Iraqi militants from Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups injured three US service members, including one critically, in an attack on the Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq on Christmas Day. They have launched more than a hundred drone and rocket attacks on US troops in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17, although there have been brief reductions in the attacks.
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The US military, in response to the attack, conducted airstrikes on three facilities the groups use in Iraq, which it has done in a series of similar responses in October and November.
“Early assessments indicate that these US airstrikes destroyed the targeted facilities and likely killed a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants. There are no indications that any civilian lives were affected,” US Central Command said in a statement, while Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al Sudani said the US strike killed one Iraqi service member and injured 18 others, including civilians.
“This constitutes a clear hostile act. It runs counter to the pursuit of enduring mutual interests in establishing security and stability, and it opposes the declared intention of the American side to enhance relations with Iraq,” the prime minister said.
The United States has repeatedly said, as it relates to the attacks from these militias and other attacks from US adversaries in the Middle East, that it does not want to see the war between Israel and Hamas expand to a wider conflict, but many of the anti-US actors are carrying out these attacks in response to Israel’s war and the US’s support for its Middle Eastern ally.
An anonymous senior Kataib Hezbollah official told the Washington Post that the group’s continued attacks against US forces are in part due to their support for Israel but also because it views the US troops in Iraq as an “occupation.” There are roughly 3,500 US troops in Iraq and Syria, which remain there to ensure the lasting defeat of the Islamic State.
Hundreds of miles away, a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was killed on Monday in an airstrike in Syria, Iranian media reported, which also noted that the Guard blamed Israel for carrying out the strike. An Israeli military spokesman declined to comment on the reports.
Brig. Gen. Sayyed Razi Mousavi, whom the Guard said was “in charge of logistics support for the Resistance front in Syria,” was reportedly killed in a strike in a suburb of Damascus. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi vowed that Israel “will certainly pay for this crime.”
Tehran has positioned itself opposite the US and Western countries for decades, but it and its proxies have intensified the tension in the Middle East following Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel that prompted Israel’s military response. The Houthis, the Yemeni rebel group that is also backed by Iran, have carried out more than a dozen ballistic missiles and drone attacks against commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
These attacks prompted numerous shipping companies to reroute to avoid these shipping lanes, raising concerns about what the long-term implications could be to the shipping industry if these passageways become no longer usable. Maersk, a major shipping company, announced on Sunday it is “preparing” to resume shipping operations in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden following the creation of a task force set up by the US to protect these commercial vessels.
On Saturday, the motor vessel Chem Pluto, a Liberian-flagged, Japanese-owned, and Netherlands-operated chemical tanker, was attacked roughly 200 nautical miles off the coast of India. The drone originated from Iran, a deviation from the location where the drone originated from and where the target was located, a US defense official told the Washington Examiner.