US President Donald Trump says “hell will rain down” on Iran if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened by Monday.Trump’s warning comes as search for the weapons officer of a US fighter jet shot down over Iran enters a second day. Iran said it downed two US warplanes: one in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, and the other crashing in the Gulf.
This is just another in a long line of deadlines.
All of this comes as the US continues to search for one of the pilots downed by Iranian air defences in the last few days. The difficulty of the search is compounded by the fact that it appears two search and rescue helicopters were also downed by Iranian defences. The crews of those helicopters were rescued.
This has many ramifications for the US. Washington had recently deployed, for example, B-52 bombers, which can carry a far greater payload, because the president had claimed Iran’s air defence systems had been obliterated. Well, clearly the events over the past 24 hours show this is not the case. The deployment of huge, highly expensive and vulnerable bombers may now have to be stopped.
“The situation is evolving; you’ve got a pilot shot down in enemy territory, and it’s a race against time”, Patrick Bury, defence and security specialist at the University of Bath, tells Al Jazeera.
“The search and rescue teams are really well prepared”, he said, referring to images released on social media of US refuelling aircraft helping Apache helicopters, Black Hawks, which have Air Force Special Forces who are “trained specifically for … identifying and extracting targets”, Bury, who is a former British Army officer, explained.
He added that the pilot might have been trained in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Extraction) techniques.
Whether the Iranians will capture the pilot depends on a number of variables, including “whether their homing beacon is working, where they’ve landed, geographically, what the population density is there… whether the pilot is able to buy off the actual locals with cash and gold they often have in their survival equipment kit,” he said.
