Nayirah testimony
False testimony concerning Iraq's invasion of Kuwait / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who was publicly identified only as Nayirah at the time. In her testimony, which took place two months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, she claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators at a Kuwaiti hospital before looting the incubators and leaving the babies to die on the floor. Nayirah's statements were widely publicized and cited numerous times in the United States Senate and by American president George H. W. Bush to contribute to the rationale for pursuing military action against Iraq. Her portrayal of Iraqi war crimes was aimed at further increasing global support for Kuwait against the Iraqi occupation during the Gulf War, which resulted in the expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait by a 42-country coalition led by the United States.
In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيرة الصباح) and that she was the daughter of Saud Nasser Al-Saud Al-Sabah, the erstwhile Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of a wider public relations campaign conducted by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile's Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which sought to encourage American military involvement against Iraq's occupation of Kuwait through coordination with the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the Nayirah testimony came to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.[1][2]
Nayirah's story was initially corroborated by Amnesty International, which published a report about the supposed killings[3] and a testimony from Kuwaiti evacuees. Following the liberation of Kuwait, international media crews were given access to the country. A report by ABC News found that "patients, including premature babies, did die, when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors ... fled" but Iraqi troops "almost certainly had not stolen hospital incubators and left hundreds of Kuwaiti babies to die."[4] Later, Amnesty International USA reacted by issuing a correction, with executive director John Healey subsequently accusing the H. W. Bush administration of "opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement."[5]