Beirut: Iraqi pilots who have joined Daesh in Syria are training members of the group to fly in three captured fighter jets, a group monitoring the war said on Friday, saying it was the first time that the militant group had taken to the air.
The group, which has seized land in Syria and Iraq, has been flying the planes over the captured Al Jarrah military airport east of Aleppo, said Rami Abdul Rahman, who runs the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
US-led forces are bombing Daesh bases in Syria and Iraq. The group has regularly used weaponry captured from the Syrian and Iraqi armies and has overrun several military bases but this was the first time it had been able to pilot warplanes.
“They have trainers, Iraqi officers who were pilots before for [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussain,” Abdul Rahman said.
“People saw the flights, they went up many times from the airport and they are flying in the skies outside the airport and coming back,” he said, citing witnesses in northern Aleppo province near the base, which is 70km south of Turkey.
It was not clear whether the jets were equipped with weaponry or whether the pilots could fly longer distances in the planes, which witnesses said appeared to be MiG 21 or MiG 23 models captured from the Syrian military.
Pro-Daesh Twitter accounts had previously posted pictures of captured jets in other parts of Syria, but the aircraft had appeared unusable, according to analysts and diplomats.
The countryside east of Aleppo city is one of the main bases of Daesh in Syria, where the Al Qaida offshoot controls up to a third of the country’s territory.
Meanwhile, Iraqi officials in the western Anbar province say a curfew has been imposed in the provincial capital Ramadi over fears that Daesh might try to advance on the city.
Sabah Karhout, the chairman of the Anbar provincial council, says the curfew began at midnight on Friday as part of an effort to limit movement in and out of the city.
Ramadi, about 100km west of Baghdad, is the key city in the mostly Sunni province of Anbar, where Daesh fighters have been active in recent months.
Daesh has been making gains around Ramadi in recent weeks against the embattled Iraqi military, despite ongoing US-led coalition airstrikes on the militants.
Two Iraqi military officials, speaking anonymously because they are not authorised to brief the media, say major operations are underway in Salahuddin province to retake key areas from the radical Islamist militants around Tikrit and the Beiji oil refinery.
