During the Gulf Warseveral Bedouins in western Iraq began to see helicopters and military convoys appear and disappear in remote areas of the desert where there was apparently nothing. Years later it was learned that many of those areas had been used as secret outposts and makeshift runways for Western special operations far from any official map.
An outpost in the middle of nowhere. He told it in an exclusive the wall street journal. The war between Israel and Iran has left images of missiles, bombers and attacks thousands of kilometers away, but one of the most surprising stories of the conflict has occurred far from the cameras, in the middle of the Iraqi desert. According to several sources cited by the mediaIsrael secretly set up a forward base inside Iraq to support part of its air campaign against Tehran.
Apparently, the place served as a logistics center, a support point for special forces and a rescue platform for downed pilots, all just a few steps away. hundreds of kilometers from Iran and hidden in one of the emptiest and most difficult to control areas of the Middle East. The idea seems straight out of a military espionage movie: a clandestine enclave installed silently inside another country, protected from the air and prepared to intervene in a regional war without official recognition.
The strategic importance of Iraq. The detail reveals to what extent the distance was one of the big problems Israeli operatives during the campaign against Iran. Bombing Iranian targets from Israeli territory involves traveling enormous distances, maintaining long flight routes and assuming constant risks for pilots and aircraft.
Having an outpost in Iraq changed part of that equation. It allowed rescue teams to be brought closer, special forces to be deployed and an intermediate point from which to react quickly in emergencies. The presence of Israeli air force commandos trained to operate in enemy territory further suggests that the enclave was not simply a makeshift base, but an infrastructure designed to sustain complex operations behind the lines of conflict.
The pastor who almost discovered it all. The story took on an even more surreal tone when the base was nearly exposed by something as simple as a local shepherd. According to the published informationa local man alerted Iraqi authorities after observing strange movements and helicopter flights in the desert.
The Iraqi Army sent several units to investigate and there began one of the most delicate episodes of the entire operation. The soldiers advanced in Humvees towards the area at dawn and ended up under intense fire supported from the air. In fact, a Iraqi soldier died and others were injured. The extraordinary thing is that for weeks no one understood exactly what had happened there: Iraq denounced an unauthorized foreign operation, some media initially pointed the finger at Washington, and rumors began to circulate about special forces operating clandestinely in the desert. Only later did the possibility begin to emerge that Israel was defending a secret facility directly linked to the war against Iran.
Invisible war within another war. Plus: the episode shows the extent to which modern conflicts are full of invisible layers that rarely appear in official statements. While the world’s attention was focused in ballistic missilesdrones and attacks on Iranian facilities, in parallel clandestine operations were carried out in third countries to sustain all this military machinery.
I remembered the Journal that the western Iraqi desert had been used for decades these types of activities by American forces, from the wars against Saddam Hussein to operations against the Islamic State. The reason is simple: the region is huge, isolated, and sparsely populated, making it a perfect place to deploy hard-to-detect temporary outposts. The difference is that now the scenario was not a US invasion or an anti-terrorist campaign, but a regional air war in which Israel needed to operate at an enormous distance from its territory.
The long shadow of the United States. Although sources assure that Washington knew of the existence of the Israeli base, the United States I would have avoided participating directly in the clashes that occurred around the enclave. Even so, the whole story once again shows the extent to which the US military infrastructure in the Middle East continues to condition any regional conflict. The bases, air corridors, intelligence and experience networks accumulated over decades of operations in Iraq have created an ecosystem that allows for this type of rapid and discreet deployments.
In fact, his own rescue of an F-15 American aircraft shot down near Isfahan during the war demonstrates that both countries were operating simultaneously in an extremely complex theater, one where commandos, helicopters and rescue teams could move across several countries while officially many of those operations They didn’t even exist.
Image | NARA
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