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Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan not allowing German aircrafts use of their airspace

Other News Materials 27 August 2009 10:56 (UTC +04:00)

The urgent decision from the Bundestag in early July to send an additional contingent of German soldiers to Afghanistan for aircraft maintenance, equipped with radar aviation complex and guidance systems such as AWACS, did not have the desired result. For over three weeks, the German soldiers were at an outpost of the North Atlantic Alliance in Konya in Turkey and then returned home to Germany without fulfilling their task. The reason for the mission's failure was that Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan did not give the NATO aircraft permission to use their airspace to fly to Afghanistan, Deutsche Welle reported.

Vice-President of the FDP faction in the Bundestag, Birgit Homburger, has accused the German government of not properly ensuring implementation of the mission and of negligence, demanding that Parliament be informed about the reasons for the incident.

Meanwhile, Germany's Defense Ministry spokesman, Thomas Raabe, who confirmed the reports on the German soldiers' return on Aug. 26, said that the implementation of the mission was NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen's task. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, now the North Atlantic Alliance is in talks on the use of outposts in the territory of the United Arab Emirates.

The task of the aircrafts equipped with the Airborne Warning and Control System is to monitor air traffic over Afghanistan's territory. At the moment, the United States is engaged in the assignment. According to analysts, air traffic over Afghanistan is expected to increase by 3-5 times, signifying the need for the urgent implementation of the AWACS aircrafts' planned mission.

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