
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, August 20, 1993                   TAG: 9308200145
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

U.S. HITS IRAQI MISSILE SITE

U.S. warplanes struck back at an Iraqi missile battery with unusual force Thursday. The planes first hit the site with cluster bombs and then, when that proved insufficient, destroyed it an hour later with laser-guided bombs, the Defense Department said Thursday.

The aircraft retaliated after two of them were fired on by the missile battery in what Pentagon officials described as one of the most serious challenges yet to the continuing U.S. enforcement of flight bans in northern and southern Iraq.

Pentagon officials cautioned, however, that for now they are treating the episode as an isolated case, rather than the start of a new round of confrontation with Iraq.

"Whether this is part of a new push by [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein, you'd have to ask him that," said Pentagon spokeswoman Kathleen deLaski. "It's hard to tell."

U.S. aircraft have fired on Iraqi missile sites and anti-aircraft batteries before since the end of the Persian Gulf War. DeLaski said there have been 20 such incidents in the past eight months alone. "This is among the most serious, but I wouldn't want to characterize it as `the' most serious," deLaski said.

Typically, Iraq has provoked the attacks by targeting the aircraft with fire control radar, or getting off a few bursts of anti-aircraft fire. The U.S. planes usually have responded by dropping cluster bombs or by firing radar-seeking missiles, then heading for home. The last such episode occurred on July 24, when an Air Force F-4G "Wild Weasel" fired a missile at an Iraqi missile site in southern Iraq.

But Thursday's confrontation was more threatening than most, both in the nature of the Iraqi provocation and the severity of the U.S. response.

Pentagon officials said the clash began when two U.S. aircraft - an F-4G and an F-16C - observed the launch of two SA-3 surface-to-air missiles from a site about five miles west of Mosul in northern Iraq. The planes dropped cluster bombs on the missile launchers. A few minutes later, an identical pair of U.S. aircraft flew over the site and also dropped cluster bombs, but even then, said one Pentagon official, "we still had indications that we had not neutralized the threat."

So the site was hit again, this time by two F-15E bombers that had been patrolling in the region. The aircraft dropped four 500-pound laser-guided bombs and returned safely to their base at Incirlik, Turkey, officials said.

DeLaski said Thursday that the U.S. action had "effectively neutralized" the missile sites.

Pentagon officials declined to say how close the Iraqi missiles had come to hitting the first pair of aircraft but emphasized they were close enough that their pilots could see their launch.

Analysts both inside and outside of government generally agreed Thursday that the missiles would not have been launched without authorization from Baghdad. The attack follows reports earlier this summer of threatening Iraqi troop movements in northern Iraq along the border of the area that has been declared a refuge for the country's Kurdish minority.

Nevertheless, said Michael Eisenstadt, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, it is too early to say whether Thursday's missile attack "really matters." That, he said, "will depend on what happens in the following days. If it's followed by more provocations, that will be an indication of a change in policy."

by CNB