More than twenty-four hours of hiding
The plane, an F-15E fighter bomber, was shot down in southwest Iran on Friday. Its two occupants were ejected in flight, according to American and Iranian media. The first, the pilot, was quickly extracted during a special forces operation, but the second was unaccounted for. Tehran had promised a reward for his capture.
According to the New York Times, the serviceman, who ejected into the Iranian mountains, initially hid in a crevasse when his location was still unknown to both sides. According to a military source, he at one point of his survival operation climbed a coastline at an altitude of 2,100 meters.
Equipped only with a pistol for defense, he had a secure communication device to coordinate with the teams coming to rescue him and a beacon, which he limited the use of for fear that the signal would be detected by Iranian forces. “We rescued the crew member/officer from the F-15, gravely injured and truly courageous, in the heart of the mountains of Iran,” said the American president.
Determined searches
A race against time (and the Iranians) began as soon as the serviceman went missing. On the American side, the CIA played a significant role in his rescue: it located where he was hiding and passed the information to the Pentagon, which then carried out the extraction operation, according to a military source cited by the New York Times.
This was not the only action by the CIA in this operation: it also launched a “disinformation campaign” to try to deceive the Iranians and convince them that the colonel being sought had already been rescued and was being taken out of the country in a large convoy.
A complex extraction
Then came the rescue itself on Saturday night, under cover of darkness. American aircraft “bombed and fired on Iranian convoys to keep them away from the area where the aviator was hiding.” The Iranian military claimed on Sunday that the United States had used an abandoned airport near Isfahan in the south of the country for their rescue operation.
It was the Navy Seals team 6 that extracted the officer. The operation involved hundreds of special operations troops and other military personnel, dozens of aircraft, helicopters, as well as intelligence, computer, and space tools, as reported by the New York Times. No American casualties were reported, according to Donald Trump. As for the rescued aviator, he was transported to Kuwait for medical treatment.
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On the other hand, the Iranian news agency Tasnim, citing a provincial official, reported that five people were killed in the American operation.
Iran says it thwarted the operation
Iran claims to have thwarted the operation: “The so-called American rescue operation, planned as a mission […] of extraction at an abandoned airport in the south of Isfahan […] was completely thwarted,” said Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman for the Iranian armed forces command, Khatam Al-Anbiya. He did not deny the rescue of the aviator, nor did he provide further details.
In a video broadcast by the state television, he claimed that “two Black Hawk helicopters and two C-130 military transport aircraft” had been destroyed by the Americans. Earlier, the military had reported three American aircraft hit in the south of Isfahan.
