Operation Southern Watch

Operation Southern Watch
	Part of the Iraqi no-fly zones conflict
	; Two F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft from the Texas Air National Guard and New Jersey Air National Guard prepare to depart Prince Sultan Air Base on a patrol as part of Operation Southern Watch in 2000.
Date	26 August 1992 – 20 March 2003
Location	Southern Iraq, below the 32nd and 33rd parallels.
Result	Inconclusive
Belligerents
United States; United Kingdom; France (until 1998); Saudi Arabia	Iraq
Commanders and leaders
George H. W. Bush; Bill Clinton; George W. Bush	Saddam Hussein
Strength
5,000	Various Iraqi air defense forces
Casualties and losses
29 American airmen killed and 372 Coalition personnel injured in the Khobar Towers bombing; 3 RQ-1 Predator shot down	1 MiG-25 Foxbat and; 1 MiG-23 Flogger shot down; 10–15 air defense systems destroyed; 175+ civilians killed and 500 others wounded

Operation Southern Watch was an air-centric military operation conducted by the United States Department of Defense from August 1992 to March 2003.

United States Central Command's Joint Task Force Southwest Asia (JTF-SWA)^[5] had the mission of monitoring and controlling the airspace south of the 32nd Parallel (extended to the 33rd Parallel in 1996) in southern and south-central Iraq during the period following the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War until the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

^ Boring, War Is (15 August 2016). "Warning – MiG-25!". Archived from the original on 23 October 2016. Retrieved 16 August 2016.
^ "Air Force Historical Support Division > Home" (PDF).
^ Knights, Michael (2005).Cradle of Conflict: Iraq and the Birth of Modern U.S. Military Power. Naval Institute Press, p. 242. ISBN 1-59114-444-2
^ John Pike. "Operation Southern Watch". Globalsecurity.org. Retrieved 19 May 2011.
^ "A BRIEF LOOK AT JOINT TASK FORCE-SOUTHWEST ASIA". www.airforcehistoryindex.org. Retrieved 30 July 2020.