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Sabri said leaflets dropped by allied warplanes asking Iraqis “not to defend their homeland” were a measure political shortsightedness
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BAGHDAD,
December 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – U.N. disarmament
inspectors targeted Monday, December 2, a Baghdad research centre
which developed guidance systems for now-banned long-range missiles,
as Iraq protested against U.S. and British “state terrorism”.
Other
arms experts from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection
Commission (UNMOVIC) visited three alcohol factories, near Bakuba,
just north of Baghdad.
Iraqi
sources said at least one factory had never previously been inspected.
If confirmed by UNMOVIC, it would be the first time in the week since
the arms experts arrived that they have gone into a site which has not
been monitored in the past.
Meanwhile,
Iraq accused the United States and Britain of “state terrorism”
for bombing civilian targets.
The
strikes on cities, villages and infrastructure by warplanes enforcing
“no-fly” zones in the north and south constitute “a blatant
aggression and flagrant state terrorism,” Foreign Minister Naji
Sabri wrote in a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The
raids in the zones killed 10 people and wounded seven others between
October 18 and November 17, Sabri said in the letter made public
Monday.
Baghdad
said four Iraqis were killed and 27 injured when coalition aircraft
struck civilian installations in Basra and two other southern
provinces on Sunday.
According
to the U.S. Central Command, Sunday’s strike targeted an Iraqi air
defense site and was in retaliation for Iraqi anti-aircraft fire
against allied aircraft.
Baghdad
reserves the right of “legitimate self-defense under the U.N.
Charter and international law,” Sabri told Annan.
Iraq
does not recognize the air exclusion zones enforced since the end of
the 1991 Gulf War without being explicitly sanctioned by any U.N.
resolution.
It
has also said that the Bush administration is seeking to use the U.N.
disarmament Resolution 1441, under which arms inspections resumed in
Iraq last week, as a cover for attack by claiming that Iraqi firing on
coalition aircraft might put Baghdad in material breach of the
resolution.
Sabri
also said that leaflets dropped by allied warplanes in which
“Iraq’s people and army are asked not to defend their homeland”
were a measure of Washington’s and London’s political
shortsightedness.
According
to U.S. military officials, U.S. planes dropped 360,000 leaflets over
southern Iraq on Thursday warning that attacks on U.S. and British
warplanes patrolling the “no-fly” zones could lead to air strikes.
On
the fifth day of inspections, experts were granted immediate access to
installations for the Al-Karama missile project in the capital’s
central Al-Waziriya district.
The
facilities where scientists had worked on missile guidance systems
were put under permanent camera monitoring by the previous inspections
regime UNSCOM before they quit Iraq in December 1998.
U.N.
inspectors had in the past sought details of what became of the
gyroscopes bought by Iraq for the missiles.
UNSCOM
also wanted to know what happened to two missiles out of 819 imported
and seven others built locally as well as 500 tons of missile fuel.
Iraq’s
Al-Husseins an improved version of the Russian Scud, had a range of
650 kilometers (400 miles) and have been banned by the United Nations
since the end of the 1991 Gulf War when Baghdad was allowed to possess
only short-range missiles.
The
inspection teams were accompanied by counterparts from Iraq’s
National Monitoring Directorate and pursued by journalists who are
kept out of sites while monitoring is underway.
UNMOVIC
and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have not reported
anything untoward from their previous site checks on Wednesday,
Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
The
November 8 U.N. resolution gives the inspectors unprecedented powers
to search for forbidden arms after UNSCOM left Baghdad in December
1998 leaving U.S. and British bombers to pound Iraq for four days for
failing to cooperate.
Iraq
has strongly denied having any weapons of mass destruction and says
the inspectors will find nothing incriminating.
