"Middle East
Egypt

Jane's credits the first combat use of the missile as being in 1969 during the War of Attrition by Egyptian soldiers. The first 'kill' was claimed on 19 August 1969. A 102 Squadron A-4H Skyhawk was hit with a shoulder-fired missile 12 miles west of the Suez Canal and pilot SqL Nassim Ezer Ashkenazi captured. Between this first firing and June 1970 the Egyptian army fired 99 missiles resulting in 36 hits. The missile proved to have poor kinematic reach against combat jets, and also poor lethality as many aircraft that were hit managed to return safely to base. The missile was used later in the Yom Kippur War, where Strela were fired in the hundreds, scoring few hits and fewer kills (A-4s had their exhaust pipes lengthened, in order to prevent fatal damage to the engine, a solution made in the previous war, together with flare launchers) but, together with Shilka and SA-2/3/6s, they caused very heavy losses to the Israeli Air Force in the first days, after that the Arab SAMs firings were so high, that they almost depleted their weapon stocks. SA-7s were not that effective against fast jets, but they were the best weapon available to Arab infantry at the time.

A Strela 2 was reportedly used by the Islamist militant group Ansar Bait al-Maqdis to destroy an Egyptian military Mil-8 helicopter operating in the northern Sinai region on 26 January 2014 near Sheikh Zuweid (close to the border with Gaza), killing its five occupants. This is the first attack of this type during the Sinai insurgency, which has raged on the peninsula due to the security and political turmoil since the 2011 revolution. The MANPADS is reported by United Nations to have come from former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's large stocks, which have been widely proliferated after Libya's civil war chaos and have become a concern to regional and world security.[10][11]"

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"In the summer of 1971, six AC-130E gunships were produced with an advanced fire-control computer, higher gross weight limit, and improved countermeasure electronics. In addition, a flare-launching system equipped with 24 chaff flares to counter SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles) was installed.

Before the addition of the flare launcher, the crews of gunships had only two crude but innovative defenses against the heat-seeking SA-7 Strela missiles commonly used by the enemy. The first was for a crewmember to manually fire a handheld flare directly at an oncoming missile while hanging out the open rear cargo bay ramp. The tactic was meant to confuse the missile’s infrared tracking system by giving it another “hot” target to lock onto; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. The main problem was, you usually only had one shot.

The second defense against heat-seeking SAM attacks was for the pilot to bank the craft in such a way that the gunship’s wing would shield its engine’s heat signature from the oncoming missile. Neither tactic was effective against more advanced radar-guided missiles, however. As suspected, the flare-launching system was a great improvement over both previous tactics."
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