ABC

WIRE: 08/07/2001 10:18 am ET

U.S. planes bomb targets in northern Iraq in response to missile firings

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) U.S. fighter planes bombed an air defense site in northern Iraq Tuesday after taking fire from Iraqi surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery, U.S. officials said.

The officials said the bombing was in self-defense and not a planned attack in response to the recent near-miss Iraqi attack on a U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane.

Tuesday's exchange was the latest in a long-running series of attacks and counterattacks in northern and southern Iraq, where U.S. and British aircraft enforce "no fly" zones established shortly after the 1991 Gulf War.

Iraq considers the "no fly" zones to be illegal and has mounted a sustained effort to shoot down a U.S. or British plane.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last Friday that Iraq has rebuilt its air defenses since U.S. and British warplanes attacked radar and communications targets around Baghdad on Feb. 16.

Rumsfeld offered no indication of whether or how the United States would respond, but he seemed to hint that any retaliation would go beyond the limited set of targets in the February raid.

"One tends to want to do things that will have somewhat more lasting effects," he told a Pentagon news conference.

He noted that the February attacks struck air defense sites that had been linked by fiber-optic cable to make them more effective. The problem, he said, with striking those cables is that they get re-laid.

-- Anonymous, August 07, 2001