US F-15 jet shot down<\/a>, President Donald Trump confirms, as Iran claims another US aircraft involved in the rescue has been downed in the province of Isfahan.<\/p>\n\u201cThis brave Warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, being hunted down by our enemies,\u201d Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday. \u201cHe sustained injuries, but he will be just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
The airman, who Trump said held the rank of colonel, was the second member of a two-person crew of an F-15 that Iran said on Friday had been brought down by its air defences.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis miraculous search and rescue operation comes in addition to a successful rescue of another brave pilot yesterday, which we did not confirm because we did not want to jeopardise our second rescue operation.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rescue resolves a crisis for the White House with the war on Iran in its sixth week.<\/p>\n
The first member of the crew had been rescued, triggering a high-stakes search for the remaining airman by both Iran and the US.<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera\u2019s Tohid Asadi, reporting from Tehran, said there had been no confirmation or denial from the Iranians on the pilot\u2019s rescue.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the past 24 hours, we have witnessed continuous air strikes on the location where the fighter jet was downed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Another plane down?<\/p>\n
Separately on Sunday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it shot down a US aircraft that was looking for the missing officer in the southern province of Isfahan, according to Iran\u2019s Fars news agency.<\/p>\n
Fars posted a photo on its Telegram channel, showing thick smoke rising from a field, and said: \u201cTrump\u2019s desperate attempt to cover up a huge defeat.\u201d<\/p>\n
The plane was a C-130 class aircraft, it said, and was destroyed by a police commando unit called the Faraj Rangers.<\/p>\n
The high-stakes US rescue effort, which involved dozens of military aircraft, encountered fierce resistance from Iran.<\/p>\n
Before Trump\u2019s confirmation, Al Jazeera\u2019s Jon Hendren, reporting from Washington, DC, quoted a US official as saying that US forces had encircled and were moving in on the downed airman, who had managed to avoid Iranian units for about two days.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then a firefight broke out. This happened in daylight,\u201d Hendren reported. \u201cGenerally, special operations troops would go in for a rescue operation like that, and they would try to extract someone very quickly in the darkness. This went on for hours, we were told.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a separate incident, an A-10 Warthog fighter crashed after being hit over Kuwait, with the pilot ejecting, officials said. The degree of any injuries among the aircraft crew remained unclear.<\/p>\n
Still, Trump was triumphant.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that we were able to pull off both of these operations, without a single American killed, or even wounded, just proves once again that we have achieved overwhelming air dominance and superiority over the Iranian skies,\u201d he said in his statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Iran claims another US aircraft involved in the rescue of the F-15 fighter pilot has been shot down.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,801,129,3,21,19,22,20,25,231941,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-565687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-iran","10":"tag-middle-east","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-us-israel-war-on-iran","18":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}