Balad Air Base
Balad Air Base is an Iraqi Air Force base located near Balad in the Sunni Triangle 40 miles (64 km) north of Baghdad, Iraq.
It was opened during the 1980s called Al-Bakr Air Base which housed Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-23 fighters, during the 2000s the base was occupied by the United States Armed Forces as part of the Iraq War and called both Balad Air Base by the United States Air Force and LSA Anaconda by the United States Army before being renamed Joint Base Balad on 15 June 2008. The base was handed back to the Iraqi Air Force during December 2011 returning to be called Balad Air Base.
During the Iraq War it was the second largest U.S. Base in Iraq and today is home to the Iraqi Air Force's General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcons.
History
Iraqi use
Balad was formerly known as al-Bakr AB, named in honor of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, the president of Iraq from 1968 to 1979. It was considered by many in the Iraqi military to be the most important airfield of the Iraqi Air Force. During most of the 1980s, it operated with at least a brigade level force, with two squadrons of Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-23 fighters. Al-Bakr AB was especially well known for the large number of hardened aircraft shelters (HAS) built by the Yugoslavs during the Iran–Iraq War in the mid-1980s. It had four hardened areas—one each on either end of the main runways—with approximately 30 individual aircraft shelters.
