Egypt Air suspends flights to Baghdad for 3 days

Egypt announced on Tuesday and beginning the following day, state-owned Egypt Air will suspend its flights into Baghdad for three days because of security instability in Iraq.

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Egypt announced on Tuesday and beginning the following day, state-owned Egypt Air will suspend its flights into Baghdad for three days because of security instability in Iraq.

Basim Abdulkarim, the spokesperson of Egypt's Civil Aviation Ministry, said in a statement, “Due to the current circumstances and the security situation in the city of Baghdad, we have decided to suspend all flights headed to Baghdad starting tomorrow, Wednesday, until Friday.”

Abdulkarim noted that the decision was made “to preserve the safety of passengers and airplanes until the security situation stabilizes.”

On Monday, Royal Jordanian Airlines announced that it would “resume direct flights from Amman to Baghdad,” for “precautionary measures,” after its own three-day slight suspension as the airline halted direct flights from Amman to Baghdad.

A US drone strike targeting a convoy leaving Baghdad International Airport early Friday morning killed leading Iranian general Qasim Soleimani, the long-time head of the Quds Force of the nation's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Read More: US strike kills Qasim Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis

The strike also killed the head of the Iranian-backed militia Kata’ib Hizbollah, which the US says was responsible for killing a US contractor in a Dec. 27 rocket attack on an Iraqi military base near Kirkuk.

Iran has vowed to respond harshly to the US military action and declared on Sunday that it would no longer abide by a nuclear accord it signed in 2015 with world powers, an agreement the US withdrew from in 2018.

Several nations including the United States and, most recently, Denmark, have issued travel warnings sternly advising their citizens to leave Iraq, with some giving the exception of the more-stable Kurdistan Region.

Editing by John J. Catherine