In Baghdad, a military spokesman said Iraq fired surface-to-air missiles at US and British warplanes after they bombed civilian targets in the south, wounding four Iraqis, late Sunday.

"Enemy (US and British) warplanes bombed civilian and services installations in the province of Muthanna, wounding four citizens," the spokesman said, quoted by Iraq's official INA news agency.

"Iraq's missile batteries confronted (the aircraft) and forced them to flee to their bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait," he said.

The US Central Command said the warplanes "used precision-guided weapons to strike an aircraft direction-finding site in southern Iraq at approximately 6:30 pm EDT (2230 GMT)" on Sunday.

The site was a radar "that actually has the ability to share information with other systems," said Lieutenant Commander Matthew Klee, a spokesman at the command, which is headquartered in Tampa, Florida.

The radar was near As-Salman, about 270 kilometers (170 miles) south of Baghdad, he said.

Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, operations director of the Joint Staff, said it was a fixed site that was being used to coordinate more effective attacks on coalition aircraft.

"They are always, always, trying something new, different in order to confront our aircraft, and we're always willing to make sure that they can't do it effectively," he said.

Klee said it was attacked two hours after a surface-to-air missile was fired at coalition aircraft patrolling a no-fly zone over southern Iraq.

"Coalition aircraft struck carefully pre-planned targets to neutralize hostile threats endangering our aircrews," the command said.

Iraq has been actively challenging US-British enforcement of the no-fly zones in the north as well as the south since December 1998. The zones were imposed in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.

The last air strike in southern Iraq was on April 15.

Iraq has improved the accuracy of its attacks on coalition aircraft by using buried fiber optic cables to link its radars to command centers that control missile batteries in the south.

Senior Pentagon officials have said that Iraq has been moving mobile surface-to-air missile systems into the no-fly zones in greater numbers after a period of relative quiet.

No manned US or British aircraft have been shot down over Iraq since the Gulf War, but US military analysts believe that downing a US aircraft remains a key Iraqi goal.

UN Security Council Approves New Iraqi Sanctions Regime
Last week the UN Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to free up delivery of humanitarian supplies to Iraq, but remained at odds over the future of their 12-year-old sanctions regime.

The council adopted a goods review list (GRL) to replace the cumbersome vetting procedures of the UN's oil-for-food lifeline, which has for five and a half years enabled Iraq to import basic necessities despite the trade embargo.

Disarming Iraq is the issue, not return of UN inspectors - Cheney Washington, May 19 (AFP) - Getting rid of all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is the issue and the return of UN weapons inspectors to that country is only a means toward that end, US Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday. "Inspectors aren't the issue. They're a means," he told Fox News. "The issue...is that (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein has violated, continues to violate the UN Resolution 687 that specifically requires him to get rid of all of his weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical and nuclear capabilities, and that he allow international inspection to verify that. The inspectors are just a means," he said. Cheney pointed out that Baghdad probably wanted "to have a big debate about inspectors." "But the real issue over here is getting rid of those materials that he (Saddam) must get rid of in order to come into compliance with the UN resolution," he noted. Iraq announced Thursday it had decided to "deal with" Resolution 1409 in conjunction with the UN administered oil-for-food program that allows the import of essential goods in return for crude exports. The resolution seeks to free up the delivery of humanitarian supplies while maintaining the arms embargo along with trade sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Asked about a change of regime in Baghdad, the US vice president restated Washington's stance, saying: "We think the region would be much more secure and the people of Iraq would be much freer if they had somebody else at the helm."

Speaking to reporters later, the US ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, emphasised the 15-0 vote, reached after a delay from Monday, when Syria seemed ready to abstain.

In a rare display of unity on the subject of Iraq, all five permanent council members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- co-sponsored the text, adopted as Resolution 1409.

Negroponte said the GRL would make it harder for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to blame sanctions for the collapse in his people's living standards.

The main reason for their poverty was "the refusal of the Iraqi regime to spend its own resources" on importing goods permitted by oil-for-food, he said.

Iraq's complaints "will even have less strength now, because humanitarian goods will be allowed in automatically and so will the lion's share of civilian products," Negroponte added.

Until now, all import contracts have been vetted by the Security Council's sanctions committee to ensure that Iraq did not get round the arms embargo imposed on it with other sanctions four days after it invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

After May 30, the committee will examine only contracts that contain items on the GRL, a 300-page list of goods including computers, vehicles, chemical compounds and telecommunications equipment.

These also may be imported, provided that the UN arms inspectorate and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are satisfied that they will not be diverted to military purposes.

Council resolutions say sanctions cannot be lifted until Iraq has satisfied the UN that it has dismantled all of its weapons of mass destruction.

But while Negroponte said the GRL "will facilitate greatly the movement of humanitarian and purely civilian goods," his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, said it could not solve the problems of Iraq's crippled economy.

"It is only through the lifting of sanctions that Iraq will be able to revive its economy," Lavrov told reporters.

There was "a need to clarify ambiguities of Resolution 1284," which offered to suspend sanctions if Iraq cooperates fully with the UN arms inspectors whom it has barred for three and a half years, he said.

Among questions put by Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan when they met on March 7 and again at the start of May were: What disarmament tasks is Iraq still expected to complete? how long would it take to suspend sanctions? and who would control the flow of money from Iraq's oil sales after sanctions were suspended but before they were lifted?

But in Washington on Tuesday, the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the onus was on Iraq to prove that it had disarmed.

US President George W. Bush "believes firm, focused controls must remain on the government of Iraq until it complies fully with its UN obligations," Fleischer said.

Lavrov said the United States had committed itself "on paper" to clarifying the ambiguities in exchange for Russia's accepting the GRL.

"I am sure that all members of the council are serious members and they seriously take the commitments into which they entered," he added.

He added that the first six months of the GRL, starting with the next phase of oil-for-food on May 30, "will be a sort of test period, after which we will be able to see whether it is working as envisaged."

Diplomats said one test of the new mechanism will be the speed with which the sanctions committee releases 5.2 billion dollars' worth of contracts blocked under previous procedures.

Speaking before the vote, the Syrian ambassador, Mikhail Wehbe, told the council that "Syria believes it is high time to lift the sanctions."

He said it was "incomprehensible" that there was no time limit for ending the sanctions, and he accused the council of applying double standards to Iraq and to Israel.

But, Wehbe said, Syria would vote in favour of the resolution so as to "give the council an opportunity to rebuild its credibility."

Robert Holloway at the United Nations contributed to this report. All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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