BASRA, Iraq, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- Second of two parts
Just outside the office of Iraqi Air Force squadron commander Col. Sami are six tiny propeller aircraft that comprise the squadron's fleet.
They are low and slow-flying two-seater planes armed only with video and forward-looking infrared cameras on their bellies. They fly missions daily over the roads and pipelines and along Iraq's borders, looking for signs of improvised explosive devices, sabotage and intrusion.
Col. Sami, 45, is not rueful about the downgraded planes he flies. He is just glad to be in the air again.
Sami was on the job at Basra air base in April 2003 when Baghdad fell to advancing U.S. forces. He he went home.
"If we continued to stay on the base the bad men would come to kill us," he said. "When we see everything is done, we left the base and go home."
Sami stayed home for a full year with no work and his savings dwindling. He sold personal possessions to buy food for his family.
In the summer of 2004 one of his old friends called him from inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. The U.S.-led Multi-National Coalition needed six pilots in Basra.
"I tell them yes because that's my love, the flight is my life," he said. "That started our new work."
"Most of them have the most amazing survival stories," said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Lee Scifer. Known as "SciFi," he is the commander of the military training team partnered with the 70th Iraqi Air Force squadron. "The reason all of them have a story like that is the others didn't make it. Unless they have a story like that they aren't around."
Scifer is a C-141 transport aircraft pilot. He is one of about a dozen U.S. Air Force trainers at the base in Basra who live and work with the squadron, their lives confined to about one square mile of sand and dust, a hangar and a runway.
The British base at Basra airport is rocketed with startling frequency. Since September, when Scifer arrived, they have been attacked 76 times with an average of four rockets each time. They can be that precise because when there is an air raid warning the team gathers in a bunker, known as the conference room. On its walls are scrawled notes from each "conference' - who was there, what time the rockets came, and how many fell.
For these men, it is a taste of what their new friends and colleagues in the Iraqi air force have lived through at least twice in the last 16 years when under U.S. attack.
"As terrifying as the rocket attacks we've been encountering here are, the biggest ones are 75-lb warheads," Scifer said. "I can't imagine a 2,000-pound bomb or a B-52 load of 50 2000-lb bombs raining down on top of you, day after day. I can't even imagine what that would be like. And these guys have been through that."
The American bomber is "one of the least popular aircraft" among the men in the Iraqi squadron, he said.
"We know so much of our side of the story to actually sit down and hear about it on the receiving end" is amazing, Scifer said.
Scifer and the other Americans have gained a profound respect for the Iraqi pilots' bravery and dedication -- not to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who treated them poorly, but to their country. Even as the greatest war machine in the world began its attack on Iraq in 2003, they remained at their posts.
"Their command and control system was absolutely non-functional. Even if they wanted to (fly) and were ready to go, the orders never came," Scifer said.
The Iraqis all knew from the 1991 Gulf war that the U.S. military would easily overrun Iraq.
"In 2003 everyone knew how much of a mismatch it was. The guys on alert must have had no expectation of surviving and they were still on duty. They were pretty dedicated," Scifer said.
Two-thousand feet above the ground in a tiny Seeker aircraft, Sami points out his home, and he gestures toward a string of houses nearby he says are home to militia fighters from Moqtada al-Sadr's Shiite Mahdi Army.
"We avoid them," he said. "When I finish my job I go do the shopping and then go home. I cannot go to another place because maybe it's dangerous. Maybe they know me and kill me."
Sami's full name cannot be used. Like most men in the new Iraqi Air Force, his life is under threat. There is a list circulating with 400 names on it of men in the former Iraqi air force, U.S. officials say. It is a hit list put out by Iran. There is a bounty on each man's head for the fearsome role they played in the Iran-Iraq war. One pilot from the small squadron was kidnapped in Baghdad almost a year ago; no one has heard from him since.
Sami leaves his home before sunrise to drive to the base at Basra's airport in the dark, so his neighbors will not see where he is going. He pretends to have a different job -- one much less dashing than being an air force pilot and squadron commander.
"Truthfully, if I were in their shoes I would pick up my family and move out of the country," said U.S. Air Force Maj. Matt Vincent, another of the squadron's trainers.
One of Vincent's Iraqi friends, a soldier he knew through the squadron, was murdered outside his Basra home recently, punishment for joining the new military and working with the coalition.
"I really respect the fact that they even come to work. It takes guts," he said.
