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The US carried out strikes in Iraq and Syria on Friday, its first retaliation against Iran-backed proxy groups nearly a week after a drone attack killed three American troops based in the region.
The attack, confirmed by a US official, is the first of what the Pentagon has said will be a series of retaliatory strikes. It marks a further escalation by the US in the Middle East, raising fears it is being drawn into a widening regional conflict sparked by the Israel-Hamas war.
The Joe Biden administration has sought to avoid escalation despite attacks by Iran-backed militias on US military personnel in Iraq, Syria and Jordan. The US last month also launched a campaign of missile strikes against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
“We will have a multi-tiered response, and again, we have the ability to respond a number of times, depending on what the situation is,” Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, said on Thursday.
Washington attributed last Sunday’s drone attack on its base in Jordan, which also injured 41 service members, to the Islamic Resistance in Iraq — a shadowy umbrella group that contains Kataib Hizbollah, a radical Shia militia, as well as other groups that have claimed responsibility for more than 160 attacks against US service members since mid-October, after the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
The IRI is part of the Axis of Resistance, controlled by Iran, and has also targeted Israeli interests since Hamas’s attack on the Jewish state in October.
Biden has been under pressure from some Republicans to strike Iran directly in response to last week’s attacks, which follow months of strikes by Houthi rebels on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, an important shipping lane for global trade.
The US has carried out more than 10 strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen in an effort to degrade the group’s ability to attack international maritime traffic.
“I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for,” Biden told reporters on Tuesday after he said he had decided on how to respond.
Iranian officials have also said they do not seek direct conflict with the US and Israel or a regional war.
“We are not seeking war, but we are not afraid of it,” Major General Hossein Salami, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Wednesday.
Biden’s decision to attack came after several meetings in recent days with his national security team to decide on an appropriate response. In the meantime, Kataib Hizbollah on Wednesday said it had halted attacks on US troops.
The US said it did not take that claim at “face value” and said Kataib Hizbollah was not the only group attacking its troops.
Friday’s assertive response further adds to an increasingly unstable Middle East. US secretary of state Antony Blinken on Monday warned the region was at its most dangerous juncture since the Yom Kippur war between Israel and its neighbours in 1973.
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