from the pictures it looks like they’re making a domestic copy of it.

This is the issue that has been plaguing Iraqis for the past year. They’ve tried all manner of these small laser guided rockets right up to hellfires all have the same issue. As I know the only solution is the use of small gps guided munitions. Laser guided munitions are thus obsolete for multi target simultaneous engagement.

yes. no doubt. the best fighter interceptor of the iran iraq war was the F14A. It however never performed adequately due to many factors including lack of AWACS support, low operational availability etc…

Iraqis only claimed about 5-6 F14s as shot down in air combat anyway.

ultimately the fact that Iraqi planes flew in and out of Iran for 8 years, conducting hundreds of thousands of combat sorties and losing less than 200 planes in the process is a testament to that. Similarly, iranian F4 phantoms could fly into Baghdad even in 1987 despite there being a large air defence umbrella and interceptors and a MiG25 squadron around… both sides chaffed under a lack of AWACS platform which meant that it was exceedingly easy for either side to sneak in hilly terrain along the border and be detected too late for effective interception.

Lets not forget that by March 1988 the Iraqis were flying Il-76 heavy freighters INTO IRAN and dropping “pallet bombs” (with no loss)! This in addition to the lumbering medium bombers that flew into Iran on many hundreds of missions over 8 years (TU22, Tu-16 and B6D) and suffered a less than 1% attrition rate… despite these being “ideal” targets for the F14 / Phoenix combo.

In reality the “most effective” interceptor for both sides was the short-medium altitude SAMs, due to the inherent weakness of both sides air operations and control capability. I am surprised Iran has not bothered to upgrade its capability after the war… but it seems they took their experience from teh war to focus more on having nimble mobile forces and lots of independent capable and highly mobile ground based air defence systems…

Iran’s post-war action (focusing on building up alternative forces and de-centralised air defence and rocket based attack) shows that the overall experience of using “us style” air supremacy simply didn’t work out. The fact that the air force was left to soldier on with whatever they had and without much more investment in air capability over the past 25 years is a testament to that.

Similarly the Iraqis “attempted” in the 1988-1990 period to “upgrade” their air operations shortcomings with the expensive project consisting of three aircraft:
-Baghdad 1 “ground mapping and control” aircraft series
-Adnan-2 “AEW & C” aircraft series
-Boeing 727 “Airborne Command Post” series

demonstrating aptly that they were not impressed by the capability of their air interception and attack capability during the war…

The problem for you is that now we know how many planes iraq lost in total from iraqi archives and iraqi officers. Rendering the wild claims from earlier tom cooper books obsolete (relying 100% on iranian claims then trying to “match” iraqi figures around the iranian claims to make them fit).

The total fixed wing Aircraft losses do not exceed 170 For all causes. And Iraqis admit to losing only about 25 or less to air combat (and only claim a few iranian jets in air combat too… Ceding most claims to air defence sams).

I can see that the erroneous wild claims by cooper and bishop are still plastered on every Wikipedia page and thus the myth goes on.

The Defence and Security Parliamentary committee of the Iraqi Parliament has made an official request in the parliament to begin the procedure to demand the refunding of the F16 IQ payments due to the non-delivery of the aircraft and thus non-compliance to the contract by the US side.

Very nice!

How many Tucanos did Iraq actually operate? The number published through the 1980s was “80+” but I think that was based on the number of CKD kits supplied to Egypt; not sure how many of those were actually assembled.

88 Tucano were supplied to Iraq. They were operated exclusively by the Air Academy in Tikrit until 2003. All pilots in Iraq trained first on AS-202 Bravo (48 supplied) then on the Tucano planes before moving onto L39 (80 supplied) and then MiG21UM / F7B for “advanced training”.

The PC7 (52 supplied) and PC9 (20 supplied) by contrast seemed to be mostly as FAC / COIN planes.

Iraqi Mi35M and IA-407 “tag team” in Tikrit last week.

B52 is the best CAS.