WASHINGTON — U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the United States navy to hold out retaliatory airstrikes towards Iranian-backed militia teams after three U.S. service members had been injured in a drone assault in northern Iraq.
National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson mentioned one of many U.S. troops suffered essential accidents within the assault that occurred earlier Monday. The Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated teams, below an umbrella of Iranian-backed militants, claimed credit score for the assault that utilized a one-way assault drone.
Iraqi officers mentioned that U.S. strikes concentrating on militia websites early Tuesday killed one militant and wounded 18. They got here at a time of heightened fears of a regional spillover of the Israel-Hamas warfare.
Iran introduced Monday that an Israeli strike on the outskirts of the Syrian capital of Damascus killed considered one of its high generals, Seyed Razi Mousavi, who had been an in depth companion of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the previous head of Iran’s elite Quds Force. Soleimani was slain in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
Iranian officers vowed revenge for the killing of Mousavi, however didn’t instantly launch a retaliatory strike. The militia assault Monday in northern Iraq was launched previous to the strike in Syria that killed Mousavi.
Biden, who was spending Christmas on the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, was alerted to the assault by White House nationwide safety adviser Jake Sullivan shortly after it occurred Monday and ordered the Pentagon and his high nationwide safety aides to organize response choices to the assault on an air base utilized by American troops in Irbil.
Sullivan consulted with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Biden’s deputy nationwide safety adviser, Jon Finer, was with the president at Camp David and convened high aides to evaluate choices, in keeping with a U.S. official, who wasn’t licensed to remark publicly and requested anonymity.
Within hours, Biden convened his nationwide safety staff for a name through which Austin and Gen. CQ Brown, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed Biden on the response choices. Biden opted to focus on three areas utilized by Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated teams, the official mentioned.
The U.S. strikes had been carried out at about 4:45 a.m. Tuesday in Iraq, lower than 13 hours after the U.S. personnel had been attacked. According to U.S. Central Command, the retaliatory strikes on the three websites “destroyed the targeted facilities and likely killed a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants.”
“The President places no higher priority than the protection of American personnel serving in harm’s way,” Watson mentioned. “The United States will act at a time and in a manner of our choosing should these attacks continue.”
The newest assault on U.S. troops follows months of escalating threats and actions towards American forces within the area because the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel that sparked the devastating warfare in Gaza.
The harmful back-and-forth strikes have escalated since Iranian-backed militant teams below the umbrella group known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Syria started placing U.S. amenities Oct. 17, the date {that a} blast at a hospital in Gaza killed a whole bunch. Iranian-backed militias have carried out greater than 100 assaults on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria because the begin of the Israel-Hamas warfare greater than two months in the past.
In November, U.S. fighter jets struck a Kataib Hezbollah operations heart and command and management node, following a short-range ballistic missile assault on U.S. forces at Al-Assad Air Base in western Iraq. Iranian-backed militias additionally carried out a drone assault on the similar air base in October, inflicting minor accidents.
The U.S. has additionally blamed Iran, which has funded and educated the Hamas group, for assaults by Yemen’s Houthi militants towards industrial and navy vessels by a essential transport choke level within the Red Sea.
The Biden administration has sought to forestall the Israel-Hamas warfare from spiraling right into a wider regional battle that both opens up new fronts of Israeli combating or attracts the U.S. in immediately. The administration’s measured response – the place not each try on American troops has been met with a counterattack – has drawn criticism from Republicans.
The U.S. has hundreds of troops in Iraq coaching Iraqi forces and combating remnants of the Islamic State group, and a whole bunch in Syria, totally on the counter-IS mission. They have come below dozens of assaults, although as but none deadly, because the warfare started on Oct. 7, with the U.S. attributing duty to Iran-backed teams.
“While we do not seek to escalate conflict in the region, we are committed and fully prepared to take further necessary measures to protect our people and our facilities,” Austin mentioned in a press release.
The clashes put the federal government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in a fragile place. He got here to energy in 2022 with the backing of a coalition of Iranian-backed events, a few of that are related to the identical militias launching the assaults on U.S. bases.
A bunch of Iranian-backed militias often called the Popular Mobilization Forces had been key within the combat towards Islamic State militants after the extremist group overran a lot of Iraq in 2014. The PMF is formally below the command of the Iraqi military, however in follow the militias function independently.
In a press release Tuesday, Sudani condemned each the militia assault in Irbil and the U.S. response.
Attacks on “foreign diplomatic mission headquarters and sites hosting military advisers from friendly nations … infringe upon Iraq’s sovereignty and are deemed unacceptable under any circumstances,” the assertion mentioned.
However, it added that that the retaliatory strikes by the U.S. on “Iraqi military sites” – referring to the militia – “constitute a clear hostile act.” Sudani mentioned a few of these injured within the strikes had been civilians.
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Qassim Abdul-Zahra reported from Baghdad.
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