A total of five people were injured when warplanes of the United States and Britain bombed northern Iraq on Tuesday, an Iraqi military spokesman said.
The unidentified military spokesman told the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) that at 12:00 (0800 GMT), the US and British jets, taking off from their bases in Turkey, carried out 14 armed sorties over the provinces in the northern no-fly zone.
The hostile jets bombed "civil and service installations" in Neiveva Province and wounded five civilians, the spokesman said.
Iraq's air defense artillery opened fire at the US and British planes and forced them to flee away from Iraq's airspace, the spokesman added.
This was the fourth time in the past 10 days that US and British jets raided the two no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq.
Four civilians were injured when US and British jets bombed the southern Muthana Province on May 20. Iraq said two were killed and two others injured when the Western planes bombed Thi-Qar Province on May 23, while US and British air strikes in southern Iraq on May 25 left 18 wounded.
The two no-fly zones were set up by the US-led Western allies after the 1991 Gulf War to allegedly protect the Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from the persecution of the Iraqi government.
Iraq has never recognized the two air exclusion zones for lack of clear authorization by the United Nations and has regularly opened fire at the patrolling Western planes.
The US and its ally Britain have claimed that their warplanes only bombed military targets inside the two no-fly zones in southern and northern Iraq.
US President George W. Bush has branded Iraq as part of an " axis of evil" and strongly warned that Iraq may become the next target of the US-led war on terrorism.
(Xinhua News Agency May 29, 2002)
