KIRKUK, IRAQ — When Abu Mohammed walks down the flight line at a base outside this northern Iraqi city, there's a swagger in his stride. Engineers too young to remember Iraq's storied dogfights against Iran rush up to shake his hand.
For years, the pilot lived in hiding as a taxi driver. It feels good to take the controls of a plane again, he says. But the single-engine, turboprop aircraft in which he putters around in the sky are nothing like the fighter jets he commanded during the 1980s war with Iran.
Squeezing himself into the cockpit, he wrinkles his nose and sighs: "It's like going from a race car to a bicycle."
Grounded in 2003 when the U.S.-led invasion began, Iraq's once powerful air force is taking to the skies again. Iraqi planes and helicopters conduct aerial surveillance, ferry troops and supplies, and recently completed their first medical evacuation.
But the country is years away from having enough aircraft, personnel and infrastructure to take control of its airspace from U.S.-led forces, American and Iraqi officers say. Until it does, U.S. help will be needed to secure Iraq.
The once-powerful air force was routed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Despite fighting an eight-year war against Iran, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sent more than 100 jets to his neighbor for safekeeping. The planes were never returned.
Iraqi pilots rarely took to the skies in the decade-plus era during which the U.S. and Britain imposed a no-fly zone over northern and southern Iraq to protect persecuted Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds. Many aircraft fell into disrepair because United Nations sanctions made it difficult to obtain spare parts.
Finally, when the American-led invasion began in March 2003, Hussein ordered remaining military jets buried in the sand. Air force personnel dispersed when the U.S. authorities in Iraq disbanded the Iraqi military, and the buried jets were never recovered.
With Iraq confronting a persistent insurgency, one has only to step into an American command post to see how critical air power has become to the country. U.S. transport helicopters and planes ferry troops, supplies and casualties across the country's broad open spaces, thus avoiding bomb-riddled roads. Unmanned American drones track insurgent movements. And attack aircraft are used to wipe out militant mortar teams or drop a bomb on an explosives-rigged house without risking the lives of soldiers on the ground.
