In 1974, the Kurds Got Extremely Lucky—And Shot Down an Iraqi MiG-19
The Peshmerga took good care of the captured pilot
by PAUL IDDON
In the early 2010s, Iraqi Kurds lobbied the United States against selling Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters to Iraq, warning that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could use the aircraft against their autonomous region.
At the time, Iraqi Kurdistan’s veteran leader, Masoud Barzani, indirectly referenced a historical episode in which the Kurdish Peshmerga militia shot down an Iraqi fighter jet attacking their mountainous, landlocked region.
“For us, F-16s are no different to MiG-19s or MiG-21s,” Barzani said in a 2012 interview. “We’ve seen them being used against us. We’ve seen tanks, artillery and other weapons being used against our people.”
“That’s not what we’re afraid of,” Barzani added. “What we fear is the mentality that still believes in using planes, artillery and tanks to solve the problems.”
Barzani warned the Kurds may again “be obliged to go back to the times when we had to think about how to target the F-16s—so they wouldn’t reach us.”
His specific reference to Mikoyan MiG-19s and MiG-21s is noteworthy. Iraq got those jets from the Soviet Union in the 1960s, when the Kurds—then led by Masoud’s father Mullah Mustafa Barzani—fought a protracted insurgency against Baghdad.
After nine years of fighting, the two sides signed the Iraqi-Kurdish Autonomy Agreement in 1970. However, fighting resumed in 1974 following the collapse of autonomy talks, sparking the Second Iraqi-Kurdish War.
That conflict lasted less than a year and saw the Pesh, which had expanded and reorganized in the intervening four years, try to fight like a conventional army. The move ultimately proved disastrous for the Kurds. The Iraqi army routed the Pesh—and Kurdistan lost its hard-won autonomy for the next 16 years later.
Nevertheless, the Pesh enjoyed a few tactical successes, including shooting down an Iraqi MiG—an incident that may have been on Masoud Barzani’s mind 38 years later.
On Aug. 23, 1974, 23-year-old Iraqi pilot Safa Shalal flew his MiG-19 from an air base near Iraq’s second city Mosul to the Chouman Valley in neighboring Kurdistan for a strafing run against suspected Pesh positions.
A Pesh machine gun hit a control line on one of the MiG’s wing flaps. Shalal lost control and ejected.
Kurdish fighters grabbed the pilot. “I thought they would kill me,” Shalal, then a prisoner of war, told the Associated Press a month later. “You can expect that in any war.”
Shalal was one of at least 127 Iraqi prisoners of war held by the Pesh as of October 1974. As a fighter pilot, he got preferential treatment, including a single room inside a modern villa in Chouman that was originally built for a local mayor—and which the Kurds converted into a POW camp.
Journalist Colin Smith, who provided meticulous on-the-ground reportage of that war, visited the villa, describing Shalal—whose name he gave as Safa Shellal Fayad—as the “chief prize” among the Iraqi POWs. The captured Iraqi pilot told Smith his mission was searching for armed combatants in Kurdistan and strafing any he found.
“He couldn’t explain how he could discriminate between armed men and innocent civilians wrapped up in 500 miles per hour of flying metal,” Smith wrote. “From his embarrassed silences, it became obvious that Kurdistan was a free-fire zone: if it moves, hit it.”
Shalal told A.P. he was only in the middle of his second-ever mission when the Pesh shot him down. However, the logbook recovered from the wreckage of his MiG-19 indicated he had flown several missions, including an air strike on a Kurdish village that killed two children two weeks earlier.
While Kurds viewed him as a war criminal, there were no indications they mistreated him. On the contrary, Shalal even expressed satisfaction with his treatment, going so far as to say the manager of the camp had “a good heart.”
He felt comfortable enough to say he could conceivably bomb the Kurds again some day. “I am a career officer,” he said. “I must follow orders.”
Shalal and his fellow Iraqi POWs received three to four cups of tea a day, along with rice, bread and vegetables as well as toiletries such as soap and razor blades. Each POW could also rely on their captors giving them one kilogram of tobacco per month.
“These people are treated better than our own Peshmerga in the field,” one Kurd told A.P. “Some of them never had such good treatment in their own units in the Iraqi army.”
Dubious claims
While the Pesh invariably claimed in those days that Shalal’s MiG-19 wasn’t the only Iraqi fighter the militants shot down, it was undoubtedly the most well-documented and conclusively verified shoot-down. Smith described a Pesh anti-aircraft demonstration as “painfully slow,” expressing doubt over their claim to have shot down 40 Iraqi aircraft.
Given the paucity of air-defenses in the Kurdish arsenal, luck likely played a major part in the downing of that MiG-19. “The few Dushka 12.7-millimeter anti-aircraft machine guns and Hispano Suiza 30-millimeter cannons that they have must be concentrated to defend Barzani’s headquarters” on the strategic Haj Omran-Chouman road, reporter Smith Hempstone wrote.
“These weapons are of such small caliber that, even when they are emplaced on 9,000-foot peaks, the Iraqi aircraft can still bomb with impunity from high altitudes.”
And bomb with impunity the Iraqi air force certainly did. Aside from strafing refugee columns and napalming crops, Iraqi fighter jets and even Tupolev Tu-22 strategic bombers also attacked sheep and cattle.
The Pesh couldn’t reliably bring down attacking fighters like Shalal’s. Instead, they posted lookouts on mountain peaks and listened for incoming aircraft. When those troops detected aircraft, they fired warning shots, alerting civilians to seek shelter in caves or trenches.
The war ended in tragic defeat for the Kurds in March 1975. The 1980s proved even more devastating for them, with Iraq’s genocidal Anfal campaign and the infamous bombing of Halabja with poison gas.
The Kurds regained fragile autonomy in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War—and reaffirmed it in post-2003 Iraq. By the 2010s, the region basked in unprecedented economic prosperity.
Iraq would ultimately receive F-16s not long after Maliki stepped down, at a time when the country faced an existential threat from the Islamic State terror group. Unlike its MiGs in the past, Baghdad never used the F-16s against Iraqi Kurdistan.
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