The Package Q Airstrike was the largest airstrike of the Gulf War and the largest strike of F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter aircraft in military history. Many aircraft, including the F-117 Nighthawk, were used to attack targets in Baghdad, which was the most heavily defended area of Iraq. The same target was hit several times by F-117s, and the last package consisted of seventeen F-111F Aardvarks on the 19th day of the war.

Operation Opera, also known as Operation Babylon, was a surprise airstrike conducted by the Israeli Air Force on 7 June 1981, which destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor located 17 kilometres southeast of Baghdad, Iraq. The Israeli operation came a year after the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force had caused minor damage to the same nuclear facility in Operation Scorch Sword, with the damage having been subsequently repaired by French technicians. Operation Opera, and related Israeli government statements following it, established the Begin Doctrine, which explicitly stated the strike was not an anomaly, but instead "a precedent for every future government in Israel". Israel's counter-proliferation preventive strike added another dimension to its existing policy of deliberate ambiguity, as it related to the nuclear weapons capability of other states in the region.