US warplane downed over Iran; one crew member missing

A US fighter jet has been brought down over Iran, thrusting Washington into a dangerous new phase of the nearly five-week-old war, with search teams recovering one of the two crew members who ejected, a US official told Reuters. It is the first known incident of its kind since the conflict began.

Requests for comment to the Pentagon and US Central Command went unanswered.

The possibility that a US aviator is still alive and evading capture inside Iran sharply raises the pressure on the White House in a war that opinion polls suggest has struggled to command broad support among Americans.

It also sets up a difficult test for the US military, which must balance the urgent effort to recover an American behind enemy lines against the dangers facing forces sent on any high-risk rescue operation.

The downing came little more than a week after US President Donald Trump declared in the Oval Office that Iran’s military had been so badly weakened that “we literally have planes flying over Tehran and other parts of their country. They can’t do a thing about it”.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Trump had been briefed, though she did not confirm further details of the incident.

Iranian authorities urged civilians to watch for any survivors, while social media has been flooded with images that Iranian officials say show debris from the aircraft.

Two US officials identified the aircraft as an F-15E fighter jet, a two-seat warplane flown by a pilot and a weapons systems officer.

Iranian state media circulated images it said showed fragments from the downed US fighter jet

It remained unclear which of the two crew members had been recovered, and the US official who confirmed the recovery gave no account of how it was carried out.

US air crews are trained for the possibility of being shot down in hostile territory through Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training, or SERE. But few airmen speak Persian, and avoiding detection while awaiting rescue inside Iran would pose a formidable challenge.

William Goodhind, a forensic imagery analyst with Contested Ground, said photographs of a tail fin posted on social media appeared consistent with an F-15E Strike Eagle, which carries a crew of two.

The governor of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province said anyone who captured or killed the crew “would be specially commended,” according to Iran’s semi-official news agency ISNA.

The episode follows threats this week by Mr Trump to bomb the country back to the “Stone Age,” including strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure and desalination plants, as he pushes Tehran to end the war on US terms.

According to US Central Command, 13 US military service members have been killed in the conflict so far and more than 300 wounded.

No US troops have been captured by Iran.

Although Mr Trump has repeatedly depicted Iran’s military as badly depleted, Reuters previously reported that US intelligence assessments showed Tehran still retains substantial missile and drone capabilities.

As of last week, the US could say with certainty that about one-third of Iran’s missile arsenal had been destroyed. The fate of roughly another third was less certain, though Reuters sources said bombing likely damaged, destroyed or buried those missiles in underground tunnels and bunkers.

The US and Israeli war with Iran has rippled across the Middle East, killing thousands and rattling the global economy with surging energy prices that are stoking inflation fears worldwide.

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