The F-4E was subsequently parked inside one of Tallil’s hangars and left there: US troops destroyed it in 1991. The wreckage was ‘re-discovered’ again by US troops in 2003.
The vintage footage in this post features the armed Iranian F-4E Phantom II that defected to Iraq in 1984.
On Aug. 27 of that year, Major Rahman Ghanat Pishnee of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) defected with his F-4E from Bushehr AB to Ali Ibn Abu Talib AB (known as ‘Tallil’ in the West) in southern Iraq. According to Tom Cooper, this F-4E was subsequently parked inside one of the hangars and left there; US troops destroyed it in 1991 and ‘re-discovered’ the wreckage again in 2003. The serial number was 3-6552.
‘An Iranian warplane landed in one of Iraq’s military airfields today,’ Iraqi News Agency (INA) said at that time, quoting a military communique monitored in Beirut.
‘Its pilot and co-pilot asked for political asylum, and both are now being treated as guests of Iraq,’ INA said. ‘The two men said they were escaping the persecution of the Iranian regime.’
It was the U.S. government that delivered the F-4E fighter bomber to Iran before the 1979 Islamic revolution deposed the shah. At the time of the revolution, the country was believed to have at least 99 Phantoms. It was during the war with Iraq that several of them were lost, and others have broken down because of a lack of spare parts.
It was two days after an Iranian Airbus jetliner with 206 Iranians aboard was hijacked in Baghdad that the defection came. Iraq said an Iranian couple hijacked the plane to escape persecution by the Islamic government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was the Iraqi government that granted asylum to the air pirates, who pretended to have explosives to hijack the plane. The freed passengers and crew were told they could stay in Iraq, return to Iran, or continue to a country of their choice.
Photo by Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force
