| Iraq said yesterday that its military had killed hundreds of enemy soldiers in the 10-day-old war and shot down five fighter planes and four helicopter gunships, one of which was captured almost intact.
A military spokesman speaking on television also said six unmanned drones and 143 cruise missiles had been shot down.
Iraqi forces had also destroyed 74 tanks, five tank transporters and 35 armoured personnel carriers, he said, adding that thousands of enemy soldiers had been wounded.
"These losses drove the (US) administration of evil to send reinforcements in response to cries of help from its officers in the field," the spokesman said.
The United States has ordered 100,000 more troops to the Gulf. The US military put their own casualties at 30 dead and 15 missing while British casualties are given as 23 dead.
Meanwhile, Iraq rejected a new Security Council resolution renewing the seven-year-old oil-for-food programme under sole charge of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
"Only Iraq can administer this programme," Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Al Sahhaf said in response to the resolution adopted by the council unanimously the previous day.
"They have made a mockery of the (1995) resolution" which paved the way for the launch of the programme on which an estimated 60 per cent of Iraqis now depend for food and medicine, Sahhaf said.
"Any measure which does not involve the Iraqi government cannot be implemented on the ground," he added, in reference to the US-led coalition's failure to secure more than a small pocket of Iraqi territory close to the Kuwaiti border.
The latest resolution, 1472, gives the UN chief sole authority for a renewable period of 45 days to make purchases of food and medicine using income from UN-supervised Iraqi oil exports.
Around 100 Iraqis in the captured southern port town of Umm Qasr gathered around a water tanker guarded by British and US troops as the coalition's long-delayed humanitarian aid effort got under way.
The water truck, which arrived from Kuwait, pulled into a small walled compound and opened the tap so that the civilians carrying plastic containers could press forward and fill up.
Source: Gulf Daily News | |
