The first six F-15Cs, coming from the RAF base in Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, have just landed in Turkey. From the next few hours they will begin to patrol the Turkish airspace.
Taking off from the Incirlik base, the F-15C (as reiterated for the umpteenth time by the European Command), will prevent the violation of Turkish airspace, as happened in recent weeks. They added from EUCOM "The deployment comes in response to a specific request from the Turkish government." The other twelve F-15 (six of the C version and six of the E version) will arrive in Turkey in the next few hours.
The F-15C, armed with eight air-to-air missiles of different radius, will have the task of escorting bombers engaged against ISIS in the vicinity of Syrian regime forces and Russian warplanes. The Air Force F-15 in Turkey are the first pure "dogfighters" that the US owns in the Region. The Pentagon has redeployed several platforms such as F-22, F-16, A-10 and B-1: these also carry bombs and air-to-ground missiles. The F-15, on the other hand, only carry weapons for air-to-air combat.
It should be noted that the F-15C have never been deployed in Afghanistan, nor in Iraq. The war in Syria is different. On paper, the F-15Cs already have a potential "enemy": the Sukhoi Su-30 interceptor fighters deployed in Syria to escort all aircraft engaged in the Arab Republic.
The Russians, in the official statement, spoke of the interceptor fighter and not of its 'M' variant, which also carries out the task of precision fighter-bomber. From the Kremlin they reiterated the need to escort the bombers, but even then we wondered against which enemies. It seemed clear that the opponents would be the coalition planes, not the Islamic State that, as we know, at most owns commercial drones and a few helicopters (obviously stolen from loyalist troops).
Withdrawing the USS Theodore Roosevelt from the Persian Gulf, the United States no longer has the 65 fighter planes that participated in raids in Syria and Iraq until the end of last September. The Russian interceptor fighters, until today, were rulers of the sky (although in fact there is no no-fly-zone). The arrival of the F-15 will once again change the Syrian scenario: their only goal is Russian fighters.
(photo: US Air Force)
