* U.S. 'NO-FLY' PATROLS HIT AIR DEFENCES HARD by Bradley Graham Gulf News, from Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, 10th March
Washington: The commander of U.S. air forces in the Gulf said Saturday that several months of intensified U.S. airstrikes had hit all fixed air defences in southern Iraq known to American officials. But he added that mobile anti-aircraft guns and missiles remained a threat to U.S. pilots. "We've killed what we know is there," Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley said. "But they have a lot of depth in mobile systems that they can continue to roll into the south. The mobile systems are the ones I worry about the most." The arrival of hundreds of additional Air Force and Navy carrier-based aircraft in the region in the past two months has enabled the United States to more than double the number of sorties over southern Iraq. This in turn has led to wider and more frequent coverage of the southern "no-fly" zone, Moseley said. More than 400 U.S. planes are now operating from about 30 locations in the Gulf and elsewhere, according to other officials. In the past month, U.S. pilots have struck from seven to 14 targets in Iraq a week. But Moseley said patrols are still not being flown 24 hours a day, and Iraqi forces continue to shoot at U.S. aircraft. Since passage of UN Security Council resolution 1441 in early November, which gave Iraq one more chance to disarm, Iraqi forces have fired more than 200 anti-aircraft artillery shells and more than 100 missiles at U.S. and British warplanes patrolling the southern zone, Moseley said. "They're moving stuff around, they're enhancing the no-fly zone and they're a continual threat to my pilots and crews," the general said. "Sometimes they shoot at us 10 or 11 or 12 times during an operation." As commander of the 9th Air Force and the air component commander for the U.S. Central Command, Moseley would direct the air campaign in a war against Iraq. His remarks in a telephone interview were intended to portray the intensification of U.S. airstrikes against Iraq as still essentially an enforcement action prompted by a rise in Iraqi attacks in violation of UN resolutions. But the increasingly aggressive U.S. targeting in the southern and northern no-fly zones established a decade ago has been widely seen as reflecting an American plan for the systematic destruction of Iraqi air defences and, more recently, surface-to-surface missiles in a fashion that will ease the way for an invasion. The surge in sorties, which now number in the hundreds daily and reached a record 1,000 one day last week has transformed what was once a limited patrolling operation into a broader, more intense prelude to possible full-scale war. The first sign of the widened campaign came last September when Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disclosed that he had directed commanders to focus retaliatory strikes not just on Iraqi radar and missile systems but also on air defence communications centres, command posts and cable relay sites to eliminate all elements of Iraq's air defence network in the no fly zones. Lately, the strikes have also included surface-to-surface missiles, which Iraq has moved into the southern zone within range of Kuwait, the key staging area for the bulk of U.S. ground forces massing in the region. Such weapons, which include Ababil-100 missiles, Frog-7 rockets and Astros-2 multiple rocket launchers, have also been shifted north of Baghdad presumably to attack American or Kurdish forces coming from that direction, according to defence officials. http://www.ccmep.org/usbombingwatch/2003.htm#3/9/03
