The second US airman who was missing in Iran has been saved by US forces following a daring rescue mission, President Trump said.
Trump touted the operation late Saturday night as ‘one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History’, saying the US retrieved a colonel from deep in enemy territory.
In a playful echo of President Obama’s famous words after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, Trump began his statement announcing the news: ‘WE GOT HIM!’
‘This brave Warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, being hunted down by our enemies, who were getting closer and closer by the hour,’ Trump said in a Truth Social post.
The colonel was injured in a fierce shootout with IRGC forces, but is ‘safe and sound’, Trump said.
The airman ejected from an F-15E fighter jet along with the aircraft’s pilot in the early hours of Friday, sparking a frantic two-day search operation that culminated in a fierce firefight.
Trump said the aircraft’s pilot was secretly rescued hours after the crash, but that operation was kept quiet to not ‘jeopardize our second rescue operation.’
The F-15E jet was downed on Friday soon after a US A-10 Warthog was also shot down by Iranian forces in a chaotic day of fighting, marking the first US aircraft downed since the start of the conflict.
A second US pilot shot down over Iran has been rescued in a daring rescue mission following a fierce firefight with the IRGC, reports say. The wreckage of the pilot’s F-15E fighter jet is pictured
Pictured: The ejected seat from the US aircraft as published in Iranian media
Trump touted the success of the rescue mission on Saturday evening, saying in a statement: ‘WE GOT HIM!’
It came after Trump said earlier on Truth Social that US forces had ‘terminated’ several of Iran’s military leaders, sharing footage appearing to show an airstrike taking out top IRGC commanders.
Iran had placed a large bounty on the heads of the US airmen, vowing to seek revenge on US military forces for the conflict.
Before the rescue mission took place, the official X account for the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, released harrowing new images of the destroyed F-15E jet, accompanied by a taunting caption.
‘The stealth fighter that now has no escape but to lie under the feet of aerospace warriors,’ the embassy wrote.
‘That same stealth giant, for which they wove legends for years, is today a pile of scrap metal fallen to the ground – this is the very technology they claimed was invisible and untouchable,’ it added. ‘But now it has been seen and brought down.’
While the pilot was rescued quickly, the second member of the crew, a Weapons Systems Officer, Used specialized survival techniques to evade capture long enough to be saved, Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin said in an X post on Saturday night.
The soldier used SERE – survival, evasion, resistance and escape – training to evade capture, hiking up an elevated ridge away from the wreckage and putting out an emergency beacon in hopes of being located.
Griffin said a number of Iranian military forces were killed and injured in the operation, but no US soldiers were killed.
Trump said earlier on Truth Social that US forces had ‘terminated’ several of Iran’s military leaders, sharing footage appearing to show an airstrike taking out top IRGC commanders
The Iranian military previously shared footage appearing to show the F-15E fighter jet being blown out of the sky
A US official told Fox News the mission was ‘very complex’, and involved several branches of the US military to find and rescue the airman.
During search and rescue operations on Friday, two rescue helicopters were hit by Iranian forces and crew members on board were injured.
