An Aviation Disaster Was Barely Averted Over Syria

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Iran has complained to the International Civil Aviation Organization after a Mahan Air plane flying from Tehran to Beirut was intercepted by a U.S. fighter jet in Syrian airspace on Thursday morning. The Islamic Republic is demanding an investigation of what it claims was a “clear violation of international law.” It says passengers were injured as the airliner was forced to drop altitude abruptly to avoid a collision with the American F-15.

A spokesman for U.S. Central Command said the fighter jet “conducted a standard visual inspection” of the Mahan Air plane, in accordance with international standards, at a “safe distance of approximately 1,000 meters.” The F-15 had been on a routine mission near al-Tanf in southern Syria, where the U.S. maintains a small military base.

Tehran, predictably, is drawing parallels between the incident and the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by USS Vincennes, which mistook the airliner for an Iranian F-14. All 290 lives on board were lost. The more recent tragedy of the Ukrainian airliner brought down by a Iranian missile, killing 176 people, is unlikely to feature in Tehran’s rhetoric. That plane’s black boxes, belatedly delivered to France, are revealing deeply embarrassing details for a regime that initially claimed its air-defense systems were too sophisticated to make a mistake. 

We should all be grateful that the Mahan Air flight didn’t end in tragedy. Had it done so, the regime in Tehran might have been tempted into a rash retaliation.

Although the exact details of Thursday’s encounter may get lost in the fog of the propaganda war between Iran and the U.S., some facts are worth keeping in mind as the story goes through its inevitable spin cycle.

First, Mahan Air is not your typical civilian airline. It does sell tickets and fly ordinary Iranians to foreign destinations, but it also serves the regime as a troop-carrier and weapons-delivery service. The U.S. imposed sanctions on Mahan Air in 2011, for providing financial and other support to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Trump administration, too, has imposed sanctions on the airline and on companies providing services to it. Germany and France have both banned it for ferrying Iranian troops and arms into war zones.

Second, the U.S. base at al-Tanf is hardly a secret. It can be found by anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of open-access satellite imagery. Certainly, no civilian airline operating in Middle Eastern skies can be unaware that the base is protected by military jets, not to mention surface-to-air missile batteries. Any sensible pilot obliged to fly over Syria would give al-Tanf a wide berth.

Nor can there be any doubt that Iran and its proxy militias in the region pose a threat to the base. Syrian and Russian forces have menaced it as well. So the appearance of an Iranian aircraft on the radar — even one giving every appearance of being non-threatening — might understandably merit a closer look.

Third, much of Syrian airspace is dangerous, bristling with drones and manned military aircraft of all stripes — American, Russian, Syrian, Turkish and Israeli. The regime of Bashar al-Assad frequently fires off missiles (some of them Iranian) to defend against air attacks, and its batteries are not well-known for accuracy.

As a result, most legitimate airlines avoid flying over Syria. American carriers are expressly forbidden from doing so by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency’s latest bulletin on Syria warns that, “with the presence of terrorist organizations and ongoing military operations, there is a risk of both intentional targeting and misidentification of civil aircraft. The presence of a wide range of ground-to-ground and dedicated anti-aviation weaponry poses a HIGH risk to operations at all flight altitudes.”

There have been even closer shaves than the one experienced by the Mahan Air plane. In February, another airliner from Tehran to Damascus was forced into an emergency landing at the Russian-controlled Hmeimim Air Base to avoid coming under fire from Syrian air defenses. That aircraft belonged to another U.S.-sanctioned airline, Cham Wings, which had the dubious distinction of flying the IRGC’s Qassem Soleimani on his final flight to Baghdad — shortly before he was killed by an American drone strike.

Given the perils that lurk in Syria’s skies, count it a blessing that such incidents, and the encounter between the Mahan Air plane and the F-15, don’t take place more often.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He writes on foreign affairs, with a special focus on the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.

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