The Drone Wars in Iraq and Syria

by Ian Bach   3-21-15
The Wars in Iraq and Syria have been the first Wars that the enemy is also using drones in. So far it seems like everyone has drones. Jabhat al-Nusra has used them in Syria, the FSA has them in Aleppo and Damascus, ISIS has used them in Syria and Iraq, Iraqi Shia militias have Iranian ones, Iranians have theirs, and the U.S. of course has them. It seems like the only people without drones are the Kurds. 

The western media and the blogger community has fell in love with the Kurds and their struggle. Yet the governments of the West have not properly backed them. The governments in the Middle East are not about to arm the Kurds for various reasons most of which is their own fears. 

The U.S. gives weapons and ammo directly to the Iraqi Gov and will not give them directly to the Kurds. Meanwhile Iraq Gov is dragging their feet in giving those arms and ammo to the Kurds. The Germans, Danish and Italians have supplied limited amounts of light and medium weapons and ammo, and they are also offering training to the Kurdish forces, but it is not nearly enough when you consider the amount of work the Kurds have done in the fight against the #Daeshbags of the so called (rolls eyes) Islamic State. - Ian Bach

Here is some excerpts of a few News Articles regarding Drones:
From "War is Boring"

A Bunch of Iranian Drones Have Crashed in Iraq

"Shortly after Mosul fell to Islamic State forces in June 2014, Iran began flying Ababil-3 UAVs out of Baghdad’s Al Rasheed air base in order to track the jihadists, according to The New York Times."
Iran’s Drones Are Back in Iraq
"In recent years Iran’s drones have buzzed into action over Israel, Syria and Lebanon. And now Iranian drones are returning to the scene of their birth—the skies of Iraq, where Tehran’s flying robots saw their combat debut during the 198os Iran-Iraq war."
"Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is deploying the Mohajer-4 surveillance drone and its cousins—descendants of the country’s first Mohajer-1—in its bid to halt Islamic State jihadists in Iraq."
Iran Has a Dogfighting Drone

"Hatami told the assembled press that the air-defense Mohajer can shoot down enemy fighter jets, helicopters and even cruise missiles. But a closer look at the air-to-air drone reveals that it’s not quite the engineering marvel the good general would have you believe."

The Guardian - US drone shot down by Syrian Gov over Latakia a beach resort city relatively untouched by the War.

"Syria’s state news agency, SANA, has published a video purportedly showing the wreckage of a “hostile” surveillance plane and said it was shot down in the same area where the Pentagon confirmed contact was lost with a Predator drone."

"SANA said the Syrian military had downed the plane in northern Latakia and the authorities were conducting an investigation to determine who it belonged to."

"In a statement on Tuesday, the Pentagon said it had lost contact with an unarmed Predator drone but could not confirm whether it was shot down."

US Says It Struck Islamic State Drone in Iraq

"Associated Press | Mar 19, 2015

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military says it bombed an Islamic State drone aircraft in Iraq that was being used for battlefield surveillance."

"A spokesman for the U.S. military command in charge of the conflict against the Islamic State said Wednesday that the drone was a small, unarmed hand-held type of the sort that can be purchased commercially."

"The spokesman, Maj. Kim Michelsen, said that Islamic State fighters had been flying the drone for a short time before placing it in a vehicle. A U.S. airstrike hit the vehicle near the city of Fallujah in western Iraq. He said the drone was targeted because it was being used for surveillance along IS front lines."

It seems like Unmanned Vehicles UAV's / Drones are here to stay and it is not just the USA using them anymore the cat is out of the bag and what is next is anyones guess - I.B.

Syria shoots down a US drone

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Damascus (AFP) - Syria's military shot down a US drone over the coastal province of Latakia, a stronghold of President Bashar al-Assad, state media said on Tuesday.

If confirmed, it would be the first time that Syrian forces have attacked a US aircraft since the coalition fighting the Islamic State began raids against the jihadist group in Syria in September.The US military confirmed that it had lost communication with an unarmed Predator drone over northwest Syria on Tuesday and was looking into the claims it was brought down.

The claim came as activists said Syrian regime forces had carried out an attack using chlorine gas that killed six people, including three children.

Syrian state news agency SANA reported the apparent downing of a US drone in a breaking news alert.

"Syrian air defences brought down a hostile US surveillance aircraft over north Latakia," it said, without providing further details.

While Syria is not participating in the air strikes against the IS, it has so far refrained from taking action against aircraft involved in the US-led coalition's operations to take out the extremist group.

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A Syrian man breathes with an oxygen mask following an alleged regime gas attack on the village of S …

Damascus has said it was given prior warning before the coalition began the strikes, and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said last year that Washington had pledged its raids would not hit the Syrian army.

The strikes in Syria have largely been focused on Aleppo and Raqa provinces, where the Islamic State has strongholds.

But the campaign has also targeted the group elsewhere, and hit positions believed to belong to fighters affiliated with Al-Nusra Front, the feared Syrian wing of Al-Qaeda.

IS fighters have been largely absent from the northwestern province of Latakia, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor.

But Al-Nusra fighters are active in the province, which is home to the Assad family's ancestral village and is a bastion of the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam to which the president belongs.

According to the Observatory, the strikes have killed more than 1,600 people, most of them jihadists.

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A young man sits on a bed on March 17, 2015 at a clinic in the village of Sarmin, southeast of Idlib …

- Gas attacks 'war crimes' -

Elsewhere in war-ravaged Syria, activists and the Observatory reported at least six people had been killed in an alleged regime gas attack.

The overnight incident in Idlib, in the northwest, prompted outrage from rights group Amnesty International, which said it was further evidence of government "war crimes."

"Three children, their mother and father, and their grandmother suffocated to death after regime barrel bomb attacks," the Observatory said.

The monitor said doctors in the village of Sarmin, southeast of Idlib city, concluded that the manner of death indicated a gas, possibly chlorine, had emitted from the barrel bombs.

Activists in Sarmin said chlorine gas had been used and posted videos of a chaotic field hospital where disoriented victims coughed and held gas masks over their faces as children cried in the background.

A paramedic interviewed by an AFP journalist said first responders rushed to the scene unprepared.

"This is the first time we've experienced a poison gas attack," Motea Jalal said.

"We grabbed the masks we had. They are for fires, not for gas attacks, but that's what is available."

He told AFP paramedics retrieved the wounded and tried to wash the chemicals from the bodies, adding that more than 100 people were in need of treatment.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in January it had "confidence" that chlorine gas had been used in attacks on three villages in 2014.

It did not assign responsibility, but its report noted that witnesses heard helicopters before the attack, which only government forces possess.

Iran’s Drones Insights

America isn’t the only country that deploys drones to spy on its enemies. In the skies over Syria’s bloody civil war, above Iraq’s jihadist insurgency and across a number of regional conflicts, Iran’s drones are becoming an increasingly common sight.

Ever since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Iran has been an early adopter of unmanned technology. But as drones have become more important in warfare, Iran’s development of the pilotless aircraft has intensified.

Iranian officials’ penchant for showing off fake new weapons can make it hard to separate the fact from fiction about what Tehran’s drones can do. So much of what we know—or what we think we know—about Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles comes from propaganda outlets, which are only too keen to play down the impact of sanctions and play up Iran’s martial and engineering skill, often with ludicrous assertions.

The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in between two extremes. Sanctions haven’t stopped the the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from putting more unmanned planes in the air. But the Guards still face challenges in arming them with air-to-ground missiles and building a communications infrastructure with greater bandwidth and range in order to control the robots over more distant battlefields.

The story of Iran’s drone development isn’t the underdog tale of scrappy Iranian engineers scrambling to catch up with the United States, as the Guards so often claim. Instead, it’s the story of Iran’s military prudently developing UAVs that are just good enough—and progressively improving successful designs.

A number of export control laws, multilateral agreements and international sanctions complicate Iran’s ability to purchase drone parts on the open market. Moreover, the United States, the United Nations and other countries and world bodies have levied specific sanctions against Iranian entities — and those of Tehran’s allies — for their role in Iran’s UAV production.

Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company, Qods Aviation and Hezbollah’s Stars Holding Group are all subject to sanctions.

Read the full Article Here

Iranian Jets Operating in Syria

The Syrian Arab Air Force (SyAAF), entangled in a bloody civil war that will soon reach its four-year mark, relies heavily on Russia and Iran to keep attrition from diminishing its firepower. After having upgraded several SyAAF Mi-17s with armour plates and FLIR cameras, stationing Mojaher 4, Yasir and Shahed 129 UAVs in Syria and even providing an Il-76TD to the SyAAF on behalf of Syrian Air, Iran is now further consoldating its stake in the conflict by the delivery of ten Su-22s to Syria.

These ten aircraft, part of a batch of 40 flown to Iran during Operation Desert Storm for safekeeping, were finally overhauled in recent years after idly standing around at Shiraz airbase for decades while their fate was decided upon. Initially regarded as “guests” and maintained only to keep them in good condition, they were formally put into Iranian possession in July 1993 but could not be made operational due to budgetary constraints: A team of Ukrainian technical advisors were contracted to overhaul the Su-22s, but at the time this proved to be too expensive for the ill-funded Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF). Instead, the IRIAF was to restore the ten Su-22M-3 and Su-22M-4s to operational condition without any foreign help by using other Su-22s and Su-20s as a source for spare parts. This programme only commenced in 2013, when the Revolutionary Guard’s Pars Aviation embarked on the task of bringing the first Su-22s back to operational condition.

Back to the midst of the war in Syria, where the SyAAF fighter-bomber fleet continuously finds itself flying an increasing amount of sorties while the number of operational air frames continues to dwindle. The SyAAF, originally geared towards fighting a fierce but short war with Israel, never anticipated to get tangled up in a war of attrition between the pro-Assad party and its adversaries. As a result, all of Syria’s MiG-23BNs and most of the Su-22s originally destined for replacement in this decade are now on the forefront of the aerial bombing campaign against rebel positions and villages. This led to a decreasing availability of the MiG-23BN and Su-22 fleet, which in turn  are grounded for weeks at a time to allow for some much needed maintenance for certain air frames, their role being temporarily taken over by fighters such as the MiG-23MF, MiG-23ML(D) and MiG-29.

The fate of Iran’s Su-22s was also sealed in the meantime: The fleet was to join the Aerospace Wing of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGCASF) instead of the IRIAF. At least six Iranian pilots were subsequently converted to the Su-22 in Syria, and later sent to Belarus for further training on simulators in preparation of the introduction of the Su-22. The programme took a surprising turn after it was suddenly cancelled several months ago, and on the direct order of Khamenei, the ten Su-22s were put onboard Il-76s and flown to Syria. By this time, only the Su-22’s fuselages had been completely overhauled, and once arrived in Syria, the SyAAF completed the process.

The first of these new Su-22s was spotted while bombing the town of Talbeesa, Homs Governorate, on the 9th of March 2015. The title of the video claims ”New type of warplanes bombing Talbeesa in Homs”. The aircraft donned a new camouflage scheme that appears to have been applied recently, and although it has not been seen on Syrian Su-22s in the past, it bears some resemblance to that of the SyAAF’s overhauled L-39s.

The sighting of the aircraft comes amidst a series of discoveries about Iran’s increasing military presence and exports in Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Iraq and of course Syria, and follows a widely covered exercise in which a mock-up aircraft carrier was destroyed by anti-ship missiles and fast attack craft.

The continued stream of military support to Syria shows the extent of the Iranian determination in their effort to support the Syrian regime, and once again shows how far the conflict is from finally reaching a conclusion.

Special thanks to Tom Cooper and ACIG original post here.