The Day in the Gulf

* IRAQI BUNKERS WRECKED: U.S. helicopters attacked an Iraqi bunker complex somewhere north of the border in the afternoon, the U.S. command said. Up to 15 bunkers were destroyed and as many as 500 Iraqis were taken prisoner, Marine Brig. Gen. Richard I. Neal said. Huge Chinook transport helicopters were sent in to pick up the captives. Neal said he had no information on Iraqi casualties.

* U.S. SOLDIER KILLED: One American soldier was killed and seven others were wounded in a ground engagement, an allied command spokesman said. U.S. forces took seven more Iraqi prisoners in that fight, Gen. Neal said in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Neal refused to say where the engagement occurred.

* THE AIR WAR: In a dispatch from Baghdad, Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reported four hours of intense allied air raids lasting into the morning hours and said bombs were going off every five minutes. It was the second straight night of heavy bombing around Baghdad. Since the start of the war, allied air raids may have killed or wounded more than 75,000 Iraqi soldiers, a senior Arab official said.

* THE PEACE PROPOSAL: Iraqi Radio said Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz will travel to Moscow soon to deliver Saddam Hussein’s response to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s peace proposal. But allied officials dismissed such talk as a desperate attempt by Iraq to buy time to avert a total defeat.

* BAKER’S PROMISE: “One way or another, the army of occupation of Iraq will leave Kuwait--soon,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III declared. “Kuwait will be liberated--soon.” The U.N. mandate demanding Iraqi withdrawal “is crystal-clear, and there can be no negotiation over its meaning,” said Baker, who made his remarks at a ceremony welcoming Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II.