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Iraq alleges air strike on civilian facility

BAGHDAD SEPT. 6. Iraqi state media confirmed on Friday reports of a U.S.-British air strike in western Iraq, but said the target was a civilian facility.

The U.S. military had said on Thursday that American and British planes attacked an air defence command and control facility at a military airfield 285 km southwest of Baghdad.

The U.S. Central Command said in Washington that the strike responded to an Iraqi attack on allied aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone.

On Friday, Iraqi state newspapers quoted an unidentified Iraqi military spokesman as saying enemy warplanes had attacked ``civil and service installations'' in the Al-Rutbah area on Thursday.

Iraq almost invariably accuses allied planes of attacking civilian targets.

``Our courageous anti-aircraft units confronted the jets and forced them to leave Iraqi skies,'' the Iraqi military spokesman said.

Al-Rutbah is the last big town in western Iraq before the Jordanian border.

U.S. and British planes patrol no-fly zones over southern and northern Iraq.

The zones were set up in the early 1990s to provide a measure of protection to the Kurdish and Shiite Muslim communities against Government forces.

Iraq does not recognize the zones. Its air defence units regularly challenge the allied patrols, provoking retaliatory strikes.

The strike occurred as the U.S. Government worked to mobilise domestic and foreign opinion of the need to act against the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, whom it accuses of making weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq lobbied Arab and other states against such a move.

According to a report by the Daily Telegraph, about 100 U.S. and British aircraft took part in the attack on the Iraqi air defence installation, in the biggest single operation over the country in four years.

The aim seemed to be the removal of air defences to allow easy access for special forces helicopters to fly into Iraq via Jordan or Saudi Arabia to hunt down Scud missiles before a possible war within the next few months, the report said.

Twelve warplanes dropped precision-guided bombs in the raid, but scores of other support aircraft also took part, the paper said, adding it was the first time a target in western Iraq had been attacked during air patrols of the southern no-fly zone.

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