Ukrainian Airlines tragedy leaves Tehran dangerously isolated
The latest twists in the story of the crash of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 outside Tehran in the early morning of 8 January, in which all 176 aboard died, has left the Iranian authorities embarrassed, angry – and even more dangerously isolated.
At first, they battled the increasingly credible voices that the plan had been down by one of the Revolutionary Guard’s own anti-aircraft missiles. “Scientifically it is impossible that a missile hit the Ukrainian plane,” Ali Abedzadeh of Iran’s civil aviation authority declared, “and such rumours are impossible.”
But satellite tracking and some video footage from the ground showed the plane being struck, and then on fire before hitting the ground. This led Justin Trudeau the Prime Minister of Canada, the ultimate destination for most of the passengers, to declare it had been hit by missiles. Further reports state that a Russian-built Tor-M1 missile battery had been seen to ‘light up’, in other words and go into firing mode and for at least two missiles to be launched. It would have taken them less than five seconds to strike.
Canada has requested access to the crash site and technical data, as have Boeing, the manufacturer of the 737-800 plane, which was only three years old. Having stonewalled at first, the Iranian authorities have now said they will cooperate.
The downing of Flight 752 came a few hours after the Iranians had launched 15 intermediate missiles at bases housing US soldiers at al-Asad in Anbar and Irbil in the Kurdish region in Iraq. This was a riposte to the killing of the head of the al Quds force, General Qasem Soleimani, by American Reaper drone at Baghdad airport on 3 January.
The missile strike seems to have been more of a gesture than a deliberate act of war – which suggests that the Iranians may still be plotting a surprise, unconventional attack as their main act of revenge for the killing of Soleimani. The strike on Irbil and al-Asad caused little damage and no US personnel were in the way.
None the less, the Iranians are likely to have been preparing for a counter strike – and where the airliner went down was not too far from the launch sites of the medium range missiles on Iraq a few hours before.
This leads to a major mystery as to why the Tor system in question locked onto this particular aircraft, whose flight plan and identity as a Boeing 737 must have been discernible to the battery commanders and those manning its radar. There had been several other aircraft in the air at the same time, going in and out of Tehran airport. An ugly hypothesis is that the Iranians were aiming to shoot at some aircraft at that time, but not the one they actually hit.
The result is that the international air traffic regulators have told all passenger airlines to avoid Iranian and Iraqi airspace as a whole – they are now off limits as war zones. For Iran this means further isolation, compounding the steady commercial tourniquet of the latest US-inspired sanctions. The whole string of mishaps seems to mean that the nuclear pact, the JCPOA of 2015/16 could be about to breathe its last gasp.
The incident of the mistaken firing of the missiles, now a certainty more than probability, is one of a series of mishaps involving fire-control misdirection of new generation ground to air missiles. The most notorious incident of the past ten years in this regard was the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine on 17 July 2014, in which all 298 aboard were killed, most of Dutch or Malaysian citizenship. Dutch investigators concluded that the aircraft had been shot down by Ukrainian separatists firing a Russian Buk truck-mounted anti-aircraft missile battery. They had mistaken the Boeing 777 commercial plane as an air transporter from the Ukrainian forces.
Other agencies later identified this as being brought across the border with Russia from the Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade. The Russians have said this is fake news, one of a number of conspiracy theories pout about by their enemies in Kiev, Amsterdam and Washington – but few have fallen for this.
A large part of the problem is the automation of the anti-aircraft missile systems, where the fire control system, the trigger, is fully integrated with the radar. Once the radar has locked on to the target, it can be very tricky to interrupt the firing sequence – which can matter of split seconds. Both the Buk system in 2014 and the Tor M1 outside Tehran should have been able to check the status of a target aircraft through the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) code transmitted from the aircraft’s transponders. The Tor M1 crew should have been able to see that the aircraft their radar had lit up was civilian and a Boeing 737.
These mishaps are more often down to human rather than mechanical error. At the beginning of the UK operation in the incursion into Iraq in March 2003, an RAF Tornado fighter-bomber was shot down over Kuwait on return from a mission into Iraq by a US Patriot missile battery. The gunners either didn’t understand the IFF exchange or weren’t prepared for an unfamiliar brand of allied aircraft coming into their airspace. Both crewmen were killed as a result.
The worst case of mistaken aerial identity in the long and tangled story of America’s standoff with the Islamic Republic of Iran took place on July 3rd 1988 over the Gulf. The US missile cruiser Vincennes shot down Air Iran Flight 655 en route for Dubai from Tehran via Bandar Abbas, killing all 274 passengers and crew aboard. The Vincennes captain later claimed that he was engaging an old F-14 Tomcat fighter-bomber of the Iranian forces, but mistakenly had hit the Iran Air A300 Airbus.
The tangled trail of consequences through devious ways to the commissioning of a terrorist cell to place a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 73, a Boeing 747 which then blew up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21st 1988. In all, 270 people were killed, including eleven on the ground in Lockerbie itself. How the revenge plot was hatched and prosecuted is still a matter of huge controversy. Libyan agents were convicted through a convoluted legal process, including a Scottish court sitting in The Hague.
Few are convinced by the official story to this day. The strongest conjecture is that the Iranians subcontracted the revenge strike in the first place to the guerrillas of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command of Ahmed Jibril. By various means the bomb was first loaded either in Frankfurt or Malta – and it is still far from clear which – and then loaded onto the Pan Am Flight luggage hold at Heathrow.
This is a dreadful tale of mistaken identities, misreading of aspirations and interests, and a tangle of unforeseen and unintended consequences. Which is where we are now with the whole string of incidents up to and including the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the strikes and counter-strikes, and the seemingly unintended shooting down of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752.
Two conclusions require immediate action – and they apply as much to the Trump White House as much as the councils of the Supreme Leader in Tehran. They need some clear understanding of where each other stand and what they want – which means ditching the culture of conspiracy and superstition that clouds both parties.
And they must find a way to talk, whether overtly or covertly.