Western Planes Attacked Sites in North, Iraq Says

Iraq said Western warplanes attacked civilian and military sites in the north of the country Wednesday.

A military spokesman said Iraqi air defenses engaged the planes and forced them to flee. There was no mention of casualties or damage.

“Crows of evil and aggression returned to violate our national airspace, targeting the service establishments and our weapon sites,” the spokesman said in a statement carried by the official Iraqi News Agency.

“Our ground resistance units intercepted them and forced them to flee,” the spokesman added.

On Wednesday afternoon, “10 hostile formations of . . . F-14s, F-15s, F-16s violated our airspace coming from Turkish skies,” the spokesman said.

He said the aircraft, supported by an early-warning command-and-control plane, flew over the Amadiya, Zakhu, Duhok, Arbil, Aqra, Mosul and Talafar regions.

The spokesman said Western planes also had flown over southern Iraq and were “challenged” by Iraqi ground batteries.

According to the spokesman, “11 hostile formations violated our airspace coming from Kuwaiti and Saudi skies. They implemented 18 sorties from Saudi and six sorties from Kuwaiti skies.”

He said the planes later left Iraqi airspace for their bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Earlier, a spokesman at an air base in southern Turkey said U.S. warplanes bombed Iraqi air defenses in the northern “no-fly” zone Wednesday after being tracked by radar. He said all the aircraft had left the no-fly zone safely.

Iraq also said a fuel tank discarded by a Western plane in the south killed civilians.

The Iraqi News Agency quoted a letter from Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf to Ahmed Esmat Abdel Meguid, head of the Arab League, as saying the tank had been dropped on an agricultural area in the Afak district of southern Iraq.

“This aggression caused the martyrdom of a number of innocent civilians,” the letter said.

U.S. and British warplanes have regularly patrolled no-fly zones in southern and northern Iraq since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The zones were established by the West to protect minority groups from attack by Baghdad’s forces.

Iraq does not recognize the zones, and its antiaircraft weapons have tried to shoot down the warplanes in recent months.