Seven members of Iraq’s armed forces were killed on Wednesday in what was likely a US airstrike on a base the Iraqi military shares with the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of mostly Iran-aligned Shia militias that the US has targeted since the start of the war with Iran.
The Iraqi Defense Ministry said that the Habbaniyah military base and its medical clinic in the western Anbar province were struck and that 13 Iraqi soldiers were also injured by the attack. The ministry called the attack “a heinous crime” that violated “all international laws and norms.”
The same base was hit by what the PMF said was a US airstrike a day earlier, an attack that killed 15 PMF fighters, including a senior commander.
Last week, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that US Apache helicopters were carrying out strikes against Iran-aligned factions in Iraq, but the US military has not been regularly announcing its attacks in the country. Israel has also previously launched airstrikes against Shia militias in Iraq, but it’s much more common for the US military to do so.
A US airstrike killing members of the Iraqi military would mark a significant escalation since it is a US-backed force. The strike came a day after the Iraqi government gave the PMF, which is technically part of Iraq’s security forces, a green light to respond to attacks on its positions.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani on Wednesday instructed his Foreign Ministry to summon the US chargé d’affaires in Baghdad over the strike that killed seven Iraqi soldiers. “We emphasize that the government and the armed forces reserve the right to respond by all available means as sanctioned by the United Nations Charter,” a spokesman for al-Sudani said.
US bases and diplomatic facilities in Iraq have come under constant missile and drone attacks that have mostly been claimed by a group that calls itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), which includes some of the factions in the PMF. On Tuesday, the IRI posted a video that showed a drone striking a parked Black Hawk helicopter at the US’s Camp Victory Base in Baghdad.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has also claimed attacks on US assets and what it described as Israeli Mossad bases in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, where most US forces in the country are now based. Amid the heavy attacks, the US ordered all American citizens to leave Iraq, and NATO has withdrawn its forces from the country.
