sheytanelkebirIrak needs high tech weopons that can negated much larger airforces of Turkey and Middleast. China simply cant provide them.
no money senor. Iraq is well and truly broke at the moment. 4 million internally displaced, $45 oil, massive expenditure on the war, on top of a country which is trying to rebuild infrastructure after 36 years of constant war and bombing.
so they sadly have to take what they can get in this and hope to build a deterrent to much wealthier and better armed barbaric neighbours to our north and south.
though I note that chinese weapons are actually pretty expensive. So the HQ-9 costs more than the superior Russian Anety 2500V… but the chinese give finance, so cash poor Iraq has no real choice but to pay a premium for an inferior SAM.
Similarly the CH-4B UCAVs they operate, the chinese are charging upwards of $170K for EACH precision guided munition! The USA is charging Iraqis less than $140K for a hellfire on the other hand! and Russia is charging more like $25K for an ATAKA!
so from all aspects the iraqis are getting a raw deal buying chinese. But the chinese are smart and know the iraqis are in a bind at the moment so are taking advantage.
sheytanelkebirWould you really need AIM-9X and AMRAAMs, as we speak?
turkey.
in addition to saudi “coallition” free bombing of yemen being repeated against iraq to “defend the sunnis of iraq”… (despite the iraqi minister of defence, land forces commander and air force commander being all sunnis!). I recommend a read on what these “allies” of the west say on their arabic language channels.
that is also the reason why iraq desperately needs a “non western” capable air defence system yesterday…
without an ability to defend our airspace from neighbours, we end up with the situation we are in today whereby any old mong or lizard eater can openly threaten Iraq’s sovereignty… and the US-Iraq defence pact doesn’t seem to be worth the paper its written on… they haven’t managed to put any of their barbarian “allies” on leash.
sheytanelkebiryeah, American stuff are great, but their politics (perhaps well intentioned for regional balance) sucks for the operator
thats why you have the French. go for Rafales and VBCIs
mon dieu
France would not offer finance on the same terms as China to Iraq, and although French companies have some investments in Rail, Power Oil and car manufacturing in Iraq its very small compared to China. Their ability to recover debt from Iraq is limited. China on the other hand is today in a position whereby they control (via Huawei) our telcos, the main rail artery, largest oil contracts etc…
Russia doesn’t have “security” issues as such with exports to Iraq (the items were all approved after all) but Russian banks could not guarantee repayments by Iraq and they never came to finance agreements.
I’m actually very sad 🙁 really wanted to see the MiG35 in Iraqi colours 🙁
Egypt with Saudi money is getting all the lolly in the meantime 🙁
sheytanelkebirRussia is a flexible supplier but mostly operates on cold hard cash due to the state of the Russian economy, loans and other financial incentives are risky and unavailable
but they’re not for export yet. So likely this one will do.But dont you guys already have f-16s?
Iraqi F16s, whilst good airframes with decent avionics are hobbled by a lack of advanced munitions since the US has refused to sell AMRAAMs AIM-9X and JDAMs to Iraq.
Iraq already has a very good fleet of Attack helos from Russia (Mi35M and Mi28Ne and Mi28UB) and will be producing ATAKA missiles locally.
Iraq is having an agreement with Uralvagonzavod for T90 and UR-77 local assembly in Basra (which would be funded as a local manufacture as opposed to import).
From China I can expect Iraq to buy an alternative to the BMP-3, S300V and MiG35… as well as maybe more armed UAVs.
sheytanelkebirat an iraqi military industrial conference 2 weeks ago they announced that iraq in agreement with Russia will begin producing the ATAKA missile for domestic use, cementing the position of the Russian attack helo fleet as Iraq’s premier helicopter force.
however in the same vein the US will be supplying 2 more armed cessna caravans and several thousand hellfires to Iraq. but those are operated by the air force.
sheytanelkebirWell from a recent (last week) Iraqi Finance ministry report to the parliament it has become known that Iraq has cut back massively on Russian arms purchases since last year due to a lack of funds. Russia has not been able to offer financing for Iraq’s weapons requests and so a number of large ticket items are essentially “on hold” (or maybe cancelled in polite speak). These include 24 MiG35, MSTA-S heavy artillery, T90 Tanks, BMP3 IFVs and S300V SAMs. The attack helos and a few radar stations survived the cut back.
Similarly the finance ministry report revealed that the US has given $2.7Bn loan to fund weapons purchases from the US and, more interestingly China has provided a $2.5Bn loan for the purchase of Chinese weapons. China is Iraq’s main oil importer and runs Iraqi oil fields as well as other large infrastructure projects in Iraq (power stations, railways, car factories amongst others) and thus considers its ability to recover the loan to be strong.
This development may open the door for both chinese HQ-9 (in Lieu of russian S300V) as well as J10 (instead of Russian MiG35).
sheytanelkebiriraqis generally liked russian hardware and the “freedom” that russians gave them.
most accounts (acig originating and US/western origin) about both the iran-iraq war and 1991 gulf war have a completely lopsided view of things.
dismissing iraqis claims of losses and kills with a “sleigh” of showing that some people on the internet or some “propaganda” released by iraq was inaccurate is silly. every country has erroneous info and propaganda. That does not mean that they have NO real and accurate data too (well unless they’re iraqis of course).
I will end this with a small addendum, apart from the erroneous iraqi loss numbers and kill numbers in both wars… we can see that once iraq was “free” from the US in January 2012… they stopped buying any more “large ticket” items from the US… no more F16 or C130s or M1A1s…. but they started buying Russian with a vengeance. Should tell you all you need to know from people who’ve “been there and done that” over many decades what their real experience was with russian systems. A key point difference with the western / us systems being freedom to operate and maintain and modify systems for their liking and allowing a country with a small budget to operate a combat fleet large enough to fulfil its combat needs. A “US” oriented military would have bankrupted iraq AND not given them “real” military capability (a cynic might say that was the US intention for Iraq pre 2012…).
PS. the MiG-23s did pretty well in the iraqi air force. apart from fantasy land ACIG claims a real breakdown of their losses can be found here…
http://iraqimilitary.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=71
and iraqi MiG25 certainly could “look down shoot down” a predator drone IN the no fly zone and being watched by AWACS and F15s.
as for russians not having a “look” at different western weapons… well in iraq during the early mid 1980s they could look at rapier missiles, i-hawk radars, F4E phantoms, F-14, CH-47s, chieftains, M60s, captured radar and elint stations and a plethora of other items… in exchange for which they sent loads of MiG29s, SU-24 SU-25s and agreed to licence assembly of Mi28A in iraq. Also a number of iraqi pilots who trained in the west shared their experiences with Russians in Iraq… of flying in Jaguars, Tornados, British, French and other curriculum etc… we can see that “just” in iraq the soviets had access to a pretty wide array of then front line western equipment to look at and get an idea of training, curriculum of western academies and flying schools from the iraqi graduates. once one aggregates that over all the other “sources” the Russians had… they probably had a pretty decent idea about western equipment and doctrine… I wouldn’t be surprised about pro-communist members of nominally pro-western nations “leaking” info in vast quantities during those periods.
sheytanelkebirWhen it comes to marketing a product experience is highly important. The defence sector has some unique challenges that Japan will have to learn about. This is nothing particularly new.
is “unique challenges in marketing” a euphemism for kickbacks? 😉
sheytanelkebirjust another video released in the last hour by the Iraqi MOD…
sheytanelkebirSo, Falluja was not completely surrounded by government forces then? Or the government used some local units as well for the siege which could open a road for IS?
Regarding the US armed forces, don’t worry, I’m sure they’re as happy as you are when the Iraqi army is capable of fighting IS more or less on their own.
there was an area of farms to the west / south west of falluja (outside the city) which had not been cleared. beyond the farms to the south west lay only sporadic iraqi lines (see a map the area is large). so certainly there are always some “gaps” since the full diameter of a circle around falluja and its farmlands would be over 80km long… and forces are mostly concentrated for the main attacks into the centre of the city. The “shia” PMU forces were concentrated to the east, north and south east… the area to the south west was secured by the “tribal mobilisation” (a.k.a. sunni PMU which would include some moles and turncoats). Ultimately however it was these sunni PMU who raised the alarm and allowed the army aviation to hunt them down.
now had the US accepted bombing this column from the beginning with B1Bs or B52s… they would have butchered them all in place. but then the US considered the “families” of the daesh terrorists to be civilians and simply took the decision not to participate in the beginning… and then dropping a few bombs the next day to show some “token” participation for propaganda purposes.
You may consider the US reasoning “sound” from a geopolitical perspective as the “fallout” with the hundreds of millions of “closet daeshis” in the “muslim world” would react negatively to a massacre of “good muslims”.
As it happened a large number managed to scatter since the aircraft available to the iraqis have very limited ordnance by comparison… and then they have to chase them down one by one… inevitably hundreds of vehicles escaped as a result.
sad to say that had Iraq been supported by Uncle Vlad then TU22Ms would have made short work of these scum. Its during these times that you wish someone would resurect the Il-102 project with some 21st century sensors and defensive suites and making the second seater a combat operator with SAR and EO systems to find targets and bring down tons of death and destruction…
sheytanelkebirThanks for posting all those. The convoys were huge apparently. I wonder how could they count on taking all those vehicles out unnoticed? I thought the Iraqi army had the city surrounded?
They escaped out of Falluja city into some surrounding countryside over the past weeks and went into hiding in the vast areas of farms. As the iraqi army begun moving in and all roads to North and East were fully fortified a narrow corridor to the south west seemed open so they were negotiations with local tribes and sunni Arab politicians to give them a route to freedom which they apparently got. But as they began moving out in darkness and bad weather their movements were noted and the Iraqis managed to mobilise enough helicopters to intercept the column bombing the front and rear and forcing it to scatter. They spent the next 2 days chasing the hapless terrorists around the deserts and lakeside nearby both in the air and on the ground. A kind of daesh hunting sport.
Lord knows what the final death toll would be.
As to why daesh did this… They have a bit of hubris. They have gotten away with more in the past and have as a matter of course relied on turncoat and treacherous iraqi politicians tribesmen and officers to complete their operations. They trusted that the deals they were used to extricate themselves from other areas would be honoured.
sheytanelkebirhere’s some morning footage of the bombing of the remnants…
the background story to this is that the daeshis had a “deal” with some local tribes to allow them to withdraw their remnants out of falluja and surrounding regions towards al qaim and daesh territory.
they were supposed to move out in the dark and under bad weather.
but iraqi spotters and some local tribesmen noticed their buildup and the army aviation went into action.
they notified the americans who declined to participate saying that there were “too many civilians” “ROE” … so the iraqis went in alone.
in the SECOND DAY when the bulk of the bombing by iraqi army aviation was done the americans dropped a few bombs on the main route… by which time survivors had scattered into the desert and were being picked off one by one by iraq helicopters and iraqi land forces.
sheytanelkebirso the US released its footage finally.
3 bombs and what looks like a clusterbomb on part of the convoy. they only “joined” in the raid later on as reported earlier… and made a “token” participation more for propaganda than anything… like in most battles in Iraq over the past year to take credit for “fighting daesh”.
sheytanelkebirjust a few bits and bobs they’ve collated so far from a much larger quantity of vehicles and items taken after the raid.
http://iraqimilitary.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2414&p=39994#p39994
sheytanelkebirIt takes 40 billion for around 100 planes now? Sheeeeesh.
look on the bright side. war will become increasingly improbable as even the wealthiest countries can’t afford a fleet able to maintain round the clock combat now.
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