously including ocean liner SS Canberra and cruise ship MV Sovereign of the Seas, both of which were operating as troop ships. The operation also included British battleships Lion and Vanguard, operating together for the first time since their recommissioning in the mid-1980s, which famously fired the first shots of Operation Ascension on the early morning hours of August 16, their 16-inch guns firing on Saudi positions on the Qatari Peninsula. Both the battleships and numerous Canadian, British and Australian warships equipped with 155mm guns fired thousands of rounds of ammunition onto the shocked Saudi defenders, while carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth, HMCS Canadian Shield, HMAS Australia and INS Vikramaditya joined the Indian Air Force in countless air strikes on the Saudis. The Royal Saudi Air Force attempted to secure the air against amphibious assault but failed miserably at it, and while early landings were interdicted by artillery fire, the combination of air strikes, communications jamming and naval gunfire support finished off the Saudi artillery, allowing a flotilla of landing ships over thirty strong to land two complete divisions in Qatar. No sooner had the landings begun than a complete division of Canadian, British, Australian, South African and Indian airborne troops jumped into Qatar on their own, their attack aiming directly at the air base at Al Udeid, these units having dozens of attack helicopters and tiltwings for support.
The attack was a massive success, and it took just six days for the Saudi forces garrisoning Qatar to either run for their lives out of Qatar, be captured or be blown to bits by the giant amphibious and airborne assaults. Salwa Road between Abu Samra and Al-Kiranah became a scene of carnage as a massive convoy of Saudi defenders running for the Saudi border was bombed to bits by fighter-bombers from the carriers, hundreds of destroyed pieces of military equipment being mixed with in with hundreds of civilian vehicles carrying fleeing Saudi soldiers that had been looted from Qatari civilians. The landing of over three divisions of troops from the Commonwealth was followed rapidly by the arrival of heavy engineering crews to clear the docks at Doha, while in the meantime the successful airborne assault on Al Udeid resulted in the airfield being used as a vital supply station for aircraft of all shapes and sizes - even two Ukrainian An-225s, the largest jet aircraft ever built, made visits to the air base to help with supply efforts. The successful liberation of Qatar ended the Saudis' threats to the Persian Gulf and left it completely in allied hands, and Saudi units in coastal regions quickly got away from it to avoid attacks from the Sea. After the success in Qatar, the United States Army's 82nd Airborne Division was deployed to Dhahran and Ras Tanura, landing in the region from take-off points in southern Iran on August 27, capturing the vital supply facilities in the city almost completely intact, in part because of help from HMS Lion, the battleship's guns being used here as well. The 82nd Airborne took just over 36 hours to clear Dhahran and Ras Tanura and another three days to clear Jubail as well, gaining a wide foothold in northeastern Saudi Arabia.
The capture of Dhahran and Ras Tanura came the same day as the Iranians wiped out two Iranian Republican Guard divisions south of Abdali in northern Kuwait, ending the last possible line of resistance for the Iraqis now trapped in Kuwait. Four days later, the Iranian 21st Mountain and 88th Armored Divisions entered Kuwait City to a surprising jubilation from the Kuwaitis, and the day after that entry the commander of Iraqi Forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq surrendered to his Iranian counterpart, but in a highly-symbolic action (and meant to be a PR coup), the formal surrender of the Iraqi three-star General was done to Shah Reza Pahlavi II himself on September 10, 1996, who specifically flew to the Red Palace at Al Jahra to receive the Iraqis' surrender.
The surrender of the Iraqis allowed the Iranians to move up to the border with Saudi Arabia as far west as the Rafha border crossing, with Iranian infantry units being assigned to handle the security of this section of the border as the Al-Sabah Clan returned to their country - but not before making a point of meeting Shah Reza Pahlavi in Khorramshahr to express their sincere thanks to Iran for liberating their country. Indeed, while the predominantly-Shi'a Iranians and the predominantly-Sunni Kuwaitis had for some time been somewhat antagonistic towards each other, that relationship turned 180 degrees in the years after the liberation of Kuwait, with the Iranians growing to have a much better view of the Arabs of the smaller states of the Persian Gulf region and the Arabs gaining a considerable respect and admiration for the powerful, resourceful, intelligent Iranians. It was a similar story with the Commonwealth and Qatar, as the awe-inspiring assault on the Saudis who had taken over Qatar and who had managed to clear Qatar of the Saudis with remarkably little loss of innocent life - only five Qataris lost their lives in the amphibious assault - and stunning speed. Qatar formally made its application to join the Commonwealth at the meeting of the Commonwealth's heads of state in Jerusalem on October 22, 1996, and the Al Udeid and Sumaysimah bases becoming important transit points in the Middle East. As membership in the Central Commonwealth required a number of societal requirements (including a functional democracy and a wide collection of legally-enforceable civil rights) Qatar would be some way from the Central Commonwealth in 1996, it wouldn't remain that way for long. As with Kuwait, the Emirates, Bahrain and indeed Iran and the North African Arabs, the years after the Middle Eastern War would be marked by a steady increasing of civil and human rights in the region, and Qatar would ultimately join the Central Commonwealth as one of the new members in 2018.
