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Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has warned that the Middle East confronted its most “harmful” situations since no less than 1973, as Washington considers its response to an assault that killed three service members on the weekend.
Blinken’s feedback on Monday underscored the priority within the Biden administration in regards to the potential for an growth of the battle, even because it vows to retaliate in opposition to the Iran-backed militias it has blamed for the lethal strike.
The US navy had didn’t cease the enemy drone on Sunday after mistaking it for an American drone that approached a base close to Jordan’s border with Syria on the similar time, a US official mentioned on Monday.
The assault was the primary to kill US troops for the reason that Israel-Hamas conflict that started on October 7 triggered a wave of assaults by Iranian-aligned teams in opposition to American forces within the area. This has raised the stress on President Joe Biden to discover a technique to halt the assaults on US personnel and pursuits.
“This is an extremely risky time within the Middle East,” Blinken instructed reporters throughout a press convention with Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg. “I might argue that we have not seen a state of affairs as harmful because the one we’re dealing with now throughout the area since no less than 1973, and arguably even earlier than that,” he added, a reference to the yr of the Yom Kippur conflict between Israel and neighboring Arab states.
Earlier within the day, John Kirby, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, mentioned that Biden was “weighing” the US response to the assault after assembly his nationwide safety workforce each on Sunday and on Monday.
Blinken mentioned: “We will reply. And that response could possibly be multi-levelled, are available phases, and be sustained over time.” But the secretary of state additionally insisted that the US needed to “forestall broader escalation”.
US protection officers mentioned Sunday’s assault additionally injured no less than 40 service members, because it struck the Tower 22 outpost close to Jordan’s border with Syria, which homes 350 US navy personnel as a part of the coalition in opposition to Isis. The drone struck early within the morning in an space the place service members stay and had been sleeping, a part of the rationale the casualty price was so excessive, officers mentioned.
The US has about 2,500 troops in Iraq and about 900 in Syria, the place they’re deployed to assist forestall a resurgence of the jihadist group.
The US navy was nonetheless making an attempt to raised perceive the incident and the way the one-way assault drone was capable of trigger so many casualties, officers mentioned.
“We are attempting to determine how a one-way assault drone was capable of evade our defenses,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh mentioned.
US officers mentioned they had been nonetheless assessing who was answerable for the drone assault however noticed hyperlinks to Iraq-based, Iran-backed militia Kataib Hizbollah.
“It has the footprints of Kataib Hizbollah, however not making a closing evaluation on that — our groups listed below are persevering with to do the evaluation,” Singh mentioned.
Kirby mentioned the US didn’t search “conflict” with Iran, however mentioned the administration was “absolutely cognizant of the truth that these teams backed by Tehran have simply taken the lives of American troops”.
Iran has sought to distance itself from the lethal assault because it and the US seem eager to keep away from an extra escalation. Iran’s overseas ministry labeled any accusation that it was concerned within the US troops’ deaths as a “baseless” conspiracy by these “excited about dragging the US into a brand new battle within the area to accentuate the disaster”.
But Singh mentioned on Monday that “Iran bears accountability as a result of it funds these teams in Iraq and Syria that launch assaults on our service members”.
The US has hit targets linked to Iranian-backed militias throughout the area following 165 assaults by militants on US troops in Iraq, Syria and Jordan since October, in addition to greater than 30 strikes on worldwide transport within the Red Sea.
US protection secretary Lloyd Austin mentioned Washington would “take all crucial actions to defend the US and our troops”. American forces in Syria and Iraq have come underneath repeated assault by a newly created group of Iran-backed Iraqi militias often called the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which mentioned it was retaliating in opposition to Washington’s backing for Israel’s conflict in opposition to Hamas in Gaza.