The Day in the Gulf

* BIG ATTACK STARTS: U.S. forces launched a massive ground operation against Iraqi troops in Kuwait. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney described the attack as “a large-scale ground operation against Iraqi forces . . . with hundreds of thousands of people involved.” President Bush declared, “The liberation of Kuwait has now entered a final phase.”

* ULTIMATUM REJECTED: The attack was announced 10 hours after President Bush’s deadline passed for Iraq to begin pulling its troops out of Kuwait. Earlier, the Iraqi foreign minister had said in Moscow that Baghdad accepted a Soviet-Iraqi pullout plan turned down by the allies.

* LAST-MINUTE DIPLOMACY: The U.N. Security Council, urged on by the Soviet Union, worked through the day to cobble together a diplomatic settlement to the conflict. But a final meeting Saturday night ended after 10 minutes, rendered moot by the launching of the ground attack.

* ARMOR DESTROYED: The U.S. command said allied forces had destroyed 1,685 Iraqi tanks (about 39% of Iraq’s tanks in the region), 925 other armored vehicles (32%) and more than 1,485 artillery pieces (48%). In an early-morning raid, the Marines took 143 Iraqi prisoners, for a war total of more than 3,550 Iraqi POWs, military officials said.

* AIR ACTION: Allied warplanes flew 2,900 missions, including a record 1,200 sorties over Kuwait. Television reports from Baghdad showed bomb explosions around the city as the allied withdrawal deadline passed at 8 p.m. local time.

* OIL-WELL FIRES: A thick cloud of smoke from the Kuwaiti oil wells set ablaze by Iraq covered a large area in what could be a move to obscure the battlefield from attacking warplanes. Baghdad Radio denied its country was pursuing a “scorched earth” strategy.