Four Iraqis were wounded in air strikes Tuesday by US and British warplanes on southern Iraq, Baghdad said, while denouncing Tehran for an earlier blast in downtown Baghdad.
The spokesman said the four were wounded in the "bombardment of civilian installations in Muthanna province."
AFP quoted an Iraqi official statement as saying that that missiles and anti-aircraft fire had "forced enemy planes to flee after carrying out raids, besides Muthanna, on the provinces of Basra, Zi Qar and Qadissiya."
Other allied aircraft "were forced to turn back under fire from missile batteries and anti-aircraft gunners after carrying out raids on the provinces of Dohuk, Erbil and Niniveh" in northern Iraq.
The US military announced earlier that its warplanes had attacked Iraqi air defence sites in northern and southern Iraq in response to Iraqi ground fire and "hostile threats."
The US European Command said coalition warplanes struck "elements of Iraq's integrated air defense" in northern Iraq in response to anti-aircraft artillery fire and after coalition aircraft monitoring a no-fly zone in the north were targeted by Iraqi radar.
In the south, US jets used precision-guided munitions to attack anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile sites around As Samwah, 209 kilometers (130 miles) southeast of Baghdad, a spokesman for the US Central Command said.
The command, based in Tampa, Florida, but responsible for forces in the Gulf, said the attack was "in response to recent Iraqi hostile threats against coalition aircraft monitoring the southern no-fly zone."
It would not say how many sites were struck in the raid, according to the agency.
The raids were the latest episode in a long-running US and British campaign to enforce the no-fly zones.
The United States, Britain, and France set up "no-fly zones" after the Gulf War. France left the coalition after the US and Britain bombed Iraq in December, 1998.
The UN has not authorized the no-fly zones, which are ostensibly there to prevent Iraqi attacks on Kurdish and Shiite Muslim minorities.
Iraq has from the beginning said the no-fly zones are illegal because no Security Council Resolution authorizes them, and because Iraq did not give up any territory in ceasefire agreements.
The US and UK maintain their warplanes at Incirlik airbase in Turkey, which in the last decade has carried out a large-scale war to maintain control over its own sizeable Kurdish minority.
Also Tuesday, several people were wounded when a bomb exploded in a central Baghdad market on the 21st anniversary of the start of Iraq's war with Iran, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported.
INA quoted a security source as blaming Iran for explosion, the latest in a series of similar incidents.
Iran and Iraq blame each other for hosting armed dissident groups opposed to each other's regimes – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
