Iraq appeared determine to keep attention focused on the air strikes it said killed two civilians. In a country where public protests are rarely spontaneous, there have been demonstrations every day since Friday's attack. Thousands of marchers – many of them students wearing their gray and blue high school uniforms – on Monday burned American , British and Israeli flags and carried banners declaring "aggression will not scare us and sanctions will not harm us."

U.S. and British missiles hit Iraq several times a month, and even when casualties are higher than they were Friday, such protests are rare. But Friday's attack was the first signal from the new U.S. administration of how it would deal with Iraq and was the first strike in several years to come so close to Baghdad and involve so many fighter planes.

The United States says the targets were long–range surveillance radar and associated facilities that Iraq has increasingly used to coordinate its defences against U.S. and British patrols in the no–fly zones over southern and northern Iraq. The United States and Britain say Iraq cannot fly its planes over those areas of its territory; Iraqi says the no–fly zones are illegitimate and had planned to raise the issue in talks with U.N. Secretary–General Kofi Annan set for next Monday and Tuesday in New York.

Deputy Foreign Minister Nabil Najim told reporters last week that Iraq would demand from Annan "the total and immediate lifting of sanctions and the ending of the almost daily aggression on the southern and the northern parts of the country" – the last a reference to the no–fly zones.

Iraq wants the U.N. to lift crippling economic sanctions imposed after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. The United Nations says Iraq must first let inspectors back in to make sure President Saddam Hussein is not developing weapons of mass destruction.

No major breakthrough had been expected from the meeting, but hopes were raised because Baghdad requested it and was sending a high–level delegation. In the wake of the missile strikes and bolstered by international support, Iraq may now be less inclined to compromise on the question of inspections and more insistent sanctions be lifted.

Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al–Sahhaf, who will lead the Iraqi delegation, said in a weekend letter to Annan and the U.N. Security Council that the U.N. chief should "condemn the dangerous aggression and the increase of tension."

Iraq already has heard the attacks condemned around the world. Countries that were key supporters of the coalition that drove Iraq out of Kuwait 10 years ago, like Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Spain and France have criticized the attacks.

Russia, which along with France has been pushing for a new international policy on Iraq and questioned the effectiveness of the sanctions, over the weekend said the bombardment was unjustified.

Russian ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky left Moscow Monday for Iraq on a trip intended to be a show of support.

"The United States and Britain have bombed Iraq for 10 years, humiliating it," Zhirinovsky told reporters Monday before flying out of Moscow. "Can you imagine this logic, according to which they bomb the country to make sure that not one bullet touches an American plane?"

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters in Tehran Monday that the U.S.–British air strikes were "inexplicable," the Iranian news agency IRNA reported.

"We regret the carnage of innocent Iraqis and we condemn it," Asefi was quoted as saying.

In Malaysia Monday, the main ethnic Chinese opposition party joined Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in condemning the air strikes. Nearly 60 percent of Malaysia's 22 million people are Muslim. The Malaysian government supports an end to the sanctions.

Indonesia's foreign ministry said in a statement Monday that the attacks only increased the suffering of Iraqis reduced to poverty by the prolonged sanctions. Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, who leads the world's most populous Muslim nation, has often expressed his support for the easing of the sanctions.

British member of parliament George Galloway, who has criticized his government's Iraq policy, on Monday visited a Baghdad hospital were Iraqis wounded in the missile attacks were being treated.

Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, comfortable that world opinion is on his side, ridiculed the United States and Britain for portraying Friday's attacks as an attempt to protect U.S. and British pilots patrolling the no–fly zones.

"America defends itself in Baghdad? It enters the country ...., bombs it, then says it was defending itself?" Aziz said on Iraqi television Sunday night. "This is an unacceptable and disreputable talk by the Americans. It is also condemned by the whole world."

One state–owned Iraqi daily called for military retaliation.

"Iraq is determined to confront this aggression, improve its means of retaliation to make Iraqi skies like hell for the enemy ravens," said al–Thawra daily in a front–page editorial on Monday.

Another state–run paper, al–Qadissiya, said in its front–page editorial that "Iraq has all means to retaliate if such aggression, which shall not pass unpunished, was repeated."

Iraq's military was severely weakened by the Gulf War and a decade of sanctions. But defence experts suspect that in the two years U.N. inspectors have been barred, Iraq may have reconstituted some of its chemical and biological weapons programs.

© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

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