BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq said a U.S. airstrike hit its civilian airport in the southern port city of Basra. The announcement did not mention casualties.
A Pentagon official said two strikes early Thursday were in response to Iraq's firing anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles at allied aircraft patrolling zones declared off-limits to Iraqi planes.
The strike at Basra was aimed at a mobile air defense radar system put at the civilian airport, said Lt. Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.
Officials repeatedly have charged that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein moves military equipment to nonmilitary sites in hopes coalition forces will not strike for fear of injuring civilians.
Iraq condemned Thursday's strike, which came two days after attacks aimed at radar and communications facilities in the southeast.
"This terrorist act is a breach of international civilian aviation regulations," an announcer on Iraq's state-owned satellite channel said.
The announcer said the attack targeted Basra International Airport's radar system and damaged the terminal building. No further details were announced.
Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the airport was being used by Iraqi military as well as civilian aircraft.
"The radar site that was struck was on the military side of the field, and in fact way off the end of the military side of the field," he told a Pentagon news conference. "There were no civilian activities. There were no civilian airplanes at that airfield when it was struck ... It was a military target."
A Pentagon official said in Washington that aircraft from the U.S.-British coalition launched two strikes just after midnight Iraq time, one near Basra and the other near Al Kufah in southern Iraq.
The strikes came about 90 minutes after Iraq fired at the allied planes, the official said without specifying the location of the Iraqi attacks.
The coalition strikes also targeted an air defense communications facility, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Nick Balice, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Florida. He declined to say from where the Iraqis fired but said the coalition strikes were not necessarily aimed at the Iraqi facility that provoked them.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed last week that he ordered pilots to attack such targets as communications sites, command centers and fiber-optic links in Iraq's air defense network rather than the specific guns and radars used against U.S. and British pilots.
The goal of the new approach was to reduce dangers to fliers while increasing the damage to Iraq's increasingly sophisticated air defense system.
The United States and Britain have patrolled zones in northern and southern Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, declaring the areas off limits to Iraqi aircraft to protect Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south.
Those patrols routinely launch airstrikes, with allies saying they only respond when Iraq's military radar locks onto their fighter planes, indicating an anti-aircraft attack was imminent.
On Wednesday, U.S. defense officials announced a double strike at two southeastern installations. Precision-guided weapons were aimed Tuesday at a radar facility near Al Amarah about 165 miles southeast of Baghdad and a defense communications facility at Tallil, about 170 miles southeast of the capital, the U.S. Central Command said.
The statement did not say how effective that strike was, only that the damage assessment was ongoing. The Iraqi military said one person was injured.
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