Call of Duty Rewrites America’s ‘Highway of Death’ as a Russian Atrocity

Good guys wouldn't box in and gun down a fleeing mass of conscripts and civilians — must have been the Russians

Editor’s note: That’s in addition to the portrayal of the Russians as barbarians invading a Middle Eastern country (who’s actually famous for doing that?) and repressing and murdering the populace, including with chemical weapons, while the Americans on the other hand are spreading democracy by helping the rebel freedom fighters expel the evil Russians. Ie. kind of like if Russians were helping Iraqis or Syrians to rid themselves of the actually invading US forces.


In Modern Warfare, the latest entry in the Call of Duty first-person shooter series, an infamous U.S. attack is fictionalized as Russian, rather than American, violence.

In the Modern Warfare single-player campaign’s eleventh mission, players engage Russian snipers along a wartorn highway in the fictional country of Urkistan. Strewn with burnt out vehicles and bomb craters, a rebel leader named Farah leads players in an attempt to capture a terrorist leader known as “The Wolf.” While the country and characters are fictionalized, Farah’s description of the setting directly references a real-world event.

“If they try to escape to the mountains, there is only one road,” Farah tells the player in a mission briefing. “Tariq Almawt’, the highway of death. The Russians bombed it during the invasion, killing the people trying to escape.”

But while the attack on a convoy of people escaping is assigned to Russia in Modern Warfare, the real Highway of Death was an American attack.

Highway 80 runs for more than 100 miles, connecting Kuwait City with Basra, in Iraq. Iraqi tanks rumbled down Highway 80 during the invasion of Kuwait that prompted the Gulf War, while British and U.S. forces headed the other way during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But it was the events of February 26 and 27, 1991 — the two days before the declared end of the Gulf War — that earned Highway 80 the nickname “Highway of Death.”

On Tuesday, February 26, U.S. Marine Corp attack jets dropped cluster bombs in front of and behind a column of Iraqi military personnel retreating from Kuwait to Iraq, two days after U.S. forces swept into Kuwait and easily overwhelmed Iraqi defenses.

Thousands of vehicles were forced to a standstill outside of the Kuwaiti town of Al Jahra.

What ensued was widely described, including by an anonymous Marine general, as a “turkey shoot,” with Marine, Navy and Air Force planes attacking the massive traffic jam throughout the day and into the next.

Then Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell described it as “wanton killing,” later lamenting in his memoir that subsequent television coverage made it look as if “we were engaged in slaughter for slaughter’s sake.”

Since journalists arrived at the scene after the slaughter was over, exactly what occurred on the Highway of Death remains disputed, with death toll estimates ranging from 500 to a 1,000 killed on Highway 80 and the adjoining Highway 8, where retreating Iraqi Republican Guards were strafed by helicopter gunships, killing hundreds.

While General Norman Schwarzkopf, head of coalition forces, described the Highway of Death dead as deserving “rapists, murderers and thugs,” journalists uncovered evidence that the column was partially comprised of civilians, including foreign workers, refugees, Kuwaiti collaborators and the families of militants.

In the New Yorker, journalist Seymour Hersh (most famous for exposing the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War), described an American tank platoon opening fire on 350 surrendered, unarmed Iraqi soldiers.

Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General in the Lyndon Johnson administration, described the attack on the Highway of Death as a war crime in a 1991 report, citing the Geneva Convention, which assigns rights to “persons taking no active part in the hostilities,” including members of the armed forces who have laid down their arms.”

Russia banned sales of Modern Warfare, with Russian media accounts citing the game’s hostility toward the country. While retrofitting the Highway of Death into a narrative about Russian wartime violence hasn’t been cited as the specific cause behind the ban, the transposition partially validates Russian media outlets who have called the latest Call of Duty “an unequivocal attack against Russia.”

During the Highway of Death mission, Modern Warfare players can earn the “Pit Stop” achievement by shooting out the tires of three Russian armored personnel carriers with a sniper rifle.

Source: Newsweek

12 Comments
  1. thomas malthaus says

    Then Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell described it as “wanton killing,” later lamenting in his memoir that subsequent television coverage made it look as if “we were engaged in slaughter for slaughter’s sake.”

    Perhaps we should get Powell’s more recent thoughts scribed in stone.
    Looks like a slaughter to me for Pete’s sake.

  2. Aurum Cimex says

    And Americans will believe it. Just see how enraged some of them get when you tell them easily provable facts about their own country and it’s history. If you get propaganda blasted at you from childhood reality really hurts.

  3. DarkEyes says

    USS “Liberty”-style slaughter?

    1. thomas malthaus says

      My Lai massacre. No Gun Ri. The Vietnamese and North Koreans are familiar with US slaughters or massacres.
      That doesn’t begin to describe those performed by Langley.

    2. ArcAngel says

      Hi DarkEyes- This demonic slaughter is worse. In my humble opinion.

  4. Séamus Ó Néill says

    This was just one of the myriad of war crimes committed by the US stretching back to the original genocide of the native population. Something every American “citizen” should be aware of is, that every single President, every General and every two-bit politician in their precious, exceptional country is a war criminal. Morally bankrupt from the outset, they continued through the decades and the generations, becoming more satanic and psychopathic as they progressed, until they’ve reached their zenith today….a totally amoral demonic society, bereft of compassion or empathy towards anyone, including themselves. In aligning themselves with Israel, that Lucifer worshipping harbinger of death and destruction worldwide and content to help with her murderous campaigns, they have assured that their 243 years of war and slaughter will see them checkmated very shortly…..the world will not tolerate this any longer !

    1. Andra Salzberg says

      Putrid as this action is…US citizens are being targeted in their own homes by the militarized police, government agents of all stripes…akin to the proverbial frog being eventually boiled to death as the creeps turn up the heat in every perverted way made available to them by the paid-off legislators.

  5. JustPassingThrough says

    “Call of Duty” a moronic game developed by social misfits for social misfits.
    if you can’t make it in real life you can in call of duty.
    sick dudes. future drone pilots.

  6. Mikhail Garchenko says

    The best that one can do is just NOT CONSUME all this shit. It´s the same with the “social networks”, managed by (((them))). “My middle finger for all of you, cretins..!” 😛

  7. Ronnie&MargaretInDementia says

    Lets be honest, it’s the only way the Americans will ever beat the Russians, in a video game. Real world scenarios will never be as obliging.

  8. ArcAngel says

    I remember this demonic slaughter… I pray the planners and Command staff and the pilots that carried out this f n disgusting slaughter rot in Hell for an eternity.
    I am not surprised in the least the demonic west would come out with this vile bullshit.
    Putting it in a Game and then placing the blame on another country is a whole new level of demonic insanity.

  9. ArcAngel says

    This is not the first time these vile disgusting, sociopathic/psychopathic writers and programmers have shown their true demonic, satan worshipping, cowardly blood lust… anyone remember the out cry from Humans concerning a certain “Airport scene” in one of these games.
    One has to really be a true psychopath to even think like this never mind make “a game” of it. Pure fucking demonic vile anti-Human.
    How about a game where we get to be Spetsnaz Teams and go hunt American, and is-ra-hell/UK/EU child rapist/killers or UN warmongering Anti-Human, psychopaths, and SAVE children and Mothers from these blood-thirsty, child-raping, baby-killing evil psychos.
    Bet you that would sell alot of copies around the world.

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