KUWAIT CITY, 22 October 2003 — The United States is closing an air base in Kuwait it had used in the war on Iraq, saying it is no longer needed to protect the country now that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has been toppled.
“The mission is accomplished,” US Ambassador Richard Jones told reporters yesterday. He said the last of the forces at Ahmad Al-Jaber Air Base were leaving yesterday, but did not say where they were headed.
US warplanes and helicopters have used the air base, 75 km west of Kuwait City, since the 1991 Gulf War that forced Saddam to reverse his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Among other missions, aircraft from the base helped monitor the zone over southern Iraq from which the United States had barred Iraqi fighter planes.
The United States also has Camp Doha, an isolated US Army base along the Gulf coast about 20 km west of Kuwait City, and another air base, Ali Salem, about 70 km northwest of Kuwait City. No mention was made yesterday of the fate of those installations.
Ambassador Jones said the closure of Ahmad Al-Jaber Air Base was not in response to Kuwaiti opposition to US military presence here or to any perceived threat to US interests in Kuwait.
Iraqi Convicted in Bahrain: An Iraqi convicted of detonating an explosive device near a US naval base in Bahrain received a lenient sentence of three years because he testified he was intimidated by the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein, his lawyer said yesterday.
The High Criminal Court convicted Oday Abdel Amir Hassoon on Monday of subversion and causing an explosion on March 24 when he detonated a propane gas bomb in a trash bin 600 meters from the 5th Fleet base in Bahrain.
A person convicted on such charges could be executed, but the court sentenced Hassoon to three years’ imprisonment.
“As a defense lawyer this is good news for me,” Farid Ghazi said. “It was a very serious charge for which the penalty could have been very serious.”
Nobody was wounded in the explosion. Hassoon was arrested shortly afterward.
In April, Bahrain expelled an Iraqi diplomat over his alleged links to the explosion.
Ghazi said the court was lenient because “my client accepted responsibility for the incident and told the court he was under pressure from the former Iraqi regime, which had threatened to execute his entire family.”
Moreover, the explosion was not in a crowded place and produced “more sound than the damage it caused, and this helped the case.”
Ghazi, who is also a member of Parliament, said he was considering whether to appeal, which must be done within 15 days.
He said Hassoon’s father, Abdul Amir Hassoon, has come to Bahrain with the aim of pleading for a pardon to Bahraini ruler Sheikh Hamad.
Earlier this month, the outgoing commander of the 5th Fleet, Vice Adm. Timothy J. Keating, identified the explosion as the “low point” of his 20-month stint in Bahrain. It occurred four days after the US-led coalition invaded Iraq.
