US, UK differ on motivation for 100-aircraft raid on western Iraq

The US and Britain confirmed yesterday that 100 warplanes took part in Thursday's raid on a key Iraqi military target.

Nine US F-15s and three British Tornado ground attack jets, escorted by fighters, tankers and radar support aircraft, dropped precision-guided ordnance on a command-and-control centre at an Iraqi military airfield 380 kilometers south-west of Baghdad. The raid was the 35th Anglo-US airstrike against Iraqi targets this year, the 25th in the southern no-fly zone and the largest since December 1998.

The US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, issued a statement saying that the operation was "a self-defence measure in response to Iraqi attacks" against Anglo-US air patrols in the southern no-fly zone. It said the attack was in retaliation for recent Iraqi attempts to shoot down patrols rather than an immediate challenge.

A spokesman for the British Ministry of Defence seemed to contradict this version of events when he said that patrolling aircraft had been threatened and "took immediate defensive action". He admitted: "The number of aircraft in there may have been a bit unusual, but it was a straightforward no-fly zone patrol."

Military analysts saw the raid as part of the ongoing Anglo-US campaign of wearing down Iraq's air defences and communications networks in preparation for probes by helicopter-borne special forces and, ultimately, a full-scale invasion by ground troops.

The airfield targeted in this raid was of strategic importance because it is located between Baghdad and the border with Jordan. US military planners would like to launch simultaneous ground attacks from the kingdom in the west and Kuwait in the east. Amman has so far resisted pressure to grant the US use of its territory as a launch pad while Kuwait claims that Washington has not requested facilities for an offensive. The aircraft in Thursday's raid are based in the emirate.

Iraq's press, which adopted the government line that the country is "an impregnable fortress", underplayed the raid by announcing that warplanes had bombed civilian installations south-west of the capital, without inflicting casualties.

Mr Jacques Baute, a French physicist at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, said yesterday that commercial satellite photos revealed that new construction or other unexplained changes had taken place at nuclear-related sites in Iraq. New images were compared to photographs and information from the sites gathered during the IAEA's last regular inspection.

Mr Baute said the unidentified sites had dual-use capabilities, meaning they had both civilian and military purposes. "We are very curious to see what is under the roof," he said. But he could not conclude that the changes indicated the Iraqis were engaging in "prohibited activities".

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace yesterday promulgated a proposal for "coercive inspections" which envisages the deployment in Jordan, Kuwait, Turkey and Saudi Arabia of a 50,000-strong multinational force mandated by the Security Council to ensure unfettered inspections of Iraq's weapons facilities.

The group which drafted the proposal includes Mr Rolf Ekeus, a former head of the disbanded UN commission. He said that the new monitoring body, headed by a former IAEA chief, Mr Hans Blix, would be able to call up instant enforcement if Iraq refused to grant inspectors full freedom to carry out their work.

Under the former system activation of the enforcement mechanism required council approval, which could take many months to obtain.

Iraqi officials have repeatedly said that Baghdad will refuse any resumption of inspections unless there is a firm understanding that sanctions willbe lifted once the inspectors decide that the country possesses no weapons of mass destruction.