The United States carried out retaliatory strikes on Friday in Iraq and Syria against facilities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the militias they back, four US officials said, after a deadly attack in Jordan that killed three US troops and injured some 40 others.
The strikes are believed to be just the first in a multi-tiered response by US President Joe Biden’s administration in response to the attack last weekend carried out by Iran-backed militants.
While the US strikes did not target any locations inside Iran, they are likely to increase concern about tensions in the Middle East spiralling from Israel’s more than three-month-old war with Hamas militants in Gaza.
The US military said in a statement that the strikes hit targets including command and control centres, rockets, missiles and drone storage facilities, as well as logistics and munition supply chain facilities.
The strikes hit more than 85 targets with more than 125 munitions. They targeted the Quds Force – the foreign espionage and paramilitary arm of the IRGC that heavily influences its allied militia across the Middle East, from Lebanon to Iraq and Yemen to Syria.
The Jordan attack was the first deadly strike against US troops since the Israel-Gaza war erupted in October and marked a major escalation in tensions.
Fox News cited an unidentified US defence department official saying the strikes were launched from multiple platforms.
Another report – from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor – said that six members of a pro-Iran militia group had been killed in eastern Syria during strikes believed to be carried out by the United States.
Warplanes carried out four rounds of raids on sites housing Iran-backed groups in the eastern Deir Ezzor province, the Observatory said, three of them targeting al-Mayadeen and one striking Albu Kamal, near the Iraqi border.
What are US troops doing in the Middle East and where are they?
What are US troops doing in the Middle East and where are they?
Just minutes before the first US media reports on the start of the bombing, Biden had attended a solemn military ritual at a Delaware airbase for the return of the three dead soldiers.
Six servicemen wearing camouflage, dark berets and white gloves marched slowly three times on and off the ramp of a huge C-5 transport plane to carry the bodies in flag-draped “transfer cases” – as the military calls caskets used in transport – to a waiting van.
The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CQ Brown, also attended what is known as a “dignified transfer” – their presence highlighting the importance, as well as relative rarity, of returning dead service members in the wake of US exits from major foreign conflicts.
William Rivers, Kennedy Sanders and Breonna Moffett, all from the southern state of Georgia, were killed in a drone strike. The White House blames the Islamic Resistance in Iraq militia for the attack.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse