Military Model Scene

Title: Wings of Iraq Vol2
Author: Milos Sipos & Tom Cooper
Publisher: Helion & Co
ISBN: 978-1-914377-17-4

This is the second of 3 planned volumes in the Middle East @ War series from Helion, and covers the history of the Iraqi Air Force (IrAF). Volume 1 took it from formation in 1931 up to 1970, and now this new vol 2 carries the story on from 1970 through to 1980. A 78-page soft-cover book in the standard style for this popular series. Plenty of maps, archive images plus a section of 9-pages of colour artwork and photos, with plenty of useful colour profiles showing colours and markings on an assortment of aircraft types plus a page of squadron badges from the period 1931 through to 2003.
The book opens with a page remembering the Late Brigadier General Ahmad Sadik Rushdie Al-Astrabadi, a retired officer from the Intelligence Directorate of the Iraqi Air Force whose interviews with the authors between 2005 and 2007 provided much of the material that enabled this set of 3 books to be written. He passed away in 2019. This book covers a 10 year period, a time of great change in terms of political leadership as the Ba'ath party took the reins in Iraq, they had to get over the Israeli victory in the 6-Day War of 1967, and began to change from the older British Hunters and adopted newer aircraft, both French and then Russian. It takes us through those developments, another war with Israel in 1973 as well as internal fighting against Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. New bases were built with the aid of external expertise and the Soviets (remembering this was before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989) supplying new aircraft, but arms sales that were not without their problems. At the end of the decade the Iraqis decided to attack their neighbours in Iran, the start of a bitter new war. It opened with air attacks against Iranian air bases, but poor intelligence led to multiple but largely ineffective attacks. Iran was in chaos thanks to the revolution in that country, but rather than making them an easy target for attack, it strengthened the Iranian resolve to resist the Iraqi invasion. Plenty of data tables throughout the book, such as a list of codenames for different types of missile systems they used, Orders of Battle in both 1973 and 1980, a list of IrAF Commanders over time and even a long list of known IrAF aircraft serial numbers used over the 10 year period.
This volume ends at the start of what was to be a long running war with Iran, but the remainder of that story, along with the subsequent Gulf War over Kuwait is left to be covered in volume 3, which is still to come. There is a lot of background to the Iraqi Air Force that I was completely unaware of in here, an air force which became one of the most powerful in the region. The first 2 volumes tell an interesting story, and I for one am keen to see volume 3 when it appears to give us the final element of the story.
Thanks to Helion & Co for our review copy.

Robin