Gorilla’s Guides

F-16 plane down in Salah Al Din - Follow UP

In yesterday’s report Hassan posted information on the American F-16 plane that went down in Salah Al Din governorate and posted this comment:

[In that area which is very much a “hot spot” if the pilot was alive when the plane landed he is very likely to have been taken captive, similarly even a corpse would be taken and used as a “bargaining chip.”]

The so-called “Islamic Army in Iraq” have issued a statement on an Internet site usually used by such groups [no I won’t link to it the link below is to Aswat al Ira1’s report - Du] saying that at nine o’clock on Thursday some of their fighters who they described as “detachments of the Islamic Army Air Defense” … “succeeded in downing a F-16 plane of the American occupation forces.” The statement posted on the Internet site said that the pilot was dead.

The statement released by the US forces said that the plane was based out of Balad and had been on a “close support mission” but did not mention the fate of the pilot saying only that “the incident is under investigation.”

At least nine helicopters have come down in Iraq in 2007, killing 30 people, mainly U.S. soldiers, but military plane crashes have been rare. In May 2005, two Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet aircraft crashed in Iraq and officials said at the time they believed the warplanes may have collided.

Comment And Analysis:

What to make of the disparities?

The initial American statement can be discounted - their first statements whenever a plane or a helicopter comes down is always to say that it made a “hard landing” and generally to downplay the idea that it was shot down.

There are disparities in time between the “Islamic Army” claim to have shot it down at nine and the eyewitness report that Aswat Al Iraq published yesterday in which the eyewitness said that it went down early in the morning and also said that they had not heard gunfire from the ground.

The fact that that eyewitness didn’t hear anything is not in itself significant the time differential is. By “early in the morning” most Irakis mean very early. There isn’t any way of reconciling the two. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t shot down it just means that if it was shot down it wasn’t necessarily the so-called “Islamic Army” that did the shooting. There are lots of people in Irak who are well capable of taking a potshot at a low flying aircraft and, as the Soviets found out the hard way in Afghanistan, you don’t need very sophisticated weaponry to do it. A slightly modified RPG does the job very nicely thank you.— Just ask the Afghan Mujahideen and the CIA officers who supplied them.

On the basis of past performance I thiink it likely the machine was shor down by person or persons as yet unkown and that the initial U.S: statements were just their usual holding job. I am inclined to think that it probably wasn’t the so-called “Islamic Army” though. They run a very sophisiticated propaganda outfit and the last time an F-16 went down as my colleague Ali recorded on November 28, 2006 they posted this film online: