By Hassan Hafidh
June 20, 2001

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq said Wednesday 23 people died and 11 were wounded when Western
warplanes targeted a playing field in a northern Iraqi town, but Britain and the United States denied
any attack.

The Iraqi News Agency INA said U.S. and British warplanes raided Talafar district near the city of
Mosul. It did not say in its report when the raid took place but, questioned by phone, the agency said
it occurred Tuesday.

``The raids, which targeted a football field, martyred 23 citizens and wounded 11 others who were
playing football,'' it said.

The United States and Britain swiftly denied what would be the bloodiest reported attack for two
and a half years.

``Coalition forces (U.S. and British aircraft) did not conduct any raids on northern Iraq yesterday,''
Pentagon (news - web sites) spokesman Bryan Whitman told Reuters.

``We conducted routine enforcement of the no-fly zone. We did not engage. All our aircraft returned
safely,'' said a spokesman for the U.S. European Command, based in Germany. The Ministry of
Defense in London also said no weapons had been dropped.

But the Iraqi agency said thousands of people had mourned the victims Wednesday at Talafar.

``They hit out at the United States and Britain blaming them for the incident,'' it said.

In an earlier report Tuesday, also denied by the Western allies, Iraq said its anti-aircraft defenses
had hit one of a group of allied planes that patrol the northern no-fly zone from their airbase in
southern Turkey.

Western air raids have become a regular occurrence since Baghdad decided in December 1998 to
challenge jets patrolling the northern and southern no-fly zones that were set up by Western powers
after the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites).

Tuesday's is the highest single-day death toll reported by Iraq since that challenge prompted the
United States and Britain to conduct a four-day ``Desert Fox'' campaign at targets across Iraq at the
end of 1998.

If confirmed, it would bring the reported toll from frequent bombings since then to over 300 dead and
1,000 wounded.

In the previous deadliest toll since Desert Fox, Iraq says 19 civilians were killed in widespread raids
on August 17, 1999.

The two no-fly zones were set up after the expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991 to protect
Kurdish dissidents in northern Iraq and anti-Baghdad Shi'ite Muslims in the south from attack by
President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s army.

Iraq does not recognize the zones and allied forces say that since the end of 1998, they have been
regularly threatened by Iraqi anti-aircraft units and have fired bombs and missiles back at them.

U.S. and British forces have also staged large-scale raids on wider targets in Iraq, at times
incurring the wrath of their own Western partners.
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The Kurdistan Observer
www.kurdistanobserver.com