U.S. Jets Bomb Iraqi Defenses

U.S. and British warplanes killed 12 civilians and destroyed livestock in a raid on northern Iraq Wednesday, the Iraqi armed forces said.

The allied planes "bombed shepherds' tents in the province of Nineveh," 250 miles north of Baghdad, the military said in a statement carried by the official Iraqi News Agency.

A number of others were injured, the statement said. Along with the deaths, the attack killed 200 sheep and wrecked a vehicle and a combine harvester, it said.

Earlier Wednesday, U.S. planes pounded a range of Iraqi air defense sites after being fired upon in the no-fly zone above northern Iraq, a spokesman for the jets' base in southern Turkey said.

He said the Western aircraft had been tracked by Iraqi radar and fired on by anti-aircraft artillery.

U.S. Air Force F-16s and F-15s "acting in self-defense" then dropped precision-guided bombs and fired guided missiles at radar, anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile sites around the city of Mosul, he said.

"All the aircraft left the area safely," he said.

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Air strikes on targets in northern Iraq and in a no-fly zone in the south of Iraq have become routine since December, when Baghdad began actively challenging the patrols.

The U.S.-British Operation Northern Watch force operates out of Turkey's Incirlik airbase some 340 miles from the Iraqi border.

NATO-member Turkey said Wednesday it had ordered its military authorities to allow the alliance to use its air bases in the west of the country for operations against Yugoslavia.

Operation Northern Watch in the east is designed to protect the largely Kurdish population in northern Iraq from air attack by Iraqi government forces.

Turkish permission is needed for any planned strikes against Iraq from its territory, but planes flying from Incirlik are allowed to fire in self-defense against any threat, which includes being tracked by radar.

Coalition aircraft have been enforcing the Northern No-fly Zone for more than eight years.