THE IQAF FLEES EAST
______When the Air Campaign of the First Gulf War (some people still call it Operation Desert Storm) began the Iraqi Air Force (IQAF) did something that stunned and amazed coalition soldiers: it began flying to Iran.
______Not all of them, but a significant number of the IQAF's aircraft fled eastward to the "safe haven" of Iran, a country which Saddam had concluded a costly and bitter war only two years before. Some of Saddam's best planes defected: MiG-29s, Mirage F-1s and Su-24s, as well as older aircraft such as MiG-23s, MiG-25s, Su-20s, Su-22s and Su-25s. Even two of the Adnans, Iraq's attempt to build its own AWACS, was among the 137+ aircraft that fled to its former enemy.
______This move puzzled and worried coalition planners. One possibility for the move was that the Iranians were going to allow the Iraqis to mount air attacks from their airspace to attack the vulnerable ports and airfields in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, despite the fact that President George H.W. Bush had warned Iran that permitting such attack would be an act of war... there would be no "safe zones" from which Saddam could operate against coalition forces.
______It soon became obvious that the Iraqi aircraft were being detained at the Iranian airfields. This led to one of two possibilities: either Saddam was following a policy of preserving his airpower by putting it beyond the reach of his enemies (when he began the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam sent many of his best aircraft to gulf states, where an Iranian counterstrike couldn't get to them) or else Saddam's pilots decided that discretion was the better part of valor and decided to ensure their survival against overwhelming Coalition airpower. To this day, no full explaination of the mass defection has ever been forthcoming.
WHOSE EMBLEM IS THIS?
