There was no Iraqi pilot called “mohammed rayyan” (I think its an iranian invention kind of like the americans with their “colonel toon”, and it got propagated via tom coopers works into english media),

in fact the Iraqi air force never had an official “ace”… there was one Mirage F1 pilot who had “claimed” something like 13 kills or something, but the Iraqi Air Force re-evaluated his claims already in 1984 and reduced his “kills” to 2 confirmed only… (and since the pilot had insolently painted 13 kill marks on his plane, he was then grounded from flying for the rest of the war).

ahmed sadik (along with official Iraqi records released after 2003) illustrate clearly that the Iranian claims as published earlier by Tom Cooper and Farzad Bishop are simply Iranian claims that were obviously not tallied with Iraqi actual losses… anyway that’s not really tom’s fault since the information on Iraqi aircraft availability in 1990 simply was not available to them when their books / magazines were published.

Iraqi air force lost about 130-140 fixed wing fighters/bombers during the 1980-88 war… they also lost a similar number of helicopters and turboprops. This is about 80% less than the Iranian claims. A massive discrepancy.

officially the Iraqis ran a very rigorous “confirmation” system for kills… e.g. Lt Zuhair Dawood who shot down speicher in 1991 did not get official confirmation of his kill until speicher’s plane was found by beduins in 1995 and the US confirmed the real location of the plane when it went down to the Iraqis… OTOH the MiG23 pilot who shot down the Tornados got his kill confirmations immediately since the wreckage and crew were recovered and his weapons system records/wreck matched it.

According to Iraqis over on other forums and from biographies of Iraqi air force officers the MiG25s were quite invulnerable to attack but suffered from a poor weapons system in the R40s which did limit their potential. Either way, they were the “premier” fighter of the Iraqi AF even after the induction of the MiG29s which tells you all you need to know about how highly the Iraqis regarded them. They did not shoot down many Iranian aircraft (less than a dozen), but specialised in shooting down the Iranian EC130, RF-4Es and other such “high altitude / straight line” planes that would be suitable for engagement by the MiG25. the first “true loss” for an Iraqi MiG25PDS I believe was at the hands of a US AMRAAM fired by an F16 after the end of the 1991 war… The Iraqis learned quickly from that loss, and for the rest of the 1990s engagements in the no fly zones they successfully avoided / countermeasured all the AMRAAM launches against them.

Reddor, the Iraqi Air Force couldn’t even suppress/eliminate the Kuwaiti defences (their airforce had maybe 50 combat a/c, mostly A-4 Skyhawks and survivors of 33 Mirage F1Cs).

iraq lost a couple of aircraft to kuwaiti action in 1990 (one of which was a super frelon to a kuwaiti I-HAWK SAM), and invaded the entire country with no pre-planning for the air force (in fact the iraqi air force didn’t even participate in the first 10 hours of the invasion). once they did participate, they took control of kuwait very rapidly (a day), hardly incompetence… now had you mentioned the disaster that was the army aviation assault by Mi8s in the ealy morning of 2nd of august (when over 20 Mi8s crashed into electricity pylons because they were ordered to fly from ali AB to kuwait at very low altitude at night time)… then you’d be onto something regarding incompetence!

And if you didn’t, YOU would probably speak german and waving swastika flags too, you know ( not that some over there wouldn’t like to anyway). But i digress. It’s much more “fun” sticking with the image of a hardy squadron of iraqi MiG-29’s shooting down F-15s and F-16s left and right with their R-73s in a blaze of glory.:)

Iraqi MiG29s did not have any R73s… only R60MK / R27R.

regarding the topic… Israel would have been even easier to batter than Iraq due to the small number of air bases they have in a very closed geographical proximity… their E2s would not have been able to help at all, the F15s/F16s would be mostly destroyed on the ground… but that is supposing the israelis would roll over and let the coalition come at them like the iraqis did.