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The Syrian War Makes Strange Bedfellows: US and Russian Warplanes Now Conducting Jointly Drills
The current complicated and dangerous situation in the Middle East has triggered unexpected military cooperation between countries that had been foes for years.
A good example is the cooperation between the Egyptian army and the IDF in the battle against the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula. Officially Egypt and Israel are at peace since the signing of the Camp David agreement in 1979 but in reality a state of cold war continued.
Since President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi rose to power in Egypt, the situation has changed dramatically.
Last week Israeli media even reported that the Israeli air force was helping Egypt in the search for the Russian Airbus that crashed when flying above ISIS-controlled territory in the northern part of the Sinai desert. The IAF sent out surveillance aircraft to comb the area where the plane is believed to have crash landed, the Jerusalem Post reported. Such cooperation was off limits during the era of the Mubarak regime and certainly unthinkable during the short period when the Muslim Brotherhood ruled Egypt.
But there is more.
On Tuesday, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe ‘Boogie’ Yaalon told reporters that during the U.S. hosted air force exercise ‘Red Flag’ this summer, Israeli pilots had been training with their Jordanian counterparts. This too was unthinkable until recently.
A U.S. official, who spoke to Reuters a basis of anonymity, confirmed Yaalon’s statement and said that during the drill Jordan sent warplanes that flew out with Israeli jets and even refueled from an Israeli tanker over the Atlantic Ocean.
There are rumors that Jordan also participated in the ‘Blue Flag’ joint air force drill that was held in Israel last month. Jordanian and Israeli officials refused to answer questions about Jordanian participation in ‘Blue Flag.’
Earlier, the Israeli air force delivered 16 Cobra helicopters to Jordan to help Jordan secure its border with Syria and Iraq after the Islamic State threatened to invade the Hashemite Kingdom.
The situation in Syria where two coalitions are involved in the battle against ISIS and other rebel groups has made even stranger bedfellows.
On Tuesday, a high-ranking Russian officer reported that Russian and American warplanes were jointly conducting drills in Syrian airspace.
Colonel Gen. Andrei Kartapolov told the Sputnik News Agency that Russian and U.S. jets ‘practiced a close approach to a minimally safe distance of 5.5 kilometers.’
“Today at 11 a.m. Moscow time, Russian and U.S. air forces carried out joint drills on actions by crews and land personnel in cases when aircraft fly in close proximity to each other,” Kartapolov was quoted as saying by Sputnik.
“In the course of the training, issues of warning, organization of interaction and information exchange between the staffs of the operational groups and control centers of the Russian Air Force at the Hmeymim airbase and the U.S. Strategic Air Operations Center in Qatar as well as the mutual informing of dangerous military activities in the airspace of Syria were practiced,” Kartapolov added.
The United States declined to deny or to confirm Kartapolov’s comments.
Last month the Russian army in Syria set up a 24-hour hotline with the IDF to avoid getting snared by each other.
Apparently the hotline works well because over the last week the IAF reportedly conducted two missions inside Syria without the expected confrontation with the Russian air force.
Lebanese media reported on Sunday that IAF warplanes entered Syrian airspace from Lebanon and destroyed three warehouses containing Scud missiles at the Qutayfa base in the Qalamoun Mountains in western Syria. The Hezbollah-affiliated news site Mulhak, however, said that the IAF jets destroyed the warehouses without entering Syrian airspace.
Earlier on Friday, Israeli warplanes attacked Hezbollah positions in the Qalamoun’s Ras al-Maara and Al-Jubba region. A local source who witnessed the strikes said that surface-to-surface missile warehouses of Hezbollah were destroyed in the attack.
The Russian military didn’t comment on the Israeli airstrikes but instead emphasized that its armed forces in Syria were exchanging information with Israel 24 hours a day, the Russian News Agency Interfax reported.
Source: http://www.westernjournalism.com/the-syrian-war-makes-strange-bedfellows-us-and-russian-warplanes-now-conducting-jointly-drills/
