Former Iraqi air force pilots are training Islamic State militants to fly in captured fighter jets, a group monitoring the war said Friday.
Fighter jets believed to be of the Mig-21 and Mig-23 variety were seen flying over the Al Jarrah air base in Aleppo Province this week, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Rami Abdul Rahman, director of the Observatory, said the planes flew at a low altitude, apparently to avoid radar detection.
The Islamic State militants were being trained by Iraqi officers who served as pilots under the Saddam Hussein regime, Abdul Rahman said, the Associated Press reports.
The militants is known to have got the possession of the jets from an air base it captured in Raqqa province earlier this year.
Even if the Islamic State militants learn to fly the jets, they would be exposed to Syrian and Iraqi MANPADS - man-portable-air-defense-systems - and fighter jets of the coalition forces, said former U.S. Department of Defense policymaker Richard Brennan, an Iraq expert at RAND Corperation, as reported by AP.
"The possession of these aircrafts will have a minimal military impact - however, they will provide a significant psychological boost to IS, especially if IS can find a way to periodically employ them against military or civilian targets," Brennan said.
Meanwhile, General Lloyd Austin, head of the U.S. military's Central Command, said he did not have any operational reports of Islamic State militants flying jets.
"We don't have any operational reporting of ISIL flying jets in support of ISIL activity on the ground and so I cannot confirm that. And to the degree that pilots may have defected and joined the ranks of ISIL, I don't have any information on that either," he said at a Pentagon news briefing, reports Reuters.
