Israel established a secret military base in the desert of western Iraq to support the bombing campaign against Iran and bombed Iraqi soldiers to prevent them from finding it, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
Sources told the Journal that the military outpost was established just before the US and Israel launched the war on February 28 and that it was used as a logistics base for the Israeli Air Force. Israeli special forces and search and rescue teams were deployed to the base in case any Israeli fighter jets were shot down.
In early March, local shepherds reported unusual military activity in the area, and Iraqi troops set out in Humvees to investigate, but they were hit by Israeli airstrikes. At the time, the Iraqi government blamed the strikes on the US. “This reckless operation was carried out without coordination or approval,” said Lt. Gen. Qais Al-Muhammadawi, a senior Iraqi military official.
The Journal report has caused significant controversy in Iraq, with the Iraqi Joint Operations Command saying on Sunday that it found no evidence of a foreign military presence in western Iraq following clashes with an unidentified force on March 4.
Around the same time, the US began bombing Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, or the PMF, a coalition of mainly Shia militias formed in 2014 to fight ISIS, which is part of Iraq’s security forces. During the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, US bases and other assets in Iraq came under heavy drone attacks, and some were claimed by the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, another group of Shia factions that includes some of the PMF militias.
The US killed dozens of PMF fighters in its airstrikes in March, and one US attack on March 25 killed seven Iraqi soldiers. The US backs the Iraqi military against ISIS remnants in the country, though according to recent media reports, it has been withholding funding to pressure Baghdad over its ties with its neighbor, Iran.
The US has controlled Iraq’s oil revenue since the 2003 invasion, giving Washington significant leverage over Baghdad, something the Trump administration is using in an attempt to influence the incoming government, which will be led by Ali al-Zaid.
The controversy over the reported secret military base is also causing more anger in Iraq over the government’s relationship with the US, since Washington would have been aware of the Israeli outpost. An Iraqi security source told Saudi media that military activity of an “unknown origin” was observed in western Iraq, but that “the American side informed the Iraqi forces at the time of the need not to approach the area for security reasons.”
