21 Dec 2012
FULL MEMBER
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the first one is safely tucked away in the hangers fearing that hurting ISIS will benefit Asad and Iran somehow
the second one is larger than life and actually harvesting the ISIS.
B-1 Pilots Describe Bombing Campaign Against ISIS in Kobani - Washington Wire - WSJ
A U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber flies above Kobani on Oct. 18, 2014 as seen from the Turkish border town of Suruc.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Image
For four months, the B-1B bombers of the U.S. Air Force’s 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron relentlessly hit Islamic State fighters in eastern Kobani from the air, slowly watching the line of control in that city swing back to Washington’s Kurdish allies.
The air tactics developed over Kobani, senior U.S. officials said, will hopefully prove to be a model of what close communication between an allied force on the ground and American aircraft in the skies can do. The lesson of Kobani, officials said, will be tried again when moderate Syrian rebels trained by the U.S. enter the fight against the Islamic State militants inside other parts of Syria.
The 9th Bomb Squadron deployed to the American air base in Qatar in July, prepared to close out the combat phase of the Afghanistan war and Operation Enduring Freedom, which formally ended in December.
But when President Barack Obama announced the U.S. would begin airstrikes first over Iraq and then Syria, the squadron’s mission expanded. While the planes flew regularly over Afghanistan, the bulk of the ordnance dropped by the aircrews was over the Syrian town of Kobani.
The squadron started conducting operations over Kobani the first week of October. At that point, Islamic State fighters, known in the military by the acronym ISIL, were moving largely unrestricted inside the town.
On his first sortie over Kobani, Squadron Commander Lt. Col. Ed Sumangil, expected the mission to be uneventful. Instead the crew “went Winchester,” Air Force lingo for dropping all of the bombs in a payload. The B1-B planes carry 500-lb and 2,000-lb bombs.
“We got up there thinking it would be quiet. and immediately we started getting targets against ISIL command and control elements,” he said.
Reviewing the damage assessments in the next days and weeks, Lt. Col. Sumangil said, it was clear that the airstrikes, combined with a Kurdish offensive on the ground, “basically stopped their progress.”
The U.S. had established close communications with the People’s Defense Units, or YPG, a Kurdish secularist group that led the fight to defend Kobani. YPG fighters communicated with liaisons and air controllers in the operations centers set up by the U.S.
The Combined Air Operation Center in Qatar then took that information and sent bomb coordinates to the B-1s flying over Kobani.
“The YPG, prior to that, was skeptical what our contribution was going to be,” Lt. Col. Sumangil said. “It essentially stopped their advance, not completely cold … but that was the first time they felt air power combined with their fighters on the ground can really stop their [Islamic State fighters’] progress though Kobani.”
During as much as eight hours flying over Kobani, the 9th Bomb Squadron would get targets called in to the air operations center from air controllers working with the Kurds. The B-1 crew would get the target, drop a weapon and then get confirmation from the fighters on the ground.
“It was almost like an orchestra,” said Maj. Brandon Miller, the squadron’s director of operations. “The information was flowing… almost like clockwork.”
Each day the B-1 crews would be briefed on where the dividing line was in Kobani, what the Air Force would call the Forward Line of Troops, or FLOT.
“For the four months we were there it was always moving,” said Capt. Todd Saksa, the squadron’s chief of weapons and tactics.
For the B-1 crews, the fight over Kobani was a combination of the tactics they had honed striking insurgents in Afghanistan and a more traditional, conventional battle, with opposing forces fighting over a defined front.
“It didn’t feel like 2015 or 2014,” Capt. Saksa said. “It felt like two armies going at it over a set line.”
Not long after the U.S. started dropping bombs, the line began to move. By December, Kurdish forces on the ground started taking larger parts of Kobani. By January, the town was back in the Kurds’ control.
Capt. Saksa said when he first flew over Kobani, the Kurdish fighters had only a third of the city under their control. But after four months of bombing in support of the Kurdish forces, the tide turned in their favor.
“By the time the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron came out of theater the YPG had pretty much taken the entire town” Capt. Saksa said. “We take a lot of pride in that because we spent a lot of time overhead.”
U convinced me
