IRAQ: Three Iraqi civilians were killed when US and British warplanes bombed targets in a southern no-fly zone overnight, the Iraqi military said yesterday, but the United States denied the report.
An Iraqi military spokesman said in a statement the aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone hit civilian targets in the Anbar province, killing three. It said Iraqi forces fired at the planes before they returned to bases in Kuwait.
"This is yet another example of the Iraqi propaganda machine putting out absolute untruths," Marine Capt Stewart Upton said at Central Command forward headquarters in Qatar.
"The target was in fact a military target," he said. Asked how the US military would know it had not killed civilians, Capt Upton said: "Intelligence enables us to see the damage assessment in real time." He repeated that coalition aircraft never target civilians.
Capt Upton said the target was a surface-to-air missile system and an anti-aircraft artillery site. An earlier statement said the targets were located 240 miles west of Baghdad and hit at about 5.10 a.m. Iraqi time.
The attacks were the latest in an increasing number of Western air attacks in no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq as the United States and Britain build up a force for possible invasion.
Iraq said on Monday that six civilians were killed and 15 wounded in a raid near Basra. US officials denied the Iraqi report.
Meanwhile, Iraq completed yesterday the destruction of another six banned al-Samoud 2 missiles under the supervision of UN disarmament experts, UN and Iraqi officials said.
UN spokesman Mr Hiro Ueki confirmed an earlier statement by an Iraqi official that the six had been scrapped at the Al-Taji military facility.
It has raised to 34 the number of missiles destroyed since the process was launched last Saturday in line with UN disarmament demands, Mr Ueki said.
Two warheads, two casting chambers, a launcher and five engines have also been destroyed by bulldozer.
Iraqi officials say the country has produced about 100 al-Samoud 2 missiles, which UN experts said had to be scrapped because they exceeded the range allowed by UN resolutions.
In Turkey, the US has been unloading military equipment at a port in the south-east and moving it by road towards the Iraqi border despite the Turkish parliamentary vote against the deployment of 62,000 US troops.
The general staff of Turkey's armed forces insisted the equipment movements were part of last month's agreement allowing the US to modernise Turkish bases and were not part of preparations to introduce ground forces.
But those modernisation accords allow the US to make logistical preparations for a possible attack on Iraq and Turkey could still be used for airlifting troops and equipment into northern Iraq, even if ground forces are barred by the Turkish parliament.
A new vote on US ground forces is now widely expected, and could come soon after a by-election on Sunday in which Mr Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), is expected to enter parliament ready to take over as prime minister.