A dozen US and British warplanes bombed a ”critical command and control node” in western Iraq in a raid that was larger than usual but not out of the ordinary, the Pentagon said on Friday.
”Was it bigger than most? It was bigger than the ones we’d done in the last probably two weeks, but we’ve done strikes of that size several times over the last 10 or 11 years,” Brigadier General John Rosa, deputy operations director of the Joint Staff, said of Thursday’s strike.
The Daily Telegraph of London said the raid was the biggest in four years and involved about 100 US and British aircraft, including the dozen that dropped precision bombs.
The newspaper said the aim seemed to be the removal of air defences to allow easy access for special forces helicopters to fly into Iraq via Jordan or Saudi Arabia to hunt down Scud missiles before a possible war.
However, Lieutenant Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon representative, said no more than two dozen aircraft took part in the mission, including aircraft supporting the raid.
Lapan compared that to US air strikes around Baghdad in February 2001 when two dozen fighters dropped bombs to knock out fibre optic linked command centres and radars.
”Three other times this year strike packages have been as big as the strike on Thursday,” he said.
Rosa said that in Thursday’s raid 12 aircraft dropped 25 bombs on the target, which was located at the H-3 military airfield 380 kilometres west of and slightly south of Baghdad near Ar-Rutbah.
Rosa acknowledged that the strike was unusual in that it was directed at an air defence site in western Iraq, whereas most previous strikes have been in the south eastern part of the country.
But he said the site was attacked because coalition aircraft had come under fire while patrolling the no-fly zone.
”When you look and see how they tie that system in, that’s a critical node in triangulating and looking and measuring where our airplanes are. So if you take that node out, it makes it more difficult to track your airplanes,” he said.
Another defence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the raid targeted an air defence command and control node, a high frequency direction finding antenna and a coaxial cable used to link it to Iraq’s integrated air defences.
The strike was the 25th in southern Iraq this year by US and British aircraft enforcing a no-fly zone, Rosa said.
Another 10 air strikes have been carried out in the north. The tempo of air strikes subsided during last year’s war in Afghanistan, but picked up again this year. – Sapa