WASHINGTON Ñ Since agreeing to accept UN inspectors on Sept. 11, Iraq has increased its firings on allied jets, U.S. officials said. At the same time, allied efforts to destroy Iraq's air defense capability have failed despite an intensified campaign, the officials said.
They said allied warplanes have encountered difficulty in locating
Iraqi mobile anti-aircraft assets, such as missile batteries and radar. As a result, Iraq's surface-to-air missile capability has not been
significantly downgraded despite a year of increased U.S. and British
efforts, Middle East Newsline reported.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Iraq has increased its rate of
firings toward allied warplanes since Sept. 16. The date marks Baghdad's
acceptance of the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq. He
said that Iraqi firings toward allied warplanes Ñ 67 times over the last
two weeks Ñ have been ten times greater than British and U.S. responses.
"It's just very, very hard to find artillery after it's fired," Rumsfeld
said. "And it's also very, very hard to find things that are mobile. And so
frequently, the next day a response is taken, as opposed to the day of the
[Iraqi] provocation. We have just been enormously fortunate that no plane
has been shot down and no manned aircraft has been shot down."
Iraq is believed to have received technical help and components from
Belarus, China and the Ukraine. Last month, the United States determined
that Ukraine provided the advanced Kolchuga radar system to Baghdad.
Officials said that despite a greater U.S. effort Iraq has been
increasing attacks on U.S. and British warplanes that patrol the no-fly zone
in northern and southern Iraq. In 2000, they said, Iraqi anti-aircraft
gunners fired 642 times on allied warplanes. Last year, the figure was 647.
For the first nine months of 2002, Iraq fired 416 times toward allied combat
jets.
"Now, those who have flown over anti-aircraft artillery sites that are
firing at you, it's very difficult to pinpoint them and
to do anything about them," Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, said. "We have been somewhat successful from time to time,
but it's ubiquitous, so it's very difficult to defeat that."
During a briefing at the Pentagon on Monday, Myers listed allied
achievements against Iraqi air defense assets. He said British and U.S.
warplanes damaged a major fiber-optic communications node, which integrates
air defense assets. The general said allied forces have also taken out Iraqi
long-range radars.
"We've also gone after their command and control, their
command-and-control headquarters and their communications buildings to try
to degrade this," Myers said. "And we've had some success there. And we've
had some success against their long-range radars. But, you know, any air
defense system has redundancy."
Iraq has used a combination of surface-to-air weapons against British
and U.S. aircraft. Officials cited Iraq's use of the SA-3 anti-aircraft
missile and the AAA unguided rocket. They said Iraq's military deploys its
SA-3 missile batteries outside of the no-fly zones until they're ready to be
used against allied aircraft.
On Sept. 24, officials said, three Iraqi MiG-25 fighter-jets violated UN
sanctions and flew deep in the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. The jets were
not harmed by allied forces.
Myers said the U.S. response to Iraqi firings have been slow. The
military chief said a key problem was that U.S. combat pilots were uncertain
of the source of the fire.
