The renewed Italian commitment to the fight against the Caliphate, was announced by the Chief of Defense, Admiral Luigi Binelli Mantelli, and by the Minister of Defense, Roberta Pinotti.
The decision was taken to agree to the requests of the Coalition following the poor results achieved by the operations in Iraq and Syria.
The mission of the 4 Tornado bombers in Kuwait, will not change the characteristics of Italian participation in the operations of the Coalition, which provide for the overflight of only Iraqi territory.
The hypothesis of sending the Tornadoes to Kuwait had already been evaluated by the Italian government, but was then excluded in order not to subject the combat aircraft to pilots on board the territory controlled by the jihadist militiamen, to the danger of being killed.
The KC-767A, in fact, operates in the security zone and the Predator drones are unmanned and unarmed, also because the United States has never consented to sell to Italy the technical supports for Hellfire missiles and JDAM satellite-guided bombs .
The Tornado fighter-bombers will be configured for data acquisition missions and will only have advanced recognition, surveillance and intelligence tasks. Therefore they will facilitate the air attacks of allied aircraft.
As always, there is no lack of controversy, in particular addressed by the M5S, which accuses military leaders and the defense ministry of not having previously informed the parliament of this decision.
In any case, the war against the Islamic State must be the highest priority of the West and of Italy, which seems to be a priority objective of extremist factions.
The state of alert was in fact raised by Minister Alfano.
Giovanni Caprara
