US rescues second crew member of downed F-15E fighter jet from Iran

Original article by Dan Sabbagh in Jerusalem

The second crew member of a downed F-15E fighter jet has been rescued from an Iranian mountain by US commandos overnight, ending a two-day search after the warplane crashed in south-west Iran.

The crew member, a colonel and weapons systems officer, had been wounded but was successfully rescued from a mountain hideout by US special forces, Donald Trump first announced in a social media post soon after midnight.

The US president called it “one of most daring search-and-rescue operations in US history” – and claimed that not a “single American” had been killed or wounded in the operation.

Trump said he would hold a press conference in the White House on Monday “with the Military” to provide more detail. In a subsequent social media post, he threatened Iran with the bombing of its power plants and bridges on Tuesday if Tehran did not open the strait of Hormuz to merchant shipping.

“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he wrote. In a subsequent interview with the Wall Street Journal the president added that all the country’s power plants would be destroyed, adding that Iranian civilians wanted that to happen because they were “living in hell”.

Trump also described the F-15 crew member as “seriously wounded, and really brave” on Sunday. The officer was a “highly respected Colonel” who had been picked up in the “type of raid is seldom attempted because of the danger to ‘man and equipment’”.

Once located hiding in the mountains, having at one point climbed a 7,000ft (2,135-metre) ridge, the colonel was rescued by a 200-strong special forces team under a hail of heavy covering fire. Three Revolutionary Guards were killed, according to Iranian sources.

Iran’s military said on Sunday that it had destroyed four US aircraft involved in the search operation and that the Americans had used an abandoned airstrip south of Isfahan as a base. State media shared images of charred wreckage scattered across a desert area, with smoke still emanating from the site.

Two $115m (£85m) modified Hercules had to be destroyed in Iran because they had run into difficulties, having become bogged down in the ground, according to US media. Three more transport planes had to be flown in to complete the extraction.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, highlighted the cost of the lost aircraft with an apparent photograph of the wreckage: “If the United States gets three more victories like this, it will be utterly ruined.” Iran also said two Black Hawk helicopters were destroyed on the ground while a Reaper and Hermes-900 drones were shot down from the sky.

Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated the US leader. The Israeli prime minister said: “As a nation that repeatedly carried out daring rescue operations, and as someone who was wounded in such a mission and lost a brother in the Entebbe rescue, Israelis and I, we know what a bold decision you took.”

Footage emerged of what was said to be night-time clashes in Iran’s Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, near the city of Dehdasht, about 30 miles from the coast in the south-west of the country, the area where US searches had been taking place.

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The pilot of the aircraft had been rescued on Friday, after the F-15E Strike Eagle became the first US plane to be downed over Iran during the five-week-long war. On Sunday, Trump said the pilot had been rescued “in broad daylight” having spent seven hours on the ground in Iran.

The US air force had launched a massive search-and-rescue effort, using low-flying Pave Hawk helicopters and specialist C-130 Hercules transport planes.

The CIA took more than a day to locate the missing airman and launched a disinformation campaign in Iran to give the impression that he had been found in order to fool Iranian forces on the ground.

Uncrewed Reaper drones were used to protect the crew member once he had been located, by “striking Iranian military-aged males believed to be a threat who got within three kilometers”, according to a correspondent with the US Air & Space Forces Magazine, who said he had been briefed on the operation.

Once found, using what Trump called “beeping information”, there were for a time concerns that the airman was in Iranian captivity and rescue commandos were being lured into a trap.

Military pilots said the missing F-15 crew member would have been trying to hide for as long as possible from the Iranian military. If possible, the colonel would have tried to transmit their location relative to a known secret point in the hope that US special forces coming in via helicopter would be able to rescue them.

Iran said it had shot the F-15 down on Friday, a point confirmed by Trump who told Axios it had been hit with a shoulder fired missile. The US military is yet to publicly comment. Trump previously said the episode would not affect efforts to negotiate a peace settlement with Iran.

The US military had not had a jet shot down by enemy fire in more than 20 years – since a warplane was downed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq – retired air force Brig Gen Houston Cantwell told the Associated Press.

Iranian media released pictures of the wreckage of a plane, including a distinctive F-15 tail fin, and a used ejector seat on Friday, with state media and businesses in the country offering a bounty if the missing crew member could be captured.

It also emerged that a Pave Hawk helicopter was hit by fire from the ground during the rescue of the pilot on Friday, but was able to fly away. Another combat plane, an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft, crashed near the strait of Hormuz with Iran claiming it had shot it down. Its pilot was rescued.

The loss of the F-15 and other aircraft had come as a relative surprise, given the air superiority the US and Israel have established over Iran from the beginning of the five-week-long war. But it demonstrated that after thousands of bombing missions, Iran still has the capacity to inflict high-profile damage on the US.

Trump said the US would never leave an American warfighter behind, committing the country’s military to similar rescue efforts if any more planes are brought down.

Meanwhile, heavy bombing of Iran continued. Israel attacked several facilities at Mahshahr, a petrochemical complex in Khuzestan province, on Saturday, and on Sunday Iranian officials said that production there had been shut down. Five people were reported killed and 170 injured.

Israel also attacked Lebanon, having issued a warning that people should evacuate at least 300 metres away from a building in southern Beirut that it said was affiliated with Hezbollah. Eleven people were recorded by the Lebanese authorities as killed in a strike on Kfar Hatta, 30 miles north of the border with Israel.

A fire broke out at the Borouge petrochemical plant in the United Arab Emirates after falling debris from a missile interception caused a blaze, prompting operations at the facility to be suspended. A fire was extinguished at a storage tank belonging to Bahrain’s state energy company, the company said on Sunday.

A building in Haifa, northern Israel, was destroyed by an Iranian missile and an 82-year-old man seriously injured on Sunday. It also emerged that the Aero Sol drone factory in Petah Tikva had been destroyed by an Iranian missile on Thursday.