The US Embassy in Baghdad on Saturday told all US citizens to leave Iraq due to drone and missile attacks launched by Iran and its Iraqi allies, which continue to target US assets across the country, as the US-Israeli war against Iran expands across the region.
“Iran-aligned terrorist militias have encouraged and conducted indiscriminate attacks on U.S. citizens and targets associated with the United States throughout Iraq, including the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR),” the embassy said. “US citizens should leave Iraq now.”
The embassy told US citizens not to “attempt to come to the embassy in Baghdad or the consulate general in Erbil in light of the ongoing risk of missiles, drones, and rockets in Iraqi airspace.”
The same day the advisory was issued, a missile reportedly struck the US embassy compound in Baghdad. Drone and missile attacks continued in Iraq on Sunday, with at least four civilians being injured in Iraqi Kurdistan, according to Rudaw.
The US has also launched a series of airstrikes against the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of mostly Shia militias formed in 2014 to fight ISIS, and is part of Iraq’s official security forces. Another group that calls itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), which includes some of the factions in the PMF, has been claiming attacks on US bases.
US airstrikes were launched in Baghdad on Saturday and killed at least three PMF fighters. A few days earlier, more than 30 PMF fighters were reported killed by multiple US airstrikes near the Iraq-Syria border.
US Central Command has said that on March 12, it lost a KC-135 refueling tanker aircraft over Iraq, an incident it claimed wasn’t the result of enemy fire despite the massive number of drone and missile attacks. CENTCOM has since confirmed that all six crewmembers were killed, bringing the total number of US troops who have been killed in the war to at least 13. A French soldier has also been killed in Iraq by a drone attack in Erbil.
