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Iraq Urges U.N. Chief To Condemn U.S.-British "Crime"
BAGHDAD, June 22 (News Agencies) - Iraq's parliament speaker urged U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on Friday to condemn a reported strike by U.S. and British warplanes that killed 23 people.
"You are required to condemn this crime and to work for a halt to the daily aggression by U.S. and British planes against our territory," Saadun Hammadi said in a message to Annan carried by Ath-Thawra newspaper.
Iraq says that 23 Iraqis were killed on Tuesday when U.S. and British warplanes struck a football pitch near the northern town of Mosul.
But both Washington and London denied the accusation, with the Pentagon saying U.S. and British warplanes, which patrol northern and southern Iraq daily, had launched no strikes Tuesday.
Any deaths must have been caused by "misdirected ground fire" by Iraqi forces, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
He said Iraqi forces fired several surface-to-air missiles at U.S. and British aircraft patrolling the northern no-fly zone, and that at least one went astray.
"The coalition aircraft did not fire in response, and in the event anyone was killed, it was undoubtedly the result of misdirected ground fire that ended up in a location that was not intended," he added.
Iraq's official news agency had said that U.S. and British warplanes caused the deaths in an airstrike on the Talafar district near the city of Mosul.
Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad al-Duri, warned that "the vile aggression by U.S. and British warplanes ... and the colonialist plot will not go unpunished," Ath-Thawra reported.
Iraq's minister of state for foreign affairs, Naji Sabri, meanwhile, told AFP that the Iraqi people were "ready at all times to face up to military [aggression] without accepting any compromise on the sovereignty of Iraq."
Iraq is being submitted to daily U.S.-British air raids and has continuously demanded the lifting of sanctions imposed on it following its 1991 invasion of Kuwait, which has led to the suffering of the Iraqi people due to lack of food and medicine supplies.
But Baghdad is not without options, and is "capable" of holding out despite its halt in oil exports, Sabri said, pointing out that exports had already been cut for more than six years after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Iraq, on June 4th, suspended more than two million barrels per day of oil exports under a U.N. oil-for-food program in protest towards U.S. and British plans to impose "smart" sanctions on the country.
The U.N. program allows Iraq to export crude oil in return for essential goods, as a humanitarian exemption to the sweeping embargo in force.
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