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US and British warplanes on Sunday bombed civil and service installations in southern Iraq, an Iraqi Air Defence Command spokesman said.
At 9:35 a.m. local time (0535 GMT), US and British planes coming from Kuwait carried out 38 armed sorties and bombed Iraq's civil and service installations in Thi Qar province, the spokesman told the official Iraqi News Agency (INA).
Iraq's air defenses fired at the planes and forced them back to their bases in Kuwait, the spokesman added.
Thi Qar is within the so-called southern no-fly zone, parallel to another one in northern Iraq.
US and British planes have been patrolling the two no-fly zones since the 1991 Gulf War with the claimed aim of protecting the Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from the persecution of the Iraqi government.
Iraq said more than 1,400 Iraqis have been killed by the US and British bombings since the end of the Gulf War and more than 1,400 others have been injured.
(Xinhua News Agency September 16, 2002)
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