Aviation

This Fighter jet was buried in Iraq desert ..!

Published

11 years ago

April 14, 2015

Dawal

On 6 July 2003, the US troops deployed to Iraq found a few number of ( Iraqi Air Force (IrAF) aircraft, dug in into the sand near the Tahmmouz AB (better known in the West as “al-Taqaddum”), some 250km west of Baghdad..

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Pic courtesy : US Department of Defense

Why they buried fighter jet ?

Canadian journalist Terry Reith has looked into this story into detail. The airplane in the pictures is a Mig 25, nicknamed The Foxbat. Reith said that it is one of two dozen that were sent to Iraq in 1979 by the Soviets. The Mig 25 did not perform well, however, in either the Iran-Iraq war or the gulf war in 1991. It was no match for British and U.S. in the Gulf War planes so Sadaam Hussein did not use the planes very much after two of them were quickly shot down. Reith said that by the time U.S. and coalition troops invaded Iraq in 2003 the jets were not in action. They had been hidden by burying them in desert sand.

“We’d heard a great many things had been buried, but we had not known where they were, and we’d been operating in that immediate vicinity for weeks and weeks and weeks 12, 13 weeks, and didn’t know they were (there),” Rumsfeld said in US DoD Press release (2003) .

About Foxbat

The Foxbat is known to be one of Iraq’s top jet fighters. The advanced electronic reconnaissance version found by the U.S. Air Force is currently in service with the Russian air force. The MiG is capable of flying at speeds of over 2,000 miles an hour, or three times the speed of sound, and at altitudes of over 75,000 feet.

Foxbat is asupersonic interceptor and reconnaissance aircraft that was among the fastest military aircraft to enter service. It was designed by the Soviet Union’s Mikoyan-Gurevich bureau. The first prototype flew in 1964, and the aircraft entered service in 1970. It has a top speed of Mach 2.83 (Mach 3.2 is possible but at risk of significant damage to the engines), and features a powerful radar and four air-to-air missiles.