Posted on 02/05/2010 10:52:03 AM PST by fishtank
* Even the replacement of the Soviet-backed government and the rise of the Muslim-fundamentalist Taliban didn't quite end the adventures of the Il-76 in Afghanistan. On 3 August 1995, a MiG-19S fighter operated by the Taliban government intercepted an Il-76TD operated by the Russian airline Airstan and forced it to land in Kandahar. Taliban officials were annoyed at Russian backing of anti-Taliban Afghan forces and wanted to use the crew as hostages for the return of Taliban members believed to be held by the Russians. The Russian government negotiated to no effect; a scheme to perform a commando raid to free the hostages was dismissed as impractical.
However, the crew was resourceful enough to rescue themselves. They managed to talk their captors into giving them access to the Il-76TD in order to keep it in flightworthy condition, and on 16 August 1996, after over a year in captivity, they made a run for it, taking off with three of their guards along with them, and flying at low level to Iran with a huge cloud of dust in the aircraft's wake. Fighters were scrambled to intercept, but the pilots assumed that the aircraft was heading north to Russia and failed to stop the escape.
http://www.kandagarfilm.ru/en/
Have you seen this?
ping
Sounds like a great movie - if I could understand Russian...
I’ve seen a few Russian films, all of them were filled with despair and tragedy. This one looks both different and better. I’ll be certain to rent it on Netflix when it comes out with subtitles or see it in an indie theater if one is showing it... with subtitles.
the website is bilingual, Russian and English.
Thanks. It looks to be a great adventure movie like the USA used to make.
Exactly.
I had that thought in the back of my head when I saw the trailer .... but we get America-hating swill instead, like Avatrash....avatar.....
No, but it looks like an interesting action flick if they subtitle it.
The only thing that rings a bell here is that the US Dept of Defense did buy almost $300M of ammunition from a 21 year-old Albanian-American supplier a few years ago -- he was reselling old Chinese rounds from Albania to us for use by the Iraqi Army. This movie talks about transporting arms from "Albania to Afghanistan".
It has been a long time since those were made.
This movies’ events happened in 1995.
They still have national pride, and identity, after all they have been through.
Gives me hope for US. Although we're gonna have to fall hard enough to bang it into the useless idiots heads. Socialism = mass murder, usually through starvation.
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