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| Tiyas Air Base, also known as T-4, located east of Hims, Syria© Google Earth |
Over the last year, there have been a series of confrontations between the Israelis on one side, and the Iranians and their Syrian allies on the other, at an airbase in western Syria. The air base is located between the Syrian cities of Hims (Homs) and Tadmur (Palmyra). The base has been identified as both Tiyas, and as T-4, depending on the media outlet doing the reporting.
In the above image, the Arabic descriptions give both names. Which is correct? Actually, both are.
The name Tiyas comes from the name of the closest village. It is customary in the Syrian Air Force to name bases and installations for the nearest city, town, or village. However, the base is not just close to the village of Tiyas, it is also close to the location of an oil pumping station in Tiyas designated as T-4. The T-4 designator goes back to the early days of oil exploration and transport in Iraq as far back as the 1930s.
This map shows the oil pipelines used to move oil from the Kirkuk oilfields in Iraq to Mediterranean ports - Haifa, (now in Israel but then in British-mandated Palestine) and Tarablus al-Sham (Tripoli, in French-mandated Lebanon).
The K-prefix indicates pumping stations on the Kirkuk pipeline, which transported the oil from Kirkuk to a station near the city of al-Hadithah. At Hadithah, the oil was routed into the Tripoli triple pipeline or the Haifa double pipeline. Pumping stations on the Tripoli pipeline are designated with a T prefix, while the Haifa pipeline stations are designated with an H prefix.
Not only were the pipelines accessible by the series of roads paralleling the lines, the Iraq Petroleum Company constructed private airstrips to move men, supplies, parts, etc. between stations and facilities. Many of the airstrips still exist in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. Many of them were converted into civil airports, some into military air bases, and some into shared civil/military facilities. K-1, K-3, T-3, T-4, H-2, H-3, H-5 all were/are major air bases. The current T-4 air base is about four miles west of the original Iraq Petroleum Company airstrip.
Tiyas was the location of the fourth pumping station on the al-Hadithah-Tripoli pipeline. There are three such stations in Syria, all in use today. T-2 is located just inside the Syrian border near the city of Albu Kamal, the site of a large Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base populated by both IRGC personnel as well as Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi'a militia groups.
The station at T-3 is now the shared military air base and civilian airport in the city of Tadmur (also known as Palmyra, site of ancient Aramean, Arabic, and Roman ruins).
The air base at T-4 is used by not only the Syrian Air Force, but by Russian forces in Syria, and elements of the IRGC. Having been there a few times, I can vouch for the description as being "in the middle of nowhere."
Note: Given the political situation following the 1948 creation of Israel, and later political turmoil in both Syria and Lebanon, the Iraqis constructed an alternate pipeline from al-Hadithah to Faysh Khabur on the Turkish border, then west to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. It is still in use today.
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