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Saturday, September 16, 2000

Pentagon: Iraqi planes
violated no-fly zone

By Chuck Vinch
Washington bureau

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said Thursday that six Iraqi aircraft violated that country’s southern no-fly zone Sept. 4 while allied aircraft took the day off, but officials refused to confirm reports that at least one Iraqi jet continued on to penetrate Saudi airspace.

Iraqi aircraft have violated the northern and southern no-fly zones more than 150 times since Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, the last major allied attack on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s military forces, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said at a briefing Thursday.

Most of those violations have been quick, defiant dips into and out of the zones, established in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to constrain Iraqi military aggression in the region.

Quigley acknowledged that six Iraqi aircraft were involved in five separate violations of the southern zone on Sept. 4, flying "unequivocally south of 33 North," the latitude boundary line of that zone. He declined to be more specific.

Quigley also pointedly declined to confirm a report Thursday from The Associated Press that quoted an unnamed senior U.S. official as saying one of those violations included a further penetration into Saudi airspace, the first time that has happened in more than a decade.

"I’m not going to get into violations of any other nation’s sovereign airspace," Quigley said.

But he admitted that Saddam’s air force has become adept at exploiting occasional gaps in allied air patrols over the zones.

The Iraqis were able to penetrate deeply into the southern no-fly zone and into Saudi Arabia last week because Saddam’s air-defense radar network, despite taking a near-constant battering from allied aircraft for almost a decade, apparently still is able to closely track those coalition air patrols.

On the particular day of Sept. 4, the U.S. Labor Day holiday, there were no such patrols over the no-fly zones, Quigley said.

"The Iraqi air-defense system clearly sees when the coalition is flying, and we were not flying that day," he said. "I can only assume that they felt this was an excellent opportunity to violate the southern no-fly zone.

"Typically, the Iraqis do not fly when we are flying," he said. "They’re not looking for a fight with coalition aircraft. They have not put themselves into a position where coalition aircraft can engage them. They are looking only to try to reassert sovereignty over Iraqi airspace and, I guess, to show us that they still can."

Coalition aircraft patrol the Iraqi zones "most of the time," Quigley said. "But we do have no-fly days, for a variety of reasons."

He declined to comment on why no coalition aircraft were scrambled once the Iraqi aircraft were detected.

"I’m not going to characterize our state of alert or what we knew or didn’t know," he said. "I’m not going to get into our reactions, because that would give the Iraqis some assistance in determining what would trigger a response from us."

The United States has adopted a sort of rolling response policy to Saddam’s provocations in which attacks on various Iraqi military assets come "at a time and place, and in a manner, of our own choosing," Quigley said.

Such attacks could be well-removed, both in time and distance, from the area where the Iraqi provocations originate and are not launched on a one-for-one basis.

"We try not to keep a particular box score," he said. "It’s not necessarily tit for tat, or an immediate response."

The Iraqi incursion into Saudi Arabia comes amid rising tensions between the United States and Iraq, mostly over a renewed attempt to have U.N. inspectors go back into Iraq to look for hidden weapons of mass destruction.

Coalition aircraft struck an Iraqi radar site Thursday afternoon Baghdad time in response to "a series of provocations" by Saddam’s forces in recent days, including anti-aircraft fire, surface-to-air missile launches and aircraft incursions into the no-fly zones, Quigley said.

The last coalition attack prior to Thursday came Sept. 2, when allied warplanes bombed five Iraqi air-defense command and control sites.

Quigley said U.S. officials are keeping a close eye on Iraqi troop movements because on several occasions in the past, Saddam has chosen this time of year — which coincides with the peak of the regular military training cycle for Iraqi field maneuvers — to make bellicose moves or issue fresh threats.

"We always pay attention to what Iraq says, and, more importantly, to what it does," he said. "But this is the time of year that we pay particular attention. So far, we have not seen an indication that is out of character of the sort of activity that you would see this time of year in conjunction with their normal training cycle."

The Pentagon later said in a statement Thursday that there have been "no unusual Iraqi troop movements" recently and that Iraqi forces are deployed "similar to the way they have been deployed for the last five years."

The statement said that the Iraqi military has 23 divisions today, compared with 54 divisions before the Persian Gulf War almost a decade ago.

Thirteen divisions, including some of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard forces, are deployed roughly along the "line of trace" with the Kurds in northern and eastern Iraq. There are three armored divisions around Baghdad and seven other divisions in southern Iraq.