Balad was born as Al-Bakr Air Base in 1983, in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. English Wikipedia, citing a CIA assessment of June 1983, describes two 3,400-metre runways laid out north-west to south-east, six high-speed approaches at either end of both runways, and one runway already in use by June 1983. The dispersal areas eventually held 25 high-speed approaches and 40 hardstands.

In the mid-1980s Yugoslav contractors, who built much of Iraq’s air force infrastructure in that decade, added hardened aircraft shelters. Wikipedia says the base then operated with at least a brigade-level force and two squadrons of MiG-23 fighters. The scale was deliberate: Iraq spread its air force over a network of very large, heavily sheltered bases so that no single raid could destroy it.

The US 4th Infantry Division took the base in early April 2003. As Logistics Support Area Anaconda, and from June 2008 as Joint Base Balad, it became the hub of the American war effort north of Baghdad. Wikipedia gives 28,000 military personnel and 8,000 civilian contractors at its height and 27,500 take-offs and landings a month, second only to Heathrow.

The US Air Force’s 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing moved in during February 2004. Its operations group descends from the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen of the Second World War. From Balad it flew F-16s, A-10s, C-130s, MQ-1 Predators and HH-60 Pave Hawk rescue helicopters, ran the Air Force Theater Hospital and provided base support for about 26,000 people. Its F-16s and Predators were overhead when the last US convoy left Iraq on 18 December 2011.

The base was under almost constant fire. Wikipedia says several mortar rounds and rockets a day were fired at it from 2003, hence the nickname “Mortaritaville”, and that the rate had dropped by about 40 per cent by mid-2006. The open-air burn pit was another hazard: Military Times reported 147 tons of waste burned there each day, including plastics, solvents and medical waste, and quoted a 2006 memo by an Air Force bioenvironmental officer warning of an acute health hazard. The base was handed back to the Iraqi Air Force on 8 November 2011.

Iraq decided in spring 2009 to spend 1.5 billion dollars on an initial 18 F-16s, and Balad was to be their home. The first F-16IQ was handed over in the United States on 5 June 2014, making Iraq the 28th F-16 nation. Days later the Islamic State took Mosul. On 25 June 2014 the Daily Beast, citing Reuters, reported Balad surrounded on three sides by insurgents and under heavy mortar fire, and quoted a senior US intelligence official that the group continued to threaten Iraqi control of the base. The last American contractors had already been flown to Baghdad by the Iraqi Air Force on 13 June.

Because the contractors had left, the jets were kept at Tucson, Arizona, where Iraqi pilots trained. Four F-16IQs finally reached Balad on 13 July 2015, and the last aircraft was delivered on 14 November 2017, according to Wikipedia.

The support arrangements drew their own scandal. In May 2017 the Associated Press, reported by CBS News, said Sallyport Global, which held a contract worth about 686 million dollars for security and life support at Balad, had ignored findings by its own investigators of alcohol smuggling, theft and suspected human trafficking. The company said it took any suggestion of wrongdoing very seriously.

Balad was struck again after the US killing of Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad on 3 January 2020. Military.com, reporting Iraqi military statements, said rockets landed at the gates of the base on 4 January without casualties; English Wikipedia says four people were wounded. Wikipedia records four rockets on 20 February 2021, which wounded one Iraqi contractor, and a rocket attack on 17 March 2022 that wounded two members of the security forces. No group claimed these attacks in the sources checked, and they are not attributed here.