Israel's Air Dominance Over The Middle East Was Decades In The Making
Israeli fighter jets fly low during the funeral of the former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and ... More Hashem Safieddine, who were killed in Israeli attacks last year, while tens of thousands of mourners attend their funeral in Beirut, Lebanon on February 23, 2025. (Photo by TOUFIC RMEITI/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
Israeli Air Force fifth- and fourth-generation fighter jets are freely entering Iranian airspace and bombing targets and assassinating high-value military personnel every day with little to no resistance. These jets traverse Syrian and Iraqi airspace en route to their targets, where they encounter no obstacles. While such aerial dominance over three strategically located Middle Eastern countries dramatically accelerated in the post-October 2023 conflicts that raged throughout the region, it was also decades in the making.
Fifty Israeli fighters violated Iraq's airspace on their way to Iran, Baghdad's representative to the United Nations, Abbas Kadhom Obaid Al-Fatlawi, said on Friday, noting that they came from border areas between neighboring Syria and Jordan.
'Twenty airplanes started, followed by 30 airplanes heading to the south of Iraq, and they flew over Basra, Najaf and Karbala cities,' Al-Fatlawi reported.
The complaint stands in striking contrast to the deafening silence in neighboring Syria over the Israel-Iran War. IAF warplanes are not only crossing through Syrian airspace several times per day to strike Iran, but they've also intercepted a number of suspected Iranian-made drones there, which were either headed for Israel or U.S. bases in the area.
Syria's transitional government doubtlessly wants to avoid becoming entangled in a war or risk confronting the Israelis. Israel already destroyed what was left of that country's strategic arsenal after the Assad regime collapsed in December. Iraq has American-made F-16s—but they lack any long-range air-to-air missiles. It also has Russian-made Pantsir-S1 medium-range air defenses—but they are also unlikely to threaten Israel's enormous aerial offensive. After all, Israel's air force has had lots of practice over the last decade evading and occasionally destroying the former Syrian regime's Pantsir-S1s and Buk-M2E anti-aircraft missiles, often through the usage of its indigenous standoff munitions.
In his Friday statement, Al-Fatlawi also dubbed the Israeli incursions 'violations of international law and the UN Charter.'
His statement brings to mind a historical episode from decades ago in which Iraq similarly complained to the United Nations about a much smaller incursion that took place under different circumstances.
On October 4, 1991, four Israeli F-15s took off, flying at low altitude over Syrian airspace before crossing into Iraq and ascending over the Al-Qaim and Al-Walid border regions before returning home.
That flyover occurred after the 1991 Persian Gulf War when Israel endured Iraqi Scud missile attacks on its home front ordered by then-dictator Saddam Hussein. The U.S. did not want Israel intervening in that conflict for fear it would fragment the multinational coalition, which included Arab states like Egypt and Syria, assembled to expel Hussein from Kuwait. Washington tried to reassure Israel by transferring additional Patriot missiles to defend it against the Scuds, which proved ineffective, and dispatching coalition jets and special forces to Iraq's western Anbar province to search for the mobile missile launchers.
Israeli generals and military officials were eager for a direct retaliation amid the mounting Scud attacks, which hitherto were wholly unprecedented. However, Israeli intelligence on Iraq differed little from what CNN broadcasted during that war. Furthermore, the U.S. refused to share the coalition's IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) codes with Israel, meaning that if IAF fighters entered Iraqi airspace, they might encounter 'friendly' fire from coalition fighters in addition to the Iraqi Air Force. The U.S. suggested Israel could mount a strike using its undeclared surface-to-surface arsenal of Jericho ballistic missiles. However, the Jerichos weren't fully operational at that time, leaving Israel with no other viable option to respond.
In light of these shortcomings, the October 1991 flyover was a belated way for the Israeli Air Force to demonstrate its capability to reach its adversaries on their home turf.
A decade earlier, doubtlessly heeding lessons from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War—when an array of Soviet-made Egyptian surface-to-air missile batteries along the Suez Canal denied the IAF air superiority that won the 1967 war—Israel destroyed Syrian air defenses in Lebanon. In 1982, Israel launched Mole Cricket 19, a highly sophisticated suppression of enemy air defenses operation, in which IAF jets pulverized Syria's modern Soviet-made SAMs forward-deployed in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley. Israel's newly-delivered fourth-generation F-15s and F-16s also shot down over 80Soviet-made Syrian aircraft in dogfights without suffering any losses in return. Mole Cricket 19 was, in many ways, game-changing.
Damascus still had formidable air defenses covering its national airspace in 1991 when those four Israeli F-15s briefly passed through. When justifying purchasing the fifth-generation F-22 Raptor stealth fighter in the emergent post-Cold War era, the U.S. Air Force cited the potential threat of Syria's air defenses, retrospectively describing them as one of 'the most modern … integrated air defenses.'
The United States deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003, and Iraq only acquired the F-16s and Pantsirs mentioned above in the 2010s. Syria descended into a barbarous civil war in 2011. Israel began launching airstrikes on Syrian territory in early 2013, primarily aimed at preventing suspected Iranian arms transfers to Hezbollah in Lebanon through that war-torn country. Israel would repeatedly foil Iranian attempts to supply Syria with air defenses or deploy air defenses to protect its paramilitary forces and allied militias, such as a Tor-M1 system Iran tried to set up in Homs province in 2018. Israeli jets dodged hundreds of largely ineffective Syrian SAMs in those years, although one F-16 crashed while under fire from a long-range S-200 missile in February 2018, an extremely rare loss for the IAF.
IAF fighter-bombers frequently used standoff munitions in these strikes, sometimes launching them while operating in the airspace of Syria's western neighbor Lebanon. Syrian state media would often claim that their Russian-made SAMs, especially the more modern Pantsir and Buk systems, invariably intercepted most of these incoming Israeli munitions. Even a nominal delivery of a strategic, long-range Russian S-300 air defense system to Damascus in 2018 did nothing, and likely couldn't do anything, to deter Israel's air campaign. Apparent Russian efforts to enhance Syria's existing systems in the early 2020s similarly did not seem to deter the IAF operations even slightly.
After armed opposition groups in Syria finally deposed the Assad regime in a lightning November-December 2024 offensive, Israel swiftly took action. With the former regime's army out of the picture, Israeli jets swooped in to destroy Syria's strategic arsenal of military hardware, including air defenses. Within days, Syrian airspace became more accessible to the Israeli Air Force than at any other time in history. Israeli jets could leisurely fly anywhere inside Syria they desired. According to one Israeli press report, IAF pilots could 'merrily fly in pairs' at 'any altitude, to any range, to any spot in Israel's first circle of defense.'
And the icing on the cake for Israel, its bulky tanker aircraft, otherwise vulnerable to the most basic of anti-aircraft systems, could also fly over Syria with little risk. Israel saw this as an opening to conduct an extensive air campaign against Iran.
Even before Assad's collapse dramatically increased its freedom of operation, the IAF launched a brief but extensive series of strikes against air defense and missile production facilities deep inside Iran on October 26, 2024, doubtlessly using standoff, air-launched ballistic missiles. In the mid-2010s, IAF jets trained against one of the Greek S-300s on Crete, cognizant it might one day face Syrian or Iranian S-300s. Israel said it hit all Iranian S-300 systems following that October strike, something Tehran disputed. It's highly likely that any surviving Iranian S-300s or components havebeen destroyed since June 13.
The opening salvos of the ongoing Rising Lion operation against Iran's regime and nuclear program saw the IAF once again launching ALBMs at standoff ranges. IAF jets are presently conducting close-range bombings all across Iran of the kind that it previously didn't even risk attempting in Syria just a few years ago.
It's unclear how long the Israel-Iran War will continue nor how long the IAF will seek to preserve this aerial dominance. Iraq is acquiring KM-SAMs from South Korea, which will provide it with a strategic air defense capability for the first time since 1991. Whether Baghdad would risk firing these at intruding IAF jets that are not actively attacking targets on its territory is doubtful, given the crushing retaliation doing so would likely incur.
Syria's transitional government seems eager to avoid any confrontation with Israel for the time being and may even reach a peace agreement and normalization in the future. In the meantime, Turkey may play a role in helping Syria build new air defenses and provide air defense coverage on its behalf in the interim. Israel strongly objected to Turkey deploying air defenses in Homs—possibly at the same Syrian airbase where Iran tried to deploy a Tor in 2018—earlier this year. It likely feared its window of opportunity to use Syrian airspace as an unimpeded aerial highway to Iran—'as busy as Highway 6,' as Israeli pilots quip—could close if Turkey stepped in, especially if it deployed its S-400 systems in central Syria, which Ankara reportedly considered doing.
Where Iran could turn to rebuild its decimated air defenses when the smoke from this war clears is anyone's guess. Its experience with Russian systems, or any fundamental political changes in Tehran after this war, could mean it will pursue non-Russian alternatives going forward. Interestingly, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a June 19 press conference that Moscow 'once offered our Iranian friends to work on an air defense system. At the time, our partners did not show much interest.'
Iran was reportedly hoping to acquire S-400s in return for arming Russia for its war on Ukraine. Whether Putin's talk about working on a system referred to local Iranian production of an existing system, such as the S-400, or the co-development of an entirely new system is unclear. Interestingly, the KM-SAM Iraq ordered from South Korea fires a missile based on technology from the 9M96 used in the Russian S-350E and S-400 systems that Moscow shared but made entirely with indigenous Korean parts. It's unclear if Russia offered to help Iran develop a similar tailor-made system by sharing its existing technologies.
What is clear, even as this war progresses, is that the present air superiority enjoyed by the IAF developed gradually over decades and then suddenly began in the last quarter of 2024. Learning from mistakes in 1973 enabled it to mount the game-changing 1982 SEAD operation against Syria in Lebanon. The first time its home front came under repeated missile fire in 1991 led it to develop one of the most advanced, multi-layered air defenses worldwide—and at least partially resulted in Israel building its unique ALBMs decades later. Dodging and gradually chipping away at Syria's dense network of air defenses from 2013-24 gave IAF pilots continuous training in a real-world combat environment and the ability to swiftly destroy most of the country's military arsenal the moment the opportunity presented itself.
And now there is the truly unprecedented air campaign underway over Iran itself today.
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