AMMAN, Jordan — Islamic State terrorists captured a Jordanian pilot after his warplane crashed in Syria while carrying out airstrikes Wednesday, making him the first foreign military member to fall into the extremists’ hands since an international coalition launched its bombing campaign against the group months ago.
Images of the pilot being pulled out of a lake and hustled away by masked jihadis underscored the risks for the U.S. and its Arab and European allies in the air campaign.
The capture — and the potential hostage situation — presented a nightmare scenario for Jordan, which vowed to continue its fight against the group that has overrun large parts of Syria and Iraq and beheaded foreign captives.
The crash’s cause was not immediately known, but the U.S. military insisted the plane was not shot down. “Evidence clearly indicates that (the Islamic State) did not down the aircraft as the terrorist organization is claiming,” Central Command said.
A coalition official, who was not authorized to discuss the episode publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the pilot was in an F-16 fighter and was able to eject.
Jordanian Information Minister Mohammad Momani earlier told The Associated Press that the plane was believed to have been shot down. “It is our expectation that the plane went down because of fire from the ground, but it is difficult to confirm that, with the little information we have,” he said.
The Islamic State group is known to have Russian-made Igla anti-aircraft missiles. The shoulder-fired weapon has long been in the Syrian and Iraqi government arsenals; it was used during the 1991 Gulf War by Iraqi forces to bring down a British Tornado jet, for example. More recently, militants in Chechnya have used them to down Russian helicopters.
The warplane went down near the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto Islamic State capital. The United States and several Arab allies have been striking the Islamic State in Syria since Sept. 23, and U.S. and other international warplanes have been waging an air campaign against the terrorists in Iraq for even longer. The campaign aims to push back the jihadi organization after it took over much of Iraq and Syria and declared a “caliphate.”
The Islamic State has beheaded dozens of Syrian soldiers it captured around the country. The group has also beheaded three Americans and two Britons. In Iraq, it has shot down at least one Iraqi military helicopter, and the pilots died in the crash.
The Islamic State is likely to try to target other planes, said military analyst Hisham Jaber, a retired brigadier general in the Lebanese military. “Inevitably, they will take down more,” Jaber said. He said that the anti-aircraft weapons require little training or expertise to employ and that aircraft flown by Arab countries are easier targets since they have less technology to avoid guided missiles.
Also Wednesday, a suicide bomber killed at least 24 militiamen and soldiers and wounded 55 others at a military base south of Baghdad, police said.
