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Jordan's Plane Returns from First Commercial Flight to Iraq
A Royal Jordanian airplane returned from the first commercial flight in 10 years to Iraq early Friday morning, an airline official said Friday, December 1.
The plane, an airbus A 310, was the first commercial flight to Iraq since the the sweeping UN sanctions were imposed for its invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990.
The Jordanian plane touched down at the Saddam International Airport in the western suburb of Baghdad at 22:30 local time (1930 GMT), carrying 29 passengers and medicines offered by Jordan "to the Iraqi brothers."
On its return trip, 45 passengers were on board, including some sick Iraqis to be hospitalized for treatment in Amman.
Jordan had dispatched seven humanitarian flights to Iraq since August, and has requested to the UN to resume regular civil flights to Baghdad. The latest commercial flight was not objected by the UN Sanctions Committee, the airline official said.
But this does not mean Jordan would hence resume regular and commercial flights between the two capitals, the official added, it surely is an important step toward this goal.
Humanitarian flights to Baghdad from Arab and European countries in the past two months have virtually made void an air embargo against Iraq insisted by the US and Britain in the UN Sanctions Committee.
The committee was only "informed" of those flights in most cases, and the request by the US and Britain for all flights to Iraq to get prior permission from the committee was largely ignored.
Commercial Flights to Iraq Resumed
Royal Jordanian, Jordan's national airline, said it would resume commercial flights between Amman and Baghdad from Thursday, November 30, if approved by the United Nations.
This would be the first commercial flight to and from Iraq since international sanctions were imposed on Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
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