World

Allies Bomb Iraq

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 24, 2002 / 1:06 PM EST / CBS

U.S. and British warplanes attacked anti-aircraft batteries in southern Iraq Wednesday, the second raid on the site this week, the U.S. Air Force said.

The planes struck near Tallil, about 170 miles southeast of Baghdad, at about 9 p.m., said a Saudi Arabia-based Air Force official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The strikes, using precision-guided weapons, "were executed as self-defense measures in response to Iraqi hostile threats and acts against Coalition air crews and their aircraft and are not related to the President's campaign against terror," a statement said.

"If Iraq were to cease its threatening actions, Coalition strikes would also cease," said the U.S. Central Command, which is also running the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

Time Running Out

A senior U.S. official warned Iraq on Thursday that "time was running short" for it to let United Nations inspectors return to check whether Baghdad was developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

The official, who declined to be named, said there was every indication that Iraq had been "aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction capability" in the three years since it forced U.N. inspectors to leave.

"We are coming to a critical point with Iraq," the official told journalists.

He said that Washington was not prepared to let the situation drag on, although he declined to go into detail on what its response might be.

(Reuters)

No details were released on the nature of the alleged Iraqi threat or on which aircraft -- U.S., British or both -- participated in the strikes.

On Monday, allied aircraft fired on the same site after being threatened by ground fire from Iraqi air defenses.

Until Monday, there had been no U.S. strikes against an Iraqi anti-artillery site in the southern no-fly zone since Nov. 27, the command said.

There was no immediate word on the strikes from Iraqi officials.

He said the Air Force was still assessing damage to the Iraqi defenses. No allied planes were hit.

U.S. and British planes have been patrolling skies over northern and southern Iraq since after the 1991 Gulf War that liberated Kuwait from a seven-month Iraqi occupation. The patrols were set up to protect Kurds and Shiite Muslims from the forces of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Iraq has fired anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles agaist coalition aircraft on more than 1,060 occasions since December 1998. Iraqi aircraft violated the southern no-fly zone more than 160 times during the same period, the command reported.

Iraq says the zones violate international law and has been challenging allied planes patrolling them since December 1998.