US and British warplanes struck in northern and southern Iraq yesterday amid turmoil over the assassination of the country's top Shia Muslim cleric.
US F-15E fighters and British GR1 Tornados struck two communications facilities and two weapons storage facilities near the southern port of Basra after two Iraqi MiG-23s entered a no-fly zone over southern Iraq, US military officials said.
In the north, US F-15s dropped more than 20 precision-guided bombs on multiple Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery and radar sites near Mosul after being fired on, the US European Command said.
The air strikes occurred against the backdrop of growing unrest in the south in the wake of the assassination on Friday of Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, the top Shia cleric in Iraq.
Iraq firmly denied that there have been riots. But opposition groups said protests and clashes with security forces have spread through Shia towns in southern Iraq to Baghdad, where sources said the death toll topped 100.
A US State Department official said the opposition reports were credible. If they are accurate, it would be the first widespread Shia unrest against the regime since 1991, when uprisings in the south were crushed by Iraqi security forces.
"The mere fact that there are such demonstrations is meaningful all by itself because it speaks to the fact that the Shia are willing to rise up against the regime," said Dr Ken Pollack, an expert at the Pentagon's National Defence University. "It again demonstrates that the regime has not completely pacified the Shia," he said.
Shia Muslims make up around 55 per cent of Iraq's 22 million population but play little part in the country's government, which is dominated by President Saddam Hussein's Sunni Muslim Arab minority.
Baghdad has said the assassination of the ayatollah, who was killed with his two sons, was part of a plot to destabilise Iraq. Opponents of the regime say the cleric was killed because he had distanced himself from President Saddam.
A US State Department official noted that the ayatollah was "the fourth senior Shia cleric assassinated in Iraq in less than a year".
He had reportedly been prevented from leading prayers the day he was killed and been "interrogated and threatened by security forces of the regime," the official said.
"The most likely explanation is that the government did it," said Dr Pollack. "This is how Saddam rules Iraq: you make problems for him, he kills you. This is not a very subtle regime."
Dr Pollack sees the assassination as part of a campaign of internal purges that Iraq is reported to have carried out after Desert Fox, the four-day US-British air campaign that targeted his elite security and Republican Guard forces. "Desert Fox, whatever it did, it did create problems for him and he is reacting to those problems," said Dr Pollack. "It's made him very sensitive, more sensitive than usual to internal opposition."