UK man breaks silence on ordeal as ‘human shield’ in First Gulf War

A British man who was held by Iraqi soldiers for five months after they invaded Kuwait in 1990 has spoken about his harrowing experience for the first time.

Jon Godsall was among hundreds of UK citizens held by Saddam Hussein’s troops when they stormed their Gulf neighbour state.

Mr Godsall, from the Welsh city of Swansea, and other detainees were taken from Kuwait within hours.

They spent months being moved around Iraq, where they were used as “human shields”, while coalition forces from 35 countries led by the US waged war against Iraq in response to the invasion.

On August 2, 1990, Mr Godsall was on his way to work at the British embassy in Kuwait City, where he worked for his family’s air-conditioning business, when advancing Iraqi soldiers surrounded his car.

He told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 that it was “probably one of the most vivid memories I have of all my life”.

Mr Godsall said he was held face-down on a road “with an Iraqi soldier’s boot at the back of my head, a gun at my neck, lots of shouting and activity increasing by the minute around me”.

After being loaded into a military vehicle, he was driven to the city centre, right into the middle of a firefight between Iraqi and Kuwaiti forces.

As he sheltered from the gunfire behind a wall, a local teenage boy said to him: “Don’t worry mister, the Americans will come now and kill all these

Iraqis.” Moments later the boy was dead.

“I’m kneeling down and before I had a chance to grab him and pull him to the ground, I didn’t realise for the first fraction of a second what it was, but his clothing just turned red and he fell to the ground,” said Mr Godsall, as he fought back tears.

A day after they invaded Kuwait, Iraqi forces entered the hotel in which he had been staying and rounded up foreigners, taking them hostage.

They were transported to Basra and moved to 10 more locations across Iraq before their release in mid-December 1990.

Another group were held by Iraqi forces in a room at Kuwait University.

Harvey May, a banker from Kent in south-east England, was among those kept in the building, where he occupied himself by reading books and writing short stories.

Following his release, Mr May revealed soldiers had fed hostages a diet of “slops” each day which consisted of bread and watery soup and caused them to quickly lose weight.

Months later, there were emotional scenes at London’s Heathrow Airport when Mr May was reunited with his wife Barbara and son David, 12.

The group he was with had been taken to army camps, power generation plants and other locations likely to be attacked by coalition forces, where Iraqi soldiers used them as human shields.

On one occasion, hostages including Mr Godsall were paraded through a town where locals spat at and threatened them in what he called “the most ridiculing experience ever”.

“I thought they had exhausted their imagination of finding ways to ridicule us or drive us into the ground any further,” Mr Godsall said of the Iraqi troops.

“It got quite aggressive, quite violent, and we were basically surrounded, [they were] spitting their food at us, waving these knives, coming at us.”

He said soldiers “took great joy” in saying they would be released that day, only for nothing to happen.

“I didn’t for one minute accept that it was true until I was walking through the tunnel at Heathrow Airport,” he said.

The First Gulf War ended on February 28, 1991, after Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait.

While British hostages were released and repatriated, there was a misconception among the public that they had been fairly treated in Iraq, Mr Godsall said.

After more than 30 years of keeping his experience to himself, during the Covid-19 pandemic he decided to write a book about it – which he is still working on – to help his relationship with his family.

Those decades of silence have shaped his aim to “create a more positive life … for myself and those around me”.

“The further I go into this, the better person I’m becoming because of it,” he said.

He was driven to the city centre, right into the middle of a firefight between Iraqi and Kuwaiti forces