Biden’s announcement of Americans killed this weekend is the
first
such fatal incident for Americans in the region since October 7.
Biden generally blamed “Iran-backed” groups for the strikes. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq issued a statement on Sunday taking responsibility; if accurate, marking a significant geographical departure out of Iraq for most of its activities. They also published a video allegedly showing the strikes.
According to
Al Mayadeen
, a press outlet affiliated with the Lebanese terror organization Hezbollah, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq “declared that it conducted a series of drone attacks on five enemy positions in the region. Among these, three were aimed at US occupation bases situated in Syria, specifically targeting al-Shadadi, al-Rukban, and al-Tanf.”
“The fourth strike was directed at a base near Erbil Airport in the Iraqi Kurdistan region,” Al Mayadeen detailed. “The fifth operation was executed on the ‘Zevelun’ naval facility in occupied Palestine [sic].”
A commander of Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, one of the groups under the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” brand, suggested that the groups were preparing an escalation in attacks on Americans in comments published by
PressTV
on Sunday.
“Iraq’s negotiations with the Americans will never cause a decline in efforts by the Islamic resistance against the outsiders and they will even cause us to pile more pressure on the occupiers,” the anonymous “commander” reportedly said.
“Nujaba and other groups in Iraq, which operate under the umbrella organization of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), have repeatedly said attacks on US positions in Iraq and Syria will continue until Israel ends its genocidal war on Gaza,” PressTV added.
Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba is one of a large number of militias active in Iraq with Iranian backing, and
considered
“perhaps the most aggressive anti-American Iran-backed militia in Iraq.” It gained notoriety in the jihadi world by releasing a
nasheed
, or jihadi war song, honoring Iranian terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani. Former President Donald Trump eliminated Soleimani from the battlefield with a targeted airstrike on January 3, 2020, while he was in Iraq coordinating attacks on U.S. forces with Iran’s allied militias there.
The “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” is
considered
to be made up mostly of those militias, though it appears to be intentionally unclear exactly which of the militias are involved in it or to what extent it is an established organization. The jihadists started using the term to refer to terrorist attacks against America and its allies in Iraq following the October 7 atrocities and has never defined itself or its members publicly.
Many of its members are believed to also be part of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of majority Iran-backed, Shiite militias who became a formal arm of the Iraqi armed forces during the war to uproot the Islamic State “caliphate” in the country. The PMF took credit for fighting the Islamic State despite the Kurdish Peshmerga forces and U.S. troops doing most of the work. American military leaders
praised
the PMF for their “professional” work at the time.
Despite ample evidence that Iran, the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism, funds PMF units and other militias and terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East, its foreign ministry officially denied any involvement in the attack that killed American troops.
“Iran is not involved in the resistance groups’ decisions about how to support the Palestinian people or defend themselves and the people of their countries in the face of any aggression and occupation,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani
said
on Monday. “Iran monitors the developments in the region with readiness and vigilance and the responsibility for the consequences of provocative accusations against Iran rests with the perpetrators of such baseless claims.”
Kan’ani appeared to blame Washington for the deaths of the troops, claiming “the US’s insistence and continuous violation of the national sovereignty of Iraq and Syria and bombing attacks against the groups and people of Iraq, Syria and Yemen have intensified the instability in the region,” according to PressTV.
Iran’s terror proxies Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – which the U.S. State Department
estimated
in 2020 receive $100 million annual from Tehran – openly celebrated the killing.
“The killing of three American soldiers is a message to the American administration that unless the killing of innocent people in Gaza stops, it must confront the entire Ummah,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas spokesperson, reportedly said, according to
PressTV
.
Palestinian Jihad declared the killing of Americans “a natural and legitimate response” to America’s presence in the Middle East.
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