Iraqi villagers buried two civilians Wednesday who had been killed in a US-British airstrike on southern Iraq, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported.
Iraq said US and British planes carried out a "treacherous aggression" against Ahrar village in Nasiriya province, about 300 kilometers (188 miles) southeast of Baghdad, at 10:30pm local time on Tuesday.
"This peaceful village was far away from any military site," the agency said.
But the US Defense Department said late Tuesday that their planes had attacked command, control and communications facilities of the Iraqi air defenses, according to the Associated Press.
The strike came a day after the United States lost an unmanned reconnaissance craft near the southern city of Basra, some 150 kilometers (95 miles) southeast of Nasiriya. Iraq claims to have shot down the drone.
According to the AP, the Pentagon is not sure whether it was brought down by fire or malfunction.
INA said Tuesday's raid killed Dahiaf Ali and Eidan Jabur.
“Government officials and many people attended their funeral, with people shouting their condemnation of this 'new ugly crime,'" the agency reported.
The United States, Britain, and France set up "no-fly zones" after the Gulf War. France left the coalition after the US and Britain bombed Iraq in December, 1998.
The UN has not authorized the no-fly zones, which are ostensibly there to prevent Iraqi attacks on Kurdish and Shiite Muslim minorities.
Iraq has from the beginning said the no-fly zones are illegal because no Security Council Resolution authorizes them, and because Iraq did not give up any territory in ceasefire agreements.
The US and UK maintain their warplanes at Incirlik airbase in Turkey, which in the last decade has carried out a large-scale war to maintain control over its own sizeable Kurdish minority.
IRAQI FM: IRAQ WILL NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR INVADING KUWAIT
Iraq will never apologize for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said in a defiant interview televised overnight.
"No, we will never apologize for anything ... apologies do not even cross an Iraqi citizen's mind and even less the government's," Sabri told Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite television channel, cited by AFP.
"Rather the Kuwaiti and Saudi regimes should apologize to Iraq for causing the genocide of 1.6 million Iraqis under the embargo," he said.
"These regimes finance the countries which enforce the sanctions on Iraq and go as far as to bribe any representative at the United Nations who might vote to end or ease the embargo."
Kuwait and Riyadh "finance the daily American-British aggression against Iraq so they should apologize to millions of Iraqis for what they have to endure," the minister added.
Earlier this month, Sabri said Baghdad sought diplomatic relations with all the Gulf Arab states, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
However, he urged them to stop bankrolling the military operations and close their bases to British and US forces who arrived on the Arabian Peninsula to lead an international coalition that ejected Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
