WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s continued enforcement of “no-fly” zones over northern and southern Iraq has taken an added importance as the Bush administration weighs whether to invade Iraq, giving defence officials a wealth of intelligence and a means of degrading Iraqi air defences.

Some Air Force officers recommended ending the combat patrols in the spring of 2001, but senior defence officials now consider the missions a valuable check against Iraqi aggression and a bulwark of military engagement with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, key allies in the region.

“I don’t detect anything less than enthusiasm for the fundamentals, which is to keep the Iraqi regime from being a danger to its neighbours or the Iraqi people,” one senior Pentagon official said.

Another said that enforcing the no-fly zones “keeps our skills high on knowledge of the area and keeps our competency high in flying over the area. The benefits you get from that — should you decide to do something militarily — are great.”

Indeed, one officer who recently returned from the region said enforcing the no-fly zones buys the United States extra “battle space.”

“We’ve prevented the Iraqis from having free use of the ground in those zones,” the officer said. “It keeps the Iraqis from putting a lot of tanks and armoured personnel carriers on the Kuwaiti border. They do have some stuff garrisoned in the south, but we know where they are, and if they started to move we’d see it.”

The United States established a no-fly zone over southern Iraq in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War to diminish Iraq’s ability to threaten Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, and to protect Shias in the south from attack by President Saddam Hussein’s military. It established a no-fly zone over northern Iraq in 1992 to protect Iraqi Kurds.

Statistics provided by the US European Command for the northern no-fly zone show that frequent Iraqi missile and anti-aircraft threats against US and British aircraft began in 1999 with 143 incidents, and peaked the following year with 145 unsuccessful attacks. The number declined to 97 in 2001 and stood at 32 by late June of this year.

The number of times US and British jets returned fire has also declined, from 102 in 1999 to 48 in 2000, 11 in 2001. So far this fiscal year, which began on Oct 1, coalition aircraft have returned fire 14 times over the southern no-fly zone and eight times over the northern no-fly zone, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said.

Enforcement of the no-fly zones will cost almost $1 billion this fiscal year. Through the end of May, Operation Southern Watch had cost $519.5 million and Operation Northern Watch $118 million, according to the latest budget figures.

Iraq began threatening US aircraft over the no-fly zones after the Clinton administration bombed Iraq for four days in December 1998, after UN weapons inspectors were withdrawn from Baghdad.

The most recent attack on Iraqi air defences came on Tuesday, when US and British jets fired precision-guided munitions at a military cable repeater station and communications facilities in southern Iraq, the US Central Command said. Four days earlier, coalition aircraft attacked another repeater station in southern Iraq.

“This is an extremely important mission,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Edward “Buster” Ellis, commander of Operation Northern Watch. “If it’s not, we wouldn’t be doing it.”

Iraq says the United States has killed 1,483 Iraqis and wounded 1,400 since it began enforcing the no-fly zones, which Baghdad does not recognize. After Tuesday’s attack, Iraq said that one person had been killed and 17 others wounded.

US officials typically dismiss Iraqi claims about casualties, asserting that coalition aircraft fire only at military targets and take all possible steps to minimize civilian deaths. They have acknowledged killing many civilians in May 1999, when an F-15E jet dropped a 300-pound bomb on a shepherds’ camp. Satellite imagery analysts had mistaken a watering trough for a surface-to-air missile launcher.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.