Iraq, one of the countries in the region that temporarily closed its airspace to civil aviation on April 13, 2024, amid Iran’s large and unprecedented drone and missile attack on IsraelArray. Flight trackers showed the country’s airspace empty of advertising planes for hours.
While missiles and drones crossed Iraqi airspace, Iraq did not join the United States, Britain, France and neighboring Jordan in intercepting any of them. However, a U. S. Patriot battery in Iraqi Kurdistan intercepted a ballistic missile, and United States-led coalition jets entered Iraqi airspace to shoot down many of the slower drones. Less than a week later, Israeli warplanes entered Iraqi airspace and fired airborne ballistic missiles at an air defense radar in central Iran.
Given its strategic position in a region long known for its volatility, Iraq has seen its airspace violated over the decades. Iraq has also closed its airspace for political and military reasons for decades and has been imposed external closures in return.
It is worth recounting several of those old incidents to put the brief April shutdown into perspective.
In May 1959, Iraqi warplanes forced an Italian DC6B plane to land in Baghdad while flying over Iraqi airspace on a flight from Tehran to Athens “for violating Iraqi airspace. “stick to fast runners. This first incident rightly underscored Iraq’s sensitivity to even minor or accidental violations of its airspace.
Iraq was going to ban safe overflights of its territory for political reasons. For example, in 1971, Iraq closed its borders with Jordan and soon banned Jordanian planes from using its airspace to protest King Hussein’s crackdown on Palestinian guerrillas last year, the Black Army. September incident.
In June 1978, Iraq announced that it would not allow Soviet planes flying to Ethiopia to land on its territory or use its airspace. Moscow had transported more than $1 billion worth of weapons to Ethiopia last year, and many of those flights used Iraqi airspace.
Between 1959 and 1962, Baghdad claimed that Turkish aircraft committed 15 violations of its airspace. The most serious occurred in August 1962, when Baghdad accused Turkey of sending fighter jets more than 40 miles into Iraqi airspace, shooting down an Iraqi plane and killing its pilot. Iraq has accused Turkey of committing “savage aggression”.
In short, Turkey conducted combat patrols along the Iraqi border, with raids every half hour that month. This justified those patrols in reaction to an attack by Iraqi planes 4 miles inside Turkey that killed two gendarmes. A Turkish-American F-100 Super Sabre intercepted an Iraqi plane over its territory and hit one that crashed in Iraq. Turkey temporarily ended border patrols “in the interest of intelligent neighbourly relations”.
In the mid-1970s, in the Second Iraqi-Kurdish War, Iraq accused the Iranian Air Force of violating its airspace in a “flagrant and premeditated” manner. Iran, then under the reign of the last Shah, had aided Kurdish rebellions opposed to Baghdad, funneling weapons and cash to Kurdish rebels and aiding them with cross-border artillery strikes. However, the Shah made the decision to reach an agreement with Iraq in 1975 and abandoned the Iranian army’s aid to the Iraqi Kurds.
After the Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah four years later, Saddam Hussein, who became the undisputed ruler of Iraq that year, invaded Iran in September 1980, sparking a war that lasted eight years and killed around a million people. dead. From the earliest days of the war, Iranian jets bombed Iraq, and their F-4 Phantoms occasionally flew very close to the ground and deep into Iraqi airspace. In a daring attack on April 4, 1981, Iranian planes bombed the large H-3 base of the Iraqi Air Force in Anbar province in western Iraq, destroying more than 40 aircraft without suffering losses.
Iran’s air force was not the only regional air force to launch deep moves into Iraq during the bloody war. Israel destroyed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in Baghdad using a set of F-16s escorted through F-15s in June 1981. The following December, two Israeli fighter jets shortly violated Iraqi airspace near the Saudi border, but withdrew after the Iraqis detected them.
In an incident that was not revealed until 2012, the Iraqi and Turkish air forces briefly counterattacked on September 14, 1983. Unlike the August 1962 incident, this time the Iraqis suffered a defeat by Turkey. The incident occurred over Zakho, in Iraqi Kurdistan. , near the Iraqi-Turkish border. Two Turkish aircraft, F-100F Super Sabres, violated Iraqi airspace and were intercepted via a French-made Iraqi Mirage F-1EQ, which shot down one of the Turkish Sabres with a Super 530F-1. missile. The pilot survived and was sent back to Turkey, which kept the embarrassing incident a secret.
Another notable incident had to do with Iraq’s neighboring Syria, with which Baghdad had strained relations. In April 1987, a Soviet-built Syrian MiG-21 Fishbed accidentally veered into Iraqi airspace and was shot down. The incident occurred during a thaw in relations between Iraq and Syria and therefore did not provoke tensions between Damascus and Baghdad. The former limited himself to deploring that the massacre was “unjustified”.
The war between Iran and Iraq ended in August 1988. The following January, Iraq announced that it would reopen its airspace to civilian flights from Iran for the first time since 1980. But peace is not about to triumph in the Persian Gulf region.
Saddam Hussein’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait in August 1990 placed Iraq in unprecedented isolation. The United States formed a multinational coalition to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Iraqi military is not prepared to face the weight and technological superiority of the United States-led coalition.
During the start of Operation Desert Storm, American F-117 Nighthawk stealth bombers dominated television news as they bombed Baghdad. The coalition managed to temporarily destroy the French-built KARI command and communications system, which incorporated Iraq’s vast network of basically Soviet-built surface-to-air missiles.
Although the coalition’s precision-guided munitions have attracted much attention and adulation in this war, civilians have not been entirely spared. The bombing of a bomb shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad, using MGP, killed more than 400 Iraqi civilians sheltering there after the United States said it mistook it for a command center.
During the Package Q attack, dozens of F-16s and F-117s continuously bombed Iraq’s Tawaitha nuclear studies center, home to the Osirak reactor, in the face of heavy Iraqi air defenses.
Although the Persian Gulf War officially ended with a ceasefire on February 28, 1991, the United States established primary no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq after Saddam Hussein sent helicopter gunships to ruthlessly quell the uprisings. simultaneous Kurdish and Shiite He remained in office until 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam’s regime.
Israel, which did not participate in the Gulf War despite Iraq bombing its cities with Scud missiles, sent F-15 fighters over northern and western Iraq, where they were searching for the remaining Scuds, in October 1991. Unsurprisingly, Baghdad denounced the overflight as a “serious violation” of Iraqi airspace.
Saddam’s forces, seriously weakened by the Gulf War, would intermittently question its existence, without much success. The United States would also implement intermittent measures against besieged Iraqi forces, adding Operations Desert Strike in September 1996 and Desert Fox in December 1998.
The Iraqi Vice-President declared in December 1998 “that any violation of Iraqi airspace would be suppressed by Iraqi fire”. Planes flying over southern Iraq fired on four Iraqi MiGs in the domain the following month, but shot none down. Then, in February 2001, Iraqi surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery fire was fired at coalition aircraft in the southern domain.
Iraq has never shown itself capable of shooting down any coalition aircraft during the no-fly period. It buried the rest of its fighter jets, adding its fast MiG-25 Foxbats, which had proven capable of evading coalition missiles, on the eve of the 2003 invasion. In a rare incident on December 23, 2002, an Iraqi MiG-25 shot down a U. S. MQ-1 Predator drone armed with short-range Stinger air-to-air missiles after the two exchanged fire.
On the eve of the invasion, Iraqi airspace was filled with surveillance aircraft, adding American U-2 and French Mirage IV spy planes, searching for evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
“With so many Western aircraft flying in a country where coalition F-15s are already patrolling no-fly zones in the north and south, Iraq appears to have abandoned its skies in favor of foreign air power,” a February 2003 report observed.
From June 2002 until the March 2003 invasion, Operation Southern Watch, the no-fly zone covering southern Iraq, became the more proactive Operation Southern Focus. In this new operation, the coalition responded more forcefully to Iraqi violations, aiming to degrade and destroy much of the Iraqi air defenses that remained before the invasion.
Before the invasion, the United States even briefly hired Israelis who had lived in Iraq in the past and understood the Iraqi Arabic dialect well. They boarded a surveillance plane that flew over Iraq to pay attention to the Iraqi army’s radio transmissions. These Israelis concluded that Saddam’s remaining forces were unlikely to hold out much and that many Iraqi infantrymen would flee or surrender.
The United States continued its invasion, bombing Iraq again, advancing rapidly, and capturing Baghdad as the remains of the Iraqis faded away.
The United States kept its troops in Iraq until December 2011, peaking at around 160,000 deployed in the 2007 surge. Throughout this period, it had de facto control of Iraqi airspace, especially now that Iraq had virtually no air force, which it continued to do for many years. Formation
“The U. S. military has attempted to cede square miles of territory to Iraqi infantrymen and police, but it has yet to cede control of a cubic inch of the country’s skies,” a 2006 report noted.
In 2008, the United States negotiated a security pact with the Iraqi government that would identify the legal basis for the presence of U. S. troops in the country. Among the main obstacles to a pact were an agreement on the prestige of U. S. bases in the country and the use of Iraqi airspace by the United States.
On February 25, 2009, a U. S. aircraft shot down an Iranian drone flying about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad after following it for an hour. The fact that he didn’t tell Baghdad obviously shows who controlled the Iraqi skies at the time. According to the force prestige agreement between Washington and Baghdad, the United States is guilty of protecting Iraqi airspace for 3 years.
In the late 2000s, the Iraqi Air Force had few resources other than Cessna AC-208B cargo and propeller aircraft capable of firing AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles. Many of its pilots, who had served in the old air force, dreamed of the day when, despite everything, they would fly F-16s.
The United States unceremoniously withdrew the last troops from Iraq in December 2011. However, U. S. forces would be out for a long time.
In June 2014, the Islamic State group, commonly known by the acronym ISIS, invaded Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and declared territory covering giant swaths of contiguous Syrian and Iraqi territory, adding a third to the latter. The airstrike targeted ISIS militants at an Iraqi border crossing, but not on the Iraqi side. Baghdad praised the attack as well as both countries.
The United States intervened with airstrikes in August 2014, when ISIS militants attacked Iraqi Kurdistan and subjected the Yazidi minority in the Sinjar region to ruthless genocide.
U. S. air movements opposed to IS spread to Syria the following month. Unlike the Syrian case, the movements in Iraq had the authorization of the Iraqi government. From the beginning, the Obama leadership has expressed its reluctance to the Iraqi Air Force de facto. But Iraq at the time was badly lacking in fighter jets and therefore relied heavily on coalition air support.
The United States would also form a multinational coalition, composed basically of Arab and European states, to push back into ISIS-controlled territory with local forces, basically the Iraqi army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and, in Syria, Kurdish-led forces that would form under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces in 2015.
Iraq began receiving F-16 fighter jets in mid-2015, but it will still take years to rebuild its air power as the F-16 fleet will suffer from chronic disruption until the early 2020s.
In December 2014, Iranian F-4 Phantom fighter jets briefly entered Iraqi airspace to attack ISIS positions near the Iranian border. Tehran also transferred Su-25 attack aircraft to Baghdad in June 2014. Ironically, those Soviet-era aircraft, Saddam’s Iraqi Air Force, in the past, operated those planes and transported them to Iran during the Gulf War.
Nonetheless, the United States-led coalition carried out most of the airstrikes against ISIS, and ISIS declared itself territorially defeated in Iraq in late 2017, and Mosul was recaptured in July of that year after a fierce urban war that lasted several months.
Following the June 2014 airstrike on the Syrian border, the Iraqi Air Force began targeting ISIS on Syrian territory with its F-16s in 2017 and 2018.
Russia will intervene in the civil war in Syria at the end of September 2015, by deploying fighter-bombers to the war-torn country, at the invitation of Damascus. In November of the same year, Moscow also showed its strength by launching cruise missiles. Some of those missiles flew over Iraq, prompting Baghdad to briefly close airspace over the country’s Kurdish north “to protect travelers and due to the passage of cruise missiles and bombers into the northern part of Iraq. ” of the Caspian Sea. “
Iraq would close the airspace of Iraqi Kurdistan for a very different explanation, less than two years later. On September 25, 2017, the Kurdish government of the autonomous enclave organized a referendum on independence, which received a large yes vote. Baghdad temporarily closed the airspace of Iraqi Kurdistan to all civilian flights, it is not easy for the regional government to transfer the region’s two foreign airports and foreign border crossings to the federal government. Iraqi forces also recaptured disputed territories, adding Kirkuk and Sinjar, from the Peshmerga the following month.
Baghdad lifted the flight ban the following March. However, Turkey is reported to maintain its own ban on the Kurdish city of Sulaimani, claiming that that city’s ruling party provides shelter to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, better known by its Kurdish acronym PKK. This ban would extend until January 2019. It would not be the last of its kind.
During the summer of 2019, three suspected Israeli air or drone movements targeted sites used by Iran-backed Iraqi militias across the country. Following those measures, the Iraqi government banned unauthorized flights in Iraqi airspace. She limited the United States-led coalition’s air operations in the country, which is not easy for her, as she first won Baghdad’s direct approval before wearing down measures against ISIS remnants in the country.
Tensions between Iraq would flare again after a US drone strike killed Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport in January 2020. Iraqi MPs They angrily demanded the expulsion of American forces. Russia has reintroduced its S-400 Triumf formula long-range air defense missiles in Iraq, claiming it can simply provide “reliable airspace coverage. “
Iraq acquired Pantsir-S1 medium-range air defense formulas from Moscow in the 2010s, but they are of limited use to protect all of its airspace. As speculated here in the past, Baghdad would possibly turn to South Korea for its complex medium-range air system. The KM-SAM defense formula to its limited air defenses. A subsequent unconfirmed report claimed that Iraq was interested in eight such formulas as part of a deal valued at more than $2 billion.
Iraq would close its airspace to civilian flights in 2021, ahead of national parliamentary elections.
In April 2023, Turkey imposed a new flight ban to Sulaimani, and in June announced it would lift it for six months. Even more worrying, a suspected Turkish drone attacked Kurdish counterterrorism forces at a military airfield in Sulaimani province in September 2023, killing three other people and injuring three others. The Iraqi army spokesman noted that the drone entered Iraqi airspace from the Turkish border and said Baghdad “reserves the right to end such violations. “
Less than a fortnight after Iran’s attack on Israel in April and the following Israeli response, Iraq celebrated the 93rd anniversary of the creation of its air force by unveiling its F-16s, a sign of its reconstituted national air power.
In May, Iraq’s Ministry of Transport announced the implementation of an agreement on the airspace allocated to military flights through the United States-led coalition, thus expanding airspace for civil aviation.
Last Sunday, the commander of the new Iraqi Air Defense Command told local media that the command’s operations center had “a strong outlook for Iraqi airspace with all kinds of military and civilian aircraft. “In addition, the official added, “the center will train complete control and Iraqi airspace. “
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