Iraq says 7 injured in coalition airstrike

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Seven civilians were injured in an attack by U.S. and British aircraft flying sorties over Iraq on Saturday, the Iraqi News Agency said.

The U.S. military confirmed that coalition forces struck an air defense facility in the southern "no-fly" zone over Iraq, but did not address Iraqi claims of civilian casualties.

"The American and British murderers have perpetrated a new crime against the resisting people of Iraq to be added to their dark record when their aggressive crows attacked civilians and service facilities in the province of Dhiqar," an Iraqi Air Defense Command spokesman said.

Dhiqar is about 300 miles (480 kilometers) southeast of Baghdad. The spokesman told the Iraqi News Agency said coalition forces flew 30 sorties from Kuwait on Saturday morning backed by surveillance planes, and Iraqi ground air defenses responded.

The Iraqi spokesman said one of the coalition aircraft planes may have been hit, but there was no independent verification of that account.

A statement from Lt. Col. Martin Compton, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said allied aircraft hit Iraqi air defense facilities with precision-guided weapons shortly before noon Saturday (4 a.m. EDT) after being threatened by Iraqi forces.

"This facility was struck because it helped direct air defenses attacks today against coalition aircraft authorized by the United Nations Security Council to enforce the no-fly zones in southern Iraq," Compton said in a statement Saturday afternoon.

The last coalition response to Iraqi attacks on aircraft monitoring the southern no-fly zone occurred June 28, Central Command said.

Coalition aircraft have been patrolling no-fly zones in Iraq since the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launched a policy of challenging enforcement of those zones in late 1998, deploying surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery against the planes.

Since then, Iraq has fired anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles against coalition aircraft on more than 1,000 occasions. Iraqi aircraft have been reported to have violated the southern no-fly zone more than 160 times in that same period.

-- CNN Producer Rym Brahimi and Senior Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre contributed to this report.