April 7, 2003	Monday	Safar 4, 1424

DUBAI, April 6: Saudi Arabia has repeatedly said it will have no part in the Iraq invasion, but at least two accounts from the US military command on the conduct of the campaign have come out of the kingdom in the past 24 hours.

The Central Command on Sunday issued a statement from the Prince Sultan Air Base in Al-Kharj, 80kms south of Riyadh, in which it acknowledged that its warplanes might have mistakenly attacked a joint US-Kurdish convoy in northern Iraq.

On Saturday, the US general commanding the air operations against Iraq, Lt Gen T. Michael Moseley, held a telephone conference call with reporters from his headquarters in Saudi Arabia in which he announced that US fighter aircraft were stacked up around the clock over Baghdad to provide air support for troops in the city.

On March 29, the New York Times published interviews with a number of US officers manning an advanced command and control system at the Prince Sultan base in which they said they were directing the invasion.

The paper said that dozens of men and women were working around the clock at the centre “to decide where the missiles and bombs will explode in Iraq.”

“Occasionally the targets are wrong, sometimes the munitions stray,” said Captain Mike Downs, a “chief of targets” in the Guidance Apportionment and Targeting Unit.

“I’ve studied it for a long time, so I certainly know what I’m looking at,” Captain Downs said of the Iraqi capital. He is based in Germany but has been on assignment in Saudi Arabia since early February, according to the paper.

Riyadh has said it would “under no circumstances” take part in military action against Iraq.—AFP