Iraq decries U.S. raid on Syria village

"The Iraqi government rejects the strike by the U.S. planes on Syrian territories as part of the policy of the Iraqi government and its constitution which does not allow the Iraqi land as a base to conduct such attacks on neighboring countries," Dabbagh said in a statement. "The Iraqi government has initiated an investigation on this incident and called for the U.S. forces not to repeat such an act."

The Iraqi parliament criticized the U.S. forces for launching the raid at a time when relations were improving with Iraq's neighbor and vowed "its land will not be used to attack any state."

In Damascus, Syria's Cabinet condemned the assault on Sukkariyeh as "brutal, vicious American aggression."

Syria's official news agency reported that authorities had decided to shut down an unidentified Damascus-based "American school" and a cultural center. The report didn't identify the school.

Syrian authorities have also postponed a meeting of a Syrian-Iraqi committee scheduled for Nov. 12 in Baghdad to improve relations between the two countries.

A senior U.S. official described the target in Sunday's raid as Abu Ghadiyah, the chief of a Syrian smuggling network and one of the most prominent facilitators of moving foreign fighters into Iraq.

The raid came despite an apparent thaw in Syrian-Iraqi relations. Damascus this month sent its first ambassador to Iraq since the early 1980s. The number of foreign fighters crossing into Iraq has dropped in the last year from 100 to 20 a month, the U.S. says. And Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former top commander in Iraq and the chief commander for U.S. forces in the Middle East, had previously praised Syria for cracking down on fighters crossing into Iraq.

Meanwhile, an Iraqi criminal court in Baghdad sentenced an Iraqi man to death in connection with the June 2006 killing of three U.S. soldiers in Yousifiya, south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement. Two other Iraqi males were found not guilty, it added.

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ned.parker@latimes.com

Times staff writers Borzou Daragahi in Beirut and Usama Redha, Caesar Ahmed and Saif Hameed in Baghdad contributed to this report.