US warplanes in Iraqi attacks

Iraqi air defence facilities have been attacked by US and British war planes.

U.S. President George W. Bush ordered the attack on Thursday.

The attack was due to an increasingly more sophisticated threat against allied planes patrolling the no-fly zone in southern Iraq, set up at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

Allied attacks hit Iraqi air defenses almost daily inside both the southern no-fly zone and its northern counterpart, but Friday's attack struck at targets north of the 33rd parallel, the boundary of the no-fly zone south of Baghdad.