Frustration Grows at Site of U.S. Bombings in Iraq : Persian Gulf: Anger and unease in northern ‘no-fly zone’ apparent to journalists granted a rare visit.

U.S. warplanes thundered over Col. Abdul Elah Danoun’s radar-surveillance base an hour or so before sunset Friday--about the time an American fighter jet fired two missiles at an Iraqi antiaircraft site not far from this strategic regime stronghold in the “no-fly zone” in northern Iraq.

Danoun, a gruff Iraqi base commander, just shrugged and lifted his palms skyward, saying: “We don’t accept it. We don’t accept that enemy planes fly over our land.”

He stood in the middle of a vast plain, beside the spot where a U.S. F-16 jet dropped cluster bombs Thursday when, American officials said, an Iraqi missile battery radar had tracked and threatened an allied aircraft.

Danoun was within sight of the 10-foot-tall, hillside surveillance dishes that anchor his base 10 miles south of downtown Mosul, Iraq’s northern metropolis.

“For us, we don’t support this for a moment, but we also have to live with the decisions taken by our high command,” he said, explaining that among these are direct orders from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein barring Iraq’s military from returning fire in this allied-imposed no-fly zone and from turning on their radar to track allied craft.

Those measures are the centerpiece of a unilateral cease-fire that Iraq declared in the hope of convincing President Clinton that Baghdad’s days of challenging U.N. authority in the wake of the Persian Gulf War and of engaging in confrontations with the Bush Administration have given way to a new era of peace and compliance.

Here, 13 miles inside the northern Iraq no-fly zone, it was difficult to judge whether the Iraqis really mean to change their conduct and policies. But in the first visit to this region by foreign journalists since the latest crisis began, it was clear that the current round of American bombing of allegedly threatening Iraqi radar is not sitting well with Iraqi military or civilians.

While the government responded in low-key fashion to the second of what it insisted were unprovoked American air strikes, Iraqis interviewed here Friday expressed anger, unease and disappointment.

“We were living in safety until the cease-fire came along. Then these planes came in and attacked us,” said Taha Ali Younis, 45, the mukhtar, or elder, of Bakhera, the nearest village to the site of Thursday’s bombing.

Dozens of local villagers and air force personnel spoke up to interrupt him, telling a visiting reporter that American use of military force here was wrong.

The Iraqis pointed out that what Pentagon sources said Thursday was a radar-guided, antiaircraft missile site that needed to be bombed was on Friday a vacant wheat field littered with exploded U.S. cluster bombs.

When asked why the Americans would bomb a wheat field, the land’s owner chimed in, speaking of the United States in a feminine familiar form. “She puts her legs on the chest of Iraq,” farm owner Ali Hussein Ali said, stamping his foot in the mud.

It is difficult for an outsider to be sure of the candor and real feelings of people in this region, where the United States and its allies declared a no-fly zone after the Gulf War to protect the Kurdish minority from oppression by Hussein’s regime.

But Iraq’s official action in arranging a hurried visit by 25 foreign and Iraqi journalists to the site within 24 hours of Thursday’s bombing underscored Baghdad’s new policy of trying to work with Clinton and dealing with the response within Iraq too.

Friday’s trip was unprecedented for Iraq’s Information Ministry: It was the first in recent memory to the site of an allied strike in which officials stressed--repeatedly--that there had been no casualties of any sort, military or civilian. The Iraqis put on none of the usual tours of hospitals; there were no emergency wards filled with wounded; there were no broken homes; there was not a single civilian cursing Bush, America or “the Western Zionist conspiracy to destroy Iraq.”

In fact, Brig. Gen. Samir Mohamad Nathir, a political escort from the air force command in Baghdad and himself a MIG-23 fighter pilot, offered this observation: “We would like to tell these American pilots (now above Iraq) that they are our brothers in the sky. And these are their brothers on the ground. We are not flying. We are not firing. Why are you shooting us on the ground?”

The Iraqis allowed journalists to wander freely around the grounds of what they said was the site of Thursday’s attack. But it was impossible to tell with certainty whether the cluster bombs there had, as officials here asserted, fallen on what is simply a vacant wheat field.

There were strong indications, for example, that there could well have been an Iraqi surface-to-air missile battery on the site recently.

The field, after all, is just a mile or so south of Bakhera’s large surveillance radars; they could, analysts said, be worked with smaller, targeting radar to direct mobile, surface-to-air missile batteries. There also were deep, fresh, truck tracks leading from the bombed site to the road.

And in the center of the scorched metal fragments in the field there were two distinct, 10-foot-square outlines in the dirt; the Iraqis insisted they were marks left months ago when farmers moved some prefabricated storage buildings after harvest.

Civilians and military personnel insisted that the only casualty of Thursday’s bombing was a heap of burned fertilizer--which on Friday was a pile of grayish-white powder under an orange tarp.

Danoun, the base commander, rejected the theory that the field might have housed radar and missiles that could threaten allied craft. He insisted that the nearest missile batteries to Bakhera were at least 20 miles south--well outside the no-fly zone. He said they too were under strict orders to keep their tracking radar off.

“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug, again holding up his palms, when asked why the Americans would bomb here. “Maybe they were trying to attack the radars at my base and exploit the cease-fire. But these are only surveillance radars--to watch, not fire. And the Americans should know this.”

During Friday’s trip, five hours north of Baghdad by bus, there was no sign of the latest American attack Friday in the north--not a flash on the horizon nor a comment from the Iraqi escorts.

When asked directly, just after sundown, whether there had been any new U.S. strikes nearby, Nathir, the Iraqi general, excused himself and went to call headquarters.

“No, nothing,” he reported when he returned moments later.

“What will you do if there are more attacks?” a Western journalist asked.

The brigadier smiled nervously, looked away for a second and replied, “Follow the orders of the high command, of course.”