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A US channel revealed the details of an Iranian attack on a US military base in Syria following the assassination of Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani.
And in the details, “Hello friend. If you’re watching this video, some bad things happened to your dad last night, so I want you to be strong, for your mom’s sake. You always know that I love you. bye my friend “.
Before the commander of the United States Army, Alan Johnson, recorded this message to his son, an intelligence officer had told him that they had information that Iran was preparing 27 medium-range ballistic missiles and that their objective was to settle the Ain Al-Asad’s sprawling airbase about 120 miles west of Baghdad, “and Ningo may not, according to interviews by CBS News’s 60 Minutes.
This attack was the first indication of the response to the assassination of the commander of the Quds Force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, by a drone six nights ago, specifically on January 3, 2020, which began moving ballistic missiles as US forces. . they were watching closely.
“The only thing I can think of is that God’s hand protected us … no one should have survived this,” Army Major Alan Johnson says of the night in January 2020 when Iranian ballistic missiles fell on an air base. American in Iraq. . https://t.co/QbbRizRZ79 pic.twitter.com/htYJL7LiTd
– 60 minutes (to 60 minutes) March 1, 2021
Air Force Lt. Col. Stacey Coleman and her colleagues rushed to evacuate more than 50 planes and 1,000 soldiers before the missiles hit. But the base still needed to be inhabited, “We still need to be able to do our work. Therefore, the first decision was to divide our team based on combat capacity. “
Lieutenant Colonel Tim Garland, who led an army battalion in Ain Al-Asad, sent most of his soldiers into the desert to observe the attack, if it happened, from a safe distance.
“There were a lot of people who didn’t want to leave,” he says. They want to carry the load and share the danger. “
From his headquarters in Florida, the commander of the United States Central Command, General Frank MacKenzie, tried to correctly time the evacuation.
“If you go early, you run the risk of the enemy seeing what you’ve done and adjusting your plans,” he explains.
The Iranians monitored the Ain al-Assad base by buying images like those taken by commercial satellites. MacKenzie waited until Iran downloaded its last image of the day, seeing planes on the ground and people working, without seeing evacuations.
“I think they expected the destruction of several aircraft and the death of several members of the American service personnel,” MacKenzie said.
A few hours after Johnson was searched, Iranian ballistic missiles had already rained down on the Ain Al-Asad air base in Iraq, where 2,000 American soldiers were stationed.
While warhead-bearing ballistic missiles weighed 1,000 pounds each, Americans caught in the crossfire could do nothing but run or seek shelter for protection.
Johnson was hiding in a shelter designed to protect troops from the smallest warheads weighing only 60 pounds, and the Ain Al-Asad base did not have any ballistic missile repellent systems.
The explosions sparked fires reaching the bunkers, according to Johnson, who confirmed that the bunker did not provide protection against this.
It was 1:34 in the morning when the first missile fell.
With the arrival of a second missile, Johnson and his companions began running again, looking for a hiding place, describing the sound of the missile as “like a freight train passing by.”
Johnson describes these moments: “There were six of us running to the next bunker in an attempt to save our lives … When we got there, we realized that there were about 40 people trying to get into this shelter, which was designed for only about 40 people. ten people. We were pushing each other to have enough space in the basement. “
“The best bunkers were the bomb shelters built under Saddam Hussein, but there weren’t enough,” Coleman said.
Iran launched a total of 16 rockets that night, from three locations, 11 of which landed at the Ain Al-Assad base, while five missed their targets.
Air Force Commander Sgt. John Haines and his security team were outside their armored vehicle when the first missiles landed, describing it as “like an immediate dawn.”
“I picked up the phone and ran to my car,” he says. Once this effect occurred, the back pressure generated by the explosion of one of the missiles closed our doors, and then I saw a cloud of earth, then fire.
McKinsey, for his part, was following the attack from a small room in his Florida headquarters, where he could communicate directly with the only two people who were above him in the chain of command. Bring in the secretary of defense, and a little later they bring the president into this conversation. “
The rockets lasted 80 minutes, during which no one died.
And when the sun came up, the survivors cleaned up the damage.
Keltz suffered a concussion for two weeks, describing her condition at the time, “as if someone hit me over the head with a hammer over and over again.”
Johnson suffers from a headache even today, due to a “terrible ringing in the ears.”
Military doctors diagnosed more than 100 traumatic brain injuries.
“It looked like a scene from a movie where everything around you was destroyed, but no one died,” Haines said.
While Coleman said: “I still don’t know how we survived, but the hand of God was with us and protected us and did not cause deaths, not even serious injuries.”
“It was definitely an attack unlike anything I had seen or experienced before, and I thought the cost would be too high,” he describes tonight.
MacKenzie notes that this attack let them know that Iran’s missiles are very accurate, especially since they were fired at a great distance.
“It was certainly an attack like nothing I have ever seen or experienced,” General Frank McKenzie says of Iran’s missile attack on a US air base in Iraq. “They fired those missiles at a significant range. And they hit practically where they wanted to hit. “Https://t.co/7gxIRAndE4 pic.twitter.com/AkVRWXyVXn
– 60 minutes (to 60 minutes) March 1, 2021
“The honest truth is, I didn’t think we would survive,” Coleman says, responding to his belief about the people who would stay on the base.
And in the event that the base was not evacuated from the planes and many American soldiers, before the Iranian attack, MacKenzie said, “I think we could have lost 20 or 30 planes and maybe 100 to 150 American personnel,” noting that not killing any American led to avoiding the outbreak of war with Iran.
Iran was on alert for a possible US attack and hours later accidentally shot down a Ukrainian plane, believing it to be a US bomber. 176 people have died completely innocent, which has made her pay so far for this great mistake.
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