page_title: HESA Ababil
section_title: Iraq
hierarchical_section_title: HESA Ababil / Operational history / Iraq
caption_attribution_description: English: Iranian Ababil UAV
context_page_description: The HESA Ababil is an Iranian single-engine multirole tactical unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company. The Ababil comes in two main lines, the Ababil-2 and the Ababil-3, of which the former has a number of variants. It is considered a long-range, low-technology drone.
  The Ababil program was begun during the Iran–Iraq War. The Ababil-2, developed in the 1990s, has rudimentary surveillance capabilities and can be used as a loitering munition, but is mainly used as a target drone. The larger and more capable Ababil-3, introduced in the 2000s, was designed for Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance use and has improved surveillance capabilities. Overall, the Ababil is "a pretty rough-and-ready system": cheap, simple, and easy to use.
  The Ababil-2 and Ababil-3 have been widely exported to governments and non-state actors in the Middle East and elsewhere. The Ababil has been used in the 2006 Lebanon War, the Iraq War, and the Sudanese, Syrian, Iraqi, and Yemeni civil wars.
context_section_description: On 16 March 2009, an American F-16 operating in Iraq shot down an Iranian Ababil 3 drone on 25 February 2009 that had been flying through Iraqi airspace for "almost an hour and 10 minutes." The drone crashed about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad, 12 miles inside Iraqi territory near the town of Balad Ruz in Diyala Governorate. Officials at Iraq's Defence and Interior ministries suggested that the drone might have been scouting for routes to smuggle Iranian weapons into the country. The New York Times, however, speculated that the drone was monitoring Iranian dissidents in Iraq, such as those at Camp Ashraf, which is located near where the drone crashed. Abdul Aziz Mohammed Jassim, head of military operations at the Iraqi defence ministry stated that since the drone, "crossed 10 km into Iraq, it's most likely that its entrance was a mistake."
  More recently, Ababil-3 UAVs have been used extensively in the Iraqi Civil War. Their use began in summer 2014, shortly after the Fall of Mosul, from Rasheed Air Base.
caption: The underside of an Ababil-2.
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