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 | Wednesday, April 26, 2000, updated at 09:22(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Iraq Protests to U.N. Over U.S., British AggressionsIraq has lodged protests to the U.N. over the continued U.S. and British aggressions against the country, saying that a total of 295 Iraqi civilians have been killed in their bombings from December 1998 till last Thursday.In two letters to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and president of the U.N. Security Council, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammad Said al-Sahaf said that the regular bombardments on Iraq by U.S. and British warplanes have also injured 860 others over the period, the Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported on Tuesday. On April 6, 14 civilians were killed and 19 others injured in the bombings, one of the heaviest casualties Iraq has suffered since December 1998, when the U.S. and Britain launched the four-night Operation Desert Fox air strikes against Iraq. Sahaf stressed that the U.S. and Britain used internationally-banned weapons containing depleted uranium during their attacks against Iraq, causing great harm to the health of the Iraqi people as well as the environment. "Iraq will preserve its full right to adopt necessary measures for defending the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Iraq, in addition to demanding compensation for the human and moral damage Iraq has sustained due to such aggressive acts," said the foreign minister. Iraq has been constantly sending letters to the U.N. and the Arab League, protesting the U.S. and British bombings and airspace violations by the two countries over the two so-called no-fly zones and demanded their intervention to halt such aggressions. The no-fly zones were imposed on Iraq by the U.S.-led Western coalition after the 1991 Gulf War, with the claimed aim of protecting the Kurds in the north and the Shiite Muslims in the south from what they called possible persecution from the Iraqi government troops.
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