Iranian state media has confirmed that a rescue operation took place following the downing of a United States fighter jet on Friday, while simultaneously asserting that an American plane involved in that operation was destroyed — a disclosure that immediately complicated the emerging narrative from Washington.
France 24 correspondent Reza Seyah, reporting from Tehran, noted that while Iranian state media did not initially confirm the rescue of the second pilot — a claim that came from Washington, it did independently verify that a rescue mission had occurred and that an American aircraft taking part in it had been destroyed. The divergence in these two accounts set the tone for what would become a broader conflict of narratives between the two governments.
According to Seyah, the sequence of events began in the early hours of Sunday morning, when social media reports from within Iran described explosions and unusual aircraft activity near the city of Yasuj, in central Iran the same location where the US fighter jet had been shot down the previous day. Iranian state media subsequently picked up and reported on those developments, confirming the presence of a military operation in the area.
What remained sharply contested, however, was the fate of the American plane said to have been left behind. US reports indicated that American forces themselves bombed and destroyed the aircraft — a standard military protocol employed to deny adversaries access to sensitive equipment and technology. Iranian state media, by contrast, attributed the destruction of the plane to Iranian forces, offering a starkly different version of events that Washington has not formally acknowledged.
Seyah emphasised that, despite Iranian media’s reporting on the rescue operation and the downed aircraft, no formal confirmation or statement had yet emerged from Iranian officials regarding the fate of the second pilot. The correspondent indicated that further clarification from Tehran was expected in the hours ahead, leaving the full picture of the night’s events still incomplete as of the time of broadcast. Read_More…