I always found the choice of Il76 strange for AWACS work, a converted airliner would have been a better choice IMHO… but the Il76 seems to be popular with everyone for AWACS and a whole load of other things.

my father in law served at H3 for 6 years. no underground HAS there. there were lots of americans there after 2003… any pics or mention of these uber underground shelters?

they didn’t exist.

there were some underground shelters for people (very “shallow” ones, 1-2 meters deep, more like a basement), some “partially buried” ammunition depots… (semi buried mainly for temperature reasons).

there were also a few proper “underground” centres… sector operations commands and air defence operations command. these were indeed destroyed by the american “bunker busters” and resulted in the deaths of dozens of high ranking officers in 1991.

but all that talk of masses of underground HAS, “tunnels under baghdad” etc… were all complete and utter nonsense.

the only place with lots of tunnels in Iraq in fact is the “old town” of Najaf 😉 bet you never heard of it. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jTjr2xdxbTQ-fWOB9EpF7hz7r4WQ

sayhood retired after the 1991 war (along with a huge number of other pilots as the air force and army aviation and army were massively downsized in light of the defeat and destruction of most of their aircraft on the ground).

I had several relatives in the air force and army aviation… all were sent to retirement after 1991, so sayhood’s situation was not strange at all.

iraqi documents on the war are from the “presidential secretariat archives” not from “baghdad bob’s book of propaganda”. in fact the Iraqis showed that the destruction from the air was actually far worse than even the US planners imagined… e.g. Iraq lost 5 SU-24s on the ground destroyed… the americans didn’t think they destroyed any of those.

I would have thought a better upgrade would be to try and get some more modern Chinese radar plus some PL12 “copies” (since importing actual missiles is not allowed anymore). AWG-9s are really long in the tooth by now… and even swapping out some of the analogue electronics for digital stuff can only do so much to improve ECCM / resolution / scan speed / modes and “reliability”!

just a few corrections.

1- iraqi Mig25s were not based out of H3 “al waleed” but from Tammuz AB (“al taqaddum” in western parlance).

2- Iraqis did not have underground HAS. the only facilities underground were the Air Defence Operations Command HQ and Sector Operations Command HQs. There were some “semi buried” ammunition storage areas.

3-H3 did not have dozens of fighters and bombers etc… it was a combat training base for the air force in the 1980s. the associated small bases around it were all simple dispersal fields. sometimes 2 interceptors would be based out of there for QRA covering ingress from israel/syria. but that was about the extent of combat aircraft based there during the intensive combat period of the iran war. Chinese F7s as well as some twin seater MiG21UM were based there, all used for combat training. Jordanian Instructor pilots were based there as well as some Jordanian I-HAWK unit and they did lots of joint training with Jordanian F5s flying out of H4 Jordan.

do note that the above info refers to the period 1980-1988… at other periods different types operated out of H3.. but it was not a main operating base and did not have a “permanent” combat squadrons flying out of it.

great helo… you know they would love to buy it officially but can’t because its “russian” 😀

Iraq did claim that (and by then relations between Iraq-Syria deteriorated massively, other attacks Iraq blamed on syria were the terrorist attack on the iraqi embassy in beirut, and Iraq was arming the lebanese christian militias against syria etc…).

also Iraq shot down some Syrian planes intruding into Iraq during this period too. AFAIK the “attack” was done by a couple of F4s of which one was shot down on egress, no damage was done to the airbase. It was half baked attempt by Iran to open a “second front” against Iraq… it didn’t go far as the syrians backed out quickly, having been kept busy by what’s happening in lebanon.

but the incident itself was just a small “incursion” and the Iraqis at the time didn’t make a huge fuss about it as it was hardly an important “attack”… they had no idea that some salt and spice would be added to this skirmish 30 years later and published as some sort of massive daring raid in the english language 😀 especially not on an outlying operational training / logistics base. In fact when I asked my father in law about this some years ago, it took him a bit of time to recollect the events (and called up some of his old colleagues first to remember it, as it was not a major attack, more of a buzzing fly by by the 2 F4s when the AAA opened up they immediately turned around and flew away, one being hit on egress – major “political” incident at the time, but hardly an important military one)… when I showed him what was published by iranians about it, he cracked up laughing.

anyway, regarding F4 vs MiG25 combat, AFAIK there was probably no air to air incidents involving these 2, except for maybe an RF4E being shot down by MiG25PDS. The Iraqi MiG25RBS were invariably engaged by Iranian F14s or I-HAWK SAMs.