|
Tucano vs Farc gerila
Citat:At half past midnight on March 1, five Super Tucanos and three A-37 Dragonfly aircraft struck the encampment with 500-pound Mark 82 bombs upgraded with Paveway II laser-guided targeting systems.
Several guerrillas survived the initial bombardment and returned fire, possibly at an incoming force of Colombian troops arriving by helicopter, killing one. A second bombardment wiped out all resistance.
When the Colombian army combed through the wreckage, they found Reyes dead — by some accounts he had stepped on one of his own defensive mines in a panic. The soldiers discovered the bodies of 19 other FARC fighters and four Mexican students. They also recovered laptop computers with data suggesting that Ecuadorean and Venezuelan officials had cooperated with the FARC.
Later, Ecuadorean troops arriving on the scene found three survivors — one student and two FARC fighters, all badly injured.
Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa was furious over the incursion, describing it as a “massacre” perpetrated by laser-guided bombs. Chavez mobilized troops to the Colombian border. Fortunately, the dispute never escalated beyond a war of words. Diplomatic meetings and an apology from Colombian president Alvaro Uribe resolved the crisis a week later.
Most accounts of the attack claim that Super Tucanos dropped smart bombs during the raid. However, the Washington Post reported that attempts to mount Paveway II bombs on the Super Tucanos had been unsuccessful, because the connecting cables would have had to be drilled too close to the planes’ fuel cells.
Instead, older A-37 jets delivered the Paveway bombs, while the Tucanos dropped conventional bombs as a follow-up to the precision attacks. However, the Post reported that the Colombian aircraft did not violate Ecuador’s airspace, which seems unlikely if unguided bombs were dropped.
At some point, Colombia modified its Super Tucanos to carry Griffin laser-guided bombs, an Israeli-made add-on kit for the Mark 82 bomb. Some accounts claim the Tucano dropped Griffins on the encampment. However, this seems to contradict the Post’s account.
Regardless, sources agree that Colombian Super Tucanos primarily dropped unguided bombs during the war generally, reserving smart bombs for special targets.
The attack on Reyes was merely the first of many hits on the FARC’s leadership, the remainder of which occurred within Colombia’s borders.
In 2010, Super Tucanos lobbed 14,000 pounds of bombs in support of an operation that killed FARC commander Mono Jojoy south of Bogota, based on detailed information provided by an informant. Jojoy was FARC’s top military strategist.
The Colombian government accused him of forcibly recruiting child soldiers, and killing or kidnapping civilian officials who refused his orders to resign from their posts in FARC territory. A helicopter-borne assault involving more than a thousand soldiers followed the bombardment.
Jojoy died in the air attack.
The following year, five Super Tucanos joined A-37s on a mission to eliminate the top leader of the FARC, Alfonso Cano, at his encampment in Cauca. This time their target managed to flee a surprise bombardment involving both conventional and precision bombs.
Colombian troops swept the area after the attack and shot Cano down with rifle bullets.
Although the FARC lost four of its top leaders in four years (Cano’s predecessor, Manuel Marulanda, died of natural causes), its roots went too deep to immediately collapse. Therefore, the Tucanos remained busy in a steady campaign of strikes on one FARC jungle camp after another.
Other types of aircraft participated in the campaign as well. Besides the venerable A-37 Dragonfly, Israeli-made Kfir jet fighters took part in raids. AC-47T Spooky gunships — World War II-era transports equipped with modern sensors and side-mounted machine guns — helped identify targets under the jungle canopy and provided fire support.
In March 2012, nine Tucanos dropped 40 smart bombs on a 27th Front encampment near Vista Hermosa, killing 36, including the Front’s newly-appointed commander. The helicopter-borne troops who swept the area found five survivors, three of them wounded.
Four months later, a Super Tucano crashed during a combat mission over Cauca. The FARC claimed to have shot it down with a .50-caliber machine gun. The Colombian military maintained the crash was an accident and that the wreck did not show any signs of having been hit by anti-aircraft fire.
In September 2012, the commanders of three more FARC fronts — the 7th, 33rd and 37th Fronts — were all killed in separate air attacks.
https://warisboring.com/the-deadly-super-tucanos-o......2ofhjunj8
|
