Saudi Arabia is deploying combat planes to Turkey to fight ISIS

Royal Saudi Air Force aircraft will launch air strikes against Daesh from Turkey.

RSAF aircraft are being deployed to Incirlik airbase, Turkey, from where they will launch air strikes against ISIS, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğluy said on Feb. 13.

Saudi Arabia has been part of the US-led coalition fighting Daesh since 2014; by moving its combat planes closer to the area of operations it will be able to increase the ops tempo.

F-15RSAF

Image credit: Antonio Muñiz Zaragüeta

It’s not clear how many RSAF aircraft will be deployed, what type of aircraft the Saudi will deploy nor when these will arrive. So far, Saudi officials have performed a site survey, the Turkish foreign minister siad.

Saudi Arabia is not the only country moving its aircraft to Turkey: according to some media reports, Qatar and UAE (both already belonging to the anti-ISIS coalition and launching their sorties from Jordan) will station their warplanes in Turkish airbases, including Diyarbakir, in the southeastern region of the country.

RSAF-Typhoon-top

Image credit: Alessandro Fucito

About David Cenciotti
David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.

9 Comments

  1. Bombs in in Urban environment, on targets that are used by an insurgency no matter their initial use are going to cause dead “civilians” and civilians. Just look the tally of US airstrikes recent years. Even with far more accuracy they cause dead non-combatants.

    • You drop a 500-2000lbs of HE there is ALWAYS going to be collateral damage. Close to 90-95% of munitions used by fixed wing aircraft by the US has been PGMs since 2004. Atleast with PGMs collateral damage is minimized as much as possible.

  2. I remember that opposite.
    “Oct. 3 bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which killed 30 people, U.S. military officials” confirmed or was it the Russians how you imagine it?

    • Good point. Certain people would probably blame Russia for that as well. Strangely, they have no problem with all the civilians killed by IS and similar, “opposition groups” in Syria.

      • We do have problems with that, we just think that Russian killing civilians indiscriminately is also wrong.

        • You speak about killing civilians if Russia does it, just not if nato does it. Western double standards.

    • A hospital that wasn’t marked in any way, either by a red cross or red crescent moon. people were told to leave. reported that during the fighting Taliban fighters would hold up within the structure and would be used as a makeshift command by local Taliban Commanders.

      What about Russia’s seemingly indiscriminate bombing of “targets” during their “intervention” into Georgia in 2008?

    • And to top it all, the US owned up the mistake, apologized and are helping victims. While Russia bombs those places, on purpose, multiple times, and then blame someone else!
      Typical Russiaboos!

  3. Last time I checked with SoS bullet points, Russia is using “dumb, old, rusty bombs”. They can’t “accurately deliver their payloads”, which in return results in civilian casualties ” called “collateral damage”, in Western Ingsoc. While puting a GPS guided 250 lbs bomb on a identified MSF hospital, that’s exactly targeting civilian infrastructure. Kthxbye.

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