Munir Redfa

Who was Munir Redfa?

Munir Redfa was an Iraqi fighter pilot, of Assyrian ethnic origin, who defected in 1966 by flying a MiG-21 of the Iraqi Air Force to Israel. In what is considered as one of the Mossad's most successful operations, Redfa's entire extended family was smuggled safely out of Iraq to Israel. The MiG-21 fighter was evaluated by the Israeli Air Force and was later loaned to the United States for testing and intelligence analysis. Knowledge obtained from analysis of the aircraft was instrumental to the successes achieved by the Israeli Air Force in its future encounters with Arab MiG-21s. Redfa's defection was the subject of the movie Steal the Sky.

He was the second of nine children. Like many other Assyrians, his family fled to Iraq as part of the Christian migration from southeast Turkey and the northwestern mountains of Iran following the Assyrian Genocide.

Redfa died sometime around 1998 of a heart attack.