September 7, 2002	Saturday	Jamadi-us-Saani28,1423

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WASHINGTON, Sept 6: Two dozen US and British warplanes bombed a “critical command and control node” in western Iraq on Thursday in a raid that was larger than usual but not out of the ordinary, the Pentagon said announced on Friday.

“Was it bigger than most? It was bigger than the ones we’d done in the last probably two weeks, but we’ve done strikes of that size several times over the last 10 or 11 years,” Brigadier General John Rosa, deputy operations director of the Joint Staff, said of Thursday’s strike.

The Daily Telegraph of London said in its Friday edition the raid was the biggest in four years and involved about 100 US and British aircraft, including the dozen that dropped precision bombs.

The newspaper said the aim seemed to be the removal of air defences to allow easy access for special forces helicopters to fly into Iraq via Jordan or Saudi Arabia to hunt down Scud missiles before a possible war.

Lieutenant Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said no more than two dozen aircraft took part in the mission, including aircraft supporting the raid.

Lapan compared that to US airstrikes around Baghdad in February last year when two dozen fighters dropped bombs to knock out fibre optic linked command centres and radars.

Rosa said that in Thursday’s raid 12 aircraft dropped 25 bombs on the target, which was located at a military airfield 380kms west of and slightly south of Baghdad.

Rosa also acknowledged that the strike was unusual in that it was directed at an air defence site in western Iraq, whereas most previous strikes have been in the southeastern part of the country.—AFP