Iraq’s acting defense minister is in Russia negotiating the purchase of air surveillance equipment to help Iraq rebuild its crippled military defenses, a lawmaker said on Thursday.
The US pulled most of its troops out of Iraq in December, leaving the war-battered country to defend its own borders and airspace for the first time since it was occupied in 2003.
Under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s air force was one of the largest in the region with hundreds of Soviet-designed jets. However, its military was disbanded after the US-led invasion in 2003 deposed Saddam.
“There is a delegation, headed by the minister of defense and the commander of the air force, that went to Russia to negotiate the supply of early warning systems, radars and some other civil defense apparatuses,” parliamentary security and defense committee member Hakim al-Zamili said.
Iraqi officials say it will take years before they are able to defend their airspace again and the military has started building a new air force almost from scratch.
Iraq is due to receive the first 24 of 36 F-16 fighter jets it has ordered from the US at the start of 2014.
The Iraqi Air Force also wants to acquire more long-range radars to cover more of the north and west, as well as ground-based air defense systems.
The worsening conflict in Syria, on Iraq’s northwest frontier, threatens to spill over, and Turkey and Iran regularly launch air or artillery strikes on Kurdish rebels inside Iraq along its northern border.
Some of Iraq’s neighbors and Autonomous Kurdish Region President Masoud Barzani have said they are worried about Baghdad acquiring jets and other military equipment, which they fear may be used aggressively.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS