Baghdad: Iraq said it fired surface-to-air missiles at US and British warplanes over flying Southern Iraq on September 8, forcing them to flee, an Iraqi military spokesman said.

The US and British planes conducted raids on 15 provinces in Southern Iraq before Iraqi fire repelled them to bases in Kuwait, the spokesman said, quoted by the official INA news agency.

Baghdad does not recognise the exclusion zones over Northern and Southern Iraq, which Britain and the United States have enforced since after the 1991 Gulf War to protect the Kurds in the North and Shiites in the South.

The zones are not sanctioned by any UN resolution and Iraq says almost 1,500 Iraqis have been killed as a result of US-British raids since the no-fly zones were imposed.