By Steven Lee Myers

Washington - Intensifying the war of words over civilian bombing casualties in Iraq, the Pentagon said Tuesday that Iraq's own antiaircraft artillery, not U.S. fighter jets, killed two people during a clash in northern Iraq on Monday. The Pentagon also said reconnaissance photographs showed that Iraq had put launchers for surface-to-air missiles in residential areas in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in an effort to protect them from attack.

It is rare for Pentagon officials to disclose the extent of aerial surveillance or to provide detailed accounts of the damage caused by U.S. and British jets in Iraq. But in recent weeks the United States has faced growing international weariness with the repeated bombing of Iraq. There was a sharp rebuke last week from the Foreign Ministry of France, which until last year had contributed aircraft to the patrols of the no flight zones where Iraqi planes are forbidden to fly. The unusually detailed accounts, officials said, were an effort to undercut sympathy that might be building for Iraq.

The Pentagon has previously accused Iraq of using human shields to protect weapons, knowing that U.S. and British pilots operate under strict guidelines intended to avoid killing civilians. But it was the first time the Pentagon offered photographic evidence of such a tactic. The U.S. European Command, which oversees U.S. jets patrolling northern Iraq, said the reconnaissance photographs showed two fully armed missile launchers within 115 feet of homes in Mosul. "The placement of these SAMs in civilian populated areas is further evidence that the Iraqi military uses civilians as shields for their antiaircraft artillery and other weapons that shoot at coalition aircraft," a statement by the command said.

The command also denied that U.S. jets based in Turkey had attacked Baashiqah on Monday, killing two civilians, as Iraq had reported. Instead, the command said, Iraqi antiaircraft artillery had fired at allied jets from the town, which is 20 miles northeast of Mosul, one of the major cities in the north. Shells from those batteries, the command said, fell to the ground, exploded and caused the two deaths and another injury. The command did not elaborate on the source of this information.

In keeping with broad rules for responding to threats from Iraqi jets, the pilots reacted to the artillery fire not by attacking the batteries themselves but by striking a radar station near Saddam Dam. That site, 28 miles west of Baashiqah, was also the target of U.S. and British strikes on Aug. 15 and 16.

Skirmishes like the one on Monday have occurred every few days for nearly eight months, ever since President Saddam Hussein declared that the no flight zones were a violation of Iraq's sovereignty and vowed to defy the ban. The United States and its allies defined the zones after the Persian Gulf War ended in 1991 to protect ethnic groups facing repression from Hussein's government.