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Iraq Says it Will Not Apologize for Invading Kuwait
BAGHDAD, Aug 30 (IslamOnline &
News Agencies) - Iraq will never apologize for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said in a defiant televised interview, news agencies reported.
"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.
"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 Wednesday, an Iraqi military spokesman said the death toll, as a result of the latest U.S.-British air strikes on Northern Iraq, rose to three, with 15 others injured, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
In a statement carried by the official Iraqi news agency (INA) the spokesman said that U.S. and British planes, taking off from their bases in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, flew over Iraq's southern provinces of Basra, Wasit, Thi-Qar, Misan and Muthana.
"The enemy planes bombed civilian and service installations in Basra and Thi-Qar, and led to the casualties of Iraqi civilian[s]," the spokesman said.
Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery opened fire at the hostile planes and forced them to flee, the spokesman added.
U.S. and British planes have recently stepped up attacks in the "no-fly zone" in southern Iraq, saying that Baghdad has boosted its air defenses there.
The latest U.S.-British strikes on Tuesday bring Iraq's official casualty toll to 356 dead and more than 1,000 injured since December 1998.
The strike came after Iraq said it shot down a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft flying over southern Iraq on Monday, the same time the Pentagon admitted that one of its unmanned Predator planes went missing.
INA said the plane was equipped with "high-tech equipment", and was brought down near the southern city of Basra, 550 kilometers (340 miles) south of the capital, Baghdad, BBC's online service said.
U.S. and British planes have bombed Iraqi air defenses an average of once a week since U.S. President George W. Bush took office in January - 22 times in the south and 10 times in the north.
The Pentagon says Iraq is raising the quality of its defenses and the level of danger to allied planes.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said China helped Iraq install fiber-optic cables, and that this technological leap was one reason U.S. and British aircraft conducted a larger-scale attack - the largest so far this year - in February against five military command and control sites around Baghdad.
The success of that attack was limited in part, however, by the poor performance of some of the bombs.
More than half of the satellite-guided AGM-154A bombs launched by Navy planes against Iraqi radar missed their intended impact points, although some radar facilities were damaged.
Bombs aimed at the fiber-optic network were more successful, but a few months after the attack, a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, said the network had been largely reconstituted.
Since the February strikes, U.S. and British planes have periodically bombed Iraqi radar, surface-to-air missile sites, communications centers and other military targets in the "no-fly" zones they patrol over northern and southern Iraq.
The northern zone was established in 1991 after the Gulf War to protect minority Kurds from attacks by Iraqi government forces, and the southern zone was set up in 1992.
Iraq does not recognize the two no-fly zones unilaterally imposed by U.S.-led forces and has regularly fired at U.S. and British aircraft patrolling there. It also vowed to bolster its air defense to ground any incoming planes that violate its air space.
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