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Four Iraqi civilians were killed and10 others injured when US and British warplanes bombed northern Iraq on Wednesday, an Iraqi Air Defence Command spokesman in Baghdad said.
At local time 10:30 a.m. (0730 GMT), US and British planes bombed civilian and service facilities in Nineveh province, about 400 km north of Baghdad, killing four Iraqis and wounding 10 more, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) quoted the spokesman as saying.
Iraq's air defenses fired at the planes and forced them back to their bases in Turkey, the spokesman added.
Nineveh is within the so-called northern no-fly zone, parallel to another one in southern Iraq.
US and British planes have been patrolling the two no-fly zones since the 1991 Gulf War with the claimed aim of protecting the Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from persecutionof the Iraqi government.
Iraq does not recognize the air exclusion zones and has regularly opened fire at the Western planes enforcing the two no-fly zones.
(Xinhua News Agency October 10, 2002)
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