Beyond oil well fires, the spoils of war seeped into the sea as well. In January 1991, Saddam commanded his generals to begin opening pipeline valves leading to the Kuwait Sea, dumping millions of barrels of oil into it and resulting in the largest oil spill in history. The amount of oil spilled into the Kuwait Sea, estimated at 400 million barrels, twice the size of any other oil spill in history, 25 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill and destroyed marine life and eviscerated sea birds, coral reefs and turtles
