Basra has been relatively quiet since Sadr called his fighters off the streets of Iraq's second largest city nearly two weeks ago. In the early morning hours of Friday, however, Iraqi troops were fired upon when they tried to enter the northern Basra district of Hayaniya, a Mehdi Army stronghold, police said.That's 2 for 2 this week.
A U.S. aircraft retaliated with an air strike that killed six people and wounded one, a military spokesman said.
"We had our eyes on an enemy mortar team which was firing on Iraqi armed forces on the ground," said British Major Tom Holloway, spokesman for U.S. and British forces in southern Iraq. "The mortar team had been engaging Iraqi ground forces."
U.S. soldiers operating a drone plane over Sadr City, an eastern Baghdad Shi'ite slum, fired a Hellfire missile late on Thursday at a group of men carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers, killing six, the U.S. military said.Hey, Mookie... might be time for another Iranian vacation.
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RELATED: Yeah, right... the Iranian Space Agency
Dr Forden said that the Kavoshgar launch did not demonstrate any significant advances in ballistic missile technology. “But it does reveal the likely future development of Iran's missile programme,” he said.*
At a meeting on February 25 between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Iranians, UN inspectors confronted them with evidence of design studies for mounting nuclear warheads on long-range missiles. The Iranians denied any such aspirations.
However, according to Jane's Intelligence Review, the satellite photographs prove that the Kavoshgar 1 rocket was not part of a civilian space centre project but was consistent with Iran's clandestine programme to develop longer-range missiles.