“There were explosive materials. We don’t need anything else from Iran. If you looked you wouldn’t find any missiles. It was parts, explosives, copper sheets that could be used to make weapons in Syria.” After four or five hours he and the crew re-embarked to fly the plane back to Damascus. “There were around 20 such flights to Tehran from April 2011 to July 2012,” he said, adding that they received special permission from the Iraqi foreign ministry to overfly Iraq, “probably without American knowledge”.