The rescue of the air man from the F-15E fighter jet was announced by Donald Trump in a late night social media post
The second crew member of a downed F-15E fighter jet has been rescued by US commandos overnight, ending a dramatic two-day search after the warplane crashed in south-west Iran.
The crew member, a colonel and weapons systems officer, had sustained some injuries but was successfully extracted by US special forces, Donald Trump said in a social media post soon after midnight EST.
The US president called the operation to recover the air man “one of most daring search and rescue operations in U.S history” – and claimed that not a “single American” had been killed or wounded in the operation.
“At my direction, the U.S. Military sent dozens of aircraft, armed with the most lethal weapons in the World, to retrieve him. He sustained injuries, but he will be just fine,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.
Initial reports indicated that once located hiding in the mountains, the colonel was rescued by a special forces team under a hail of heavy covering fire. Three Islamic Revolutionary Guards were killed, according to Iranian sources.
Iran’s military said on Sunday that it had destroyed three US aircraft involved in the search operation and that the Americans had used an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan as a base. State media shared images of charred wreckage scattered across a desert area, with smoke still emanating from the site.
At least one $115m Hercules had to be destroyed in Iran because it had run into difficulties, having become bogged down in the ground, according to US media. Extra transport planes had to be flown in to complete the extraction.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, highlighted the cost of the lost aircraft with an apparent photograph of the wreckage: “If the United States gets three more victories like this, it will be utterly ruined.”
Footage emerged of what was said to be night-time clashes in Iran’s Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, near the city of Dehdasht, about 30 miles from the coast in the south-west of the country, the area where US searches had been taking
