Perry cites two incidents in Iraq no-fly zone

[Reuters]

WASHINGTON, Sept 4 (Reuter) - Defence Secretary William
Perry said on Wednesday that allied planes faced off two Iraqi
MIGs without incident and fired at an anti-aircraft radar on
the first day of patrolling an expanded no-fly zone in
southern Iraq.
``We encountered two challenges on this first day of
patrolling again,'' Perry told reporters. ``In one of them, two
MIGs approached our planes from the north but both of them
turned back before they got to 33 degrees north'' at the border
of the expanded no-fly zone, he said.
In the second incident, which had been reported minutes
earlier by other Pentagon officials, a U.S. F-16 jet fired a
Harm missile at an anti-aircraft radar that had begun tracking
the plane. Perry and other officials said the radar went silent
although they could not say whether it was destroyed.''
All the action occurred in or around the new expanded no-fly
zone which the allies began patrolling over southern Iraq after
the 1991 Gulf War and which they extended on Wednesday by one
degree of latitude up to Baghdad's southern suburbs.
The extension was part of U.S. retaliation for President
Saddam Hussein's decision to send troops into a Kurdish area of
northern Iraq also protected by the allies. That sparked two
rounds of U.S. cruise missile attacks against Iraqi
anti-aircraft defenses in the south on Tuesday, an effort that
Perry said had now been successfully completed.
``We have successfuly completed the mission to attack the
air defense facilities -- a total of 14 air defense facilities
-- south of the 33rd paraellel,'' he said at a joint news
briefing with visiting British Defense Minister Michael
Portillo.