Iraq’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf said that Iraq was open to reconciliation with Kuwait if the smaller neighbor was willing, DPA quoted Iraq’s satellite Television as saying on Friday.
Sahhaf reportedly made the statement from Amman, Jordan, where he has remained since the Arab summit, which ended Wednesday, said the agency. According to Sahhaf, Baghdad's "top priority now is the Palestinian issue."
Revolutionary Command Council Vice Chairman Ezzat Ibrahim, who headed Iraq's delegation to the Arab summit in Amman this week, has also remained in Jordan.
On Wednesday, Sahhaf told reporters that Kuwait was the one who refused a formula to find a consensus on the conflict.
He added that his country is willing to cooperate with a committee, headed by Jordan’s King Abdullah, to reach a solution to the decade-old conflict.
During the summit, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed Jabr, head of the Kuwaiti delegation, mentioned neither his country's conflict with Iraq, nor the issue of Kuwaitis still missing and presumed held prisoner in Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War.
Meanwhile, AFP reported that US F-15E fighter jets attacked an anti-aircraft artillery site in southern Iraq Friday, striking for the first time in the south since a raid February 16 to knock out radar stations and command posts near Baghdad.
The US Central Command said the raid was in response to recent Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery fire at aircraft patrolling a no-fly zone over southern Iraq, according to the agency.
"There were no coalition aircraft damaged, and all aircraft returned safely," the command said in a statement from its headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
It was unclear whether the latest attacks meant that Iraq has managed to repair damage from the February 16 raid.
Lieutenant Colonel Joe Lamarca, a Central Command spokesman, said coalition aircraft had come under Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery fire "as recently as today. They fired at us today but they also fired at us yesterday."
"We've had some weather over there, so we've had days we haven't flown," he said. "The way it looks almost every time we're flying there's some type of triple A fire directed at coalition forces."
The command, which is responsible for US forces in the Gulf, said precision guided weapons were used to strike the anti-aircraft artillery site near As Samawah, 208 kilometers (130 miles) southeast of Baghdad, AFP added.
A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP that the airstrike marked a return to "business as usual" following a pause for the recently concluded Arab summit.
Nevertheless, the attack comes amid a review of US strategy toward Iraq, including the enforcement of the decade-old no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq.
According to the agency, army General Tommy Franks on Tuesday presented Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with a range of options, from intensifying combat operations to scaling them back and relying more on reconnaissance and surveillance assets to monitor activity in the no-fly zones.
"My recommendation is that the no-fly zone continue in some form because I believe so long as we have a vital interest in the region, as long as we are concern about the threat of weapons of mass destruction it will be necessary to keep (Iraqi President Saddam Hussein) in his box," Franks said.
"In my view, maintaining the no-fly zone implies keeping some aircraft in the no-fly zone," he told reporters Wednesday after a congressional hearing.
Of the range of options put before Rumsfeld, he said: "We can either fly more, fly less or continue what we do now, or have more combat aircraft and less ISR (intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance), or less combat missions and more ISR."
In Baghdad, a military spokesman said that "enemy planes coming from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait bombed civilian installations in the south" of the country.
Quoted by the official Iraqi News Agency, the spokesman said the planes "were forced by missile and anti-aircraft defense fire to flee to their bases of treachery and treason in Arabia and Kuwait.” – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
