BEIRUT, Lebanon – Since President Biden entered the White House, Iranian – backed militants across the Middle East have hit an Saudi airport with an explosive device and are accused of killing a critic in Lebanon. and that they were targeting U.S. military personnel at an airport. in northern Iraq, killing a Filipino contractor and wounding six others.
The world got its first glimpse on Thursday at the way Mr. Biden is likely to approach one of the biggest security concerns facing U.S. partners in the region: the network of militias backed by Iran and committed to undermining the interests of the United States. and his allies.
U.S. officials said overnight airstrikes by Mr. Biden was ordered to strike a collection of buildings on the Syrian side of a border with Iraq on Thursday, targeting members of the Iranian-backed militia, Kataib Hezbollah, and an affiliated group.
An official of Kataib Hezbollah said one of his group’s fighters was killed in the airstrikes. But Iranian state television and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a conflict monitor in Britain, reported that 17 fighters were killed in airstrikes near Abu Kamal, Syria, just across the border from Iraq.
While the exact death toll remains unclear, it appears Mr. Biden calibrated the strikes in the hope that they would do enough damage to show that the United States would not allow such a rocket attack on Erbil airport in northern Iraq on February 15, but not so much as to wider burn risk.
“He is drawing his first red line,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
She said the strikes indicated to Iran that his eagerness to return to a nuclear deal would not lead to Mr. Do not ignore other regional activities by Iran and its allies, and especially attacks on US troops.
“It sends a message: the conclusion is that we will not tolerate it and that we will use military force if we feel that you have crossed the border,” she said. Yahya said.
According to the Sabareen news channel on Telegram, which is used by Iran-backed groups, the mayors of six of the seven buildings hit in the strikes fled after seeing a U.S. surveillance plane.
In a sign of heightened tensions between the Iraqi government and Iran-backed groups that are also part of Iraq’s security forces, Sabareen said the US strikes were aided by an Iraqi intelligence official posing as a shepherd.
In an interview with a local television network on Thursday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said those who called themselves “the resistance” and launched missile attacks in Iraq were not just terrorists.
Sabareen mentions the remarks of mr. Hussein “a green light for the international community to target and eliminate the resistance under the pretext of terrorism.”
“We see these attacks as attacks on the Iraqi government,” he said. Hussein said in a recent interview with The New York Times, citing attacks on the U.S. embassy and other U.S. targets. Mr. Hussein is one of several Iraqi officials who have traveled to Iran in recent months to try to persuade the country to use its influence to re-deploy military forces.
“I and others went to Tehran and had a frank and open conversation with the Iranians,” he said. “It stopped these attacks for a while.”
“In the end, the conflict is in Iraq,” he said. Hussein said.
Senior Iraqi officials have said they expect a more nuanced policy from the Biden government towards Iraq. Mr Hussein said Baghdad had no expectation that the Iraqi government would make Iraq a foreign policy priority, but said relations would be helped by the long experience of both Mr Hussein.
Kataib Hezbollah says he remains present at the border crossing to prevent the infiltration of Islamic State fighters into Iraq.
The Iraqi government has struggled to keep Iranian-backed militants in check since mobilizing to fight ISIS when it took over large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The group lost its last piece of territory two years ago, and many of them the Iranian-backed paramilitary groups have been incorporated into Iraq’s official security forces.
Iraq has warned that conflict between the United States and Iran playing on its soil could destabilize the country.
Attacks on US interests in Iraq by alleged militias backed by Iran have escalated after the United States killed an Iraqi general, Qassim Suleimani, and a senior Iraqi security official, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in a 2020 bombing raid in Baghdad. killed.
“In recent years, Iraq has become a playground and a battleground for these kinds of activities driven by the escalation between the US and Iran,” said Renad Mansour, Iraq’s initiative director at Chatham House, a policy group in London. “These groups started popping up after the murder.”
“There is one clear message from everyone: the revenge of the dead is not over yet,” he said. “For them, time is no problem.”
Mansour, which locates armed groups in Iraq, said the newer groups apparently consist of fighters armed with weapons linked to the larger Iran-linked paramilitaries.
Some of the Iran-backed paramilitary groups are on the Iraqi government’s payroll as part of the Iraqi security forces, but are only nominally under government control.
The tit-for-tat attacks come as the Biden government embarks on the daunting task of restoring the nuclear deal with Iran from which President Donald J. Trump withdrew from the United States in 2018. Behind the question of the parameters of a new agreement is the issue of Iran’s destabilizing activities in the Middle East, which particularly concern US allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Iran has spent decades building a network of partnerships with militia groups across the region, making it possible to influence power outside its territory. These groups include the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, a number of groups in Iraq and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
All of these groups have received at least some funding, support, and weapons from Iran over the years, and all share their ideology of ‘resistance’, or the fight against Israel and the United States’ interests in the region.
The groups have developed numerous, often inexpensive ways to create headaches for America and its allies. Hezbollah has grown into Lebanon’s most powerful military and political force, with an arsenal of more than 100,000 rockets aimed at Israel and experienced fighters helping turn the tide in Syria’s civil war in favor of President Bashar al-Assad.
The group’s enemies in Lebanon this month accused the group of killing Lokman Slim, a publisher, filmmaker and vocal critic of the group who had close ties to Western officials. Hezbollah officials deny any connection to the killing of Mr. Smart.
Days after the death of mr. Cleverly, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been bombing an Saudi-led Arab coalition since 2015, targeted an airport in the Saudi city of Abha with an explosive charge that damaged a civilian plane.
The Erbil rocket attack was claimed by a previously unknown armed group calling itself the Guardians of the Blood. U.S. officials said it appeared to be linked to one or more of Iraq’s more notorious militias, and Thursday’s strikes in Syria were aimed at facilities belonging to them.
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, Lebanon and Jane Arraf of Amman, Jordan. Falih Hassan reported from Baghdad.