On Sunday, the U.S military carried out strikes using F-15 aircraft to fire missiles at three sites in Iraq and two in Syria. According to a statement from the Pentagon, the locations held bases controlled by a militia group called Kataib Hezbollah that has connections to the Iranian government. The attacks came following an incident on Friday in which a series of rockets were fired into a based in Iraq, resulting in the death of a U.S. contractor and wounding four U.S. soldiers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the militia group issued an announcement that 25 of its fighters had been killed and at least 20 more wounded in U.S. attacks. Fifteen of those deaths were supposedly within Iraq. Kataib Hezbollah had issued warnings that there would be retaliation for the U.S. action, and a number of militia groups joined in calling for remaining U.S. forces to be expelled from Iraq.
On Sunday evening, Mike Pompeo spoke with reporters in the parking lot of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to blame Iran for the series of incidents and insist, “We will not stand for the Islamic Republic of Iran to take actions that put American men and women in jeopardy.”
Though Trump ordered an airstrike on a mostly abandoned military base in Syria in 2017, expending $100 million’s worth of missiles to kill nine people, Sunday’s strike was the first time that the U.S. has targeted Shiite militia groups since 2014. That’s in part because several of these groups cooperated with the United States in attempts to press back against the Islamic State. Some of the sites attacked were in areas formally occupied by the Islamic State.
According to the Journal, U.S. officials contacted the Iraqi prime minister half an hour before the strikes to inform him that the U.S. was preparing to bomb the militia sites. The prime minister “strongly objected and demanded the U.S. call the strikes off,” calling it a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and expressing concerns that it could spark a conflict with Iran. However, the U.S. strike went ahead over the objections of Iraq.
Since 2014, what has been called an informal truce has existed between U.S. forces and Shiite militias, with both sides targeting the Islamic State and other jihadist Sunni forces. But with the rocket launches against an Iraqi base where U.S. forces were present, and the U.S. retaliation, that unwritten truce would seem to be definitively over.
Shiite forces have denied responsibility for the rocket attack, but U.S. intelligence seems confident in both fingering Kataib Hezbollah for the action and stating that the group is supported by Iran.