A former US attorney general, Mr Ramsey Clark, flew into Iraq today as two planes of activists flew to Baghdad from Jordan in protest at the crippling embargo imposed on the country by the UN over ten years ago.
An Iraqi airport source announced the evening arrival of Clark and 50 other activists, saying they "represent various US states and humanitarian organizations to observe the ill effects of the embargo."
Almost half the accompanying delegates were students and educators from US colleges and universities who timed the trip to mark the 10th anniversary of the US-led Gulf War against Iraq to drive it out of Kuwait.
An airport source in Amman said Royal Jordanian airlines had received authorization for the flight from the UN committee on Iraq's air embargo.
Earlier in the day another Royal Jordanian flight came in from Amman, with Jordanian Health Minister Tareq Suheimat and some 20 activists aboard, the first US team to challenge the decade-old embargo in Iraq, which Washington strongly backs.
"We want to show that we are sorry, as Americans, for the damage the American bombs are doing," said James Jennings, the trip's organizer and head of US humanitarian group Conscience International.
"We are probably the first Americans who have flown over Iraq for a long time that have not got bombs to drop on the country," he said, referring to the continuing strikes on Iraq by US and British warplanes.
Jennings said his team, coming from several US states and including social workers and child disability experts, brought a consignment of medicine, including antibiotics and anti-parasitical medicine.
"All these people have come together in order to show that there are many thousands of people in America who are concerned about the devastating effects of these sanctions," he said.
Unlike Clark's flight, Jenning said his mission was organized without US or UN authorization, although Jordan had notified the United Nations of the operation.
Clark, the top US law enforcement official under president Jimmy Carter, has long denounced the embargo on Iraq as inhumane, calling it a genocide.
In a statement, Clark said his trip was meant to "defy US/UN imposed sanctions by taking supplies to Iraq without licence."
Clark, who has visited Iraq on several occasions since the war, was in Baghdad a year ago, when he led a delegation of US humanitarian organizations to give the country aid worth an estimated two million dollars.
The Iraqi health ministry has said a total of 1.36 million Iraqis, mostly children and the elderly, had died up until the end of June last year because of a lack of health care and food due to the embargo.
The United Nations imposed sanctions on Baghdad, including a commercial air ban, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Since August, Arab and Western countries have organized several humanitarian flights to Baghdad in a concerted effort to break the sanctions.
AFP