A U.S. drone strike on a car in Baghdad killed three members of the powerful Kataib Hezbollah militia, including a senior commander, after a series of explosions were heard in the Iraqi capital, officials said. announced that he had died.
The strike took place late Wednesday on a main street in eastern Baghdad’s Mashtar district. Crowds gathered as emergency response teams searched the wreckage. Security forces cordoned off the heavily guarded Green Zone, home to many diplomatic facilities, amid calls for protesters to storm the US embassy.
Two U.S. officials familiar with the matter said a senior Kataib Hezbollah commander was targeted in the attack.
Two Iranian-backed militia officials in Iraq said one of the three killed was Wissam Mohammed “Abu Bakr” al-Saadi, the commander in charge of Kataib Hezbollah operations in Syria. He said it was. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists.
The airstrike comes amid heightened tensions in the region, used by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in retaliation for a U.S. drone strike that killed three U.S. soldiers. The attack came days after it launched airstrikes on dozens of sites in Iraq and Syria. Jordan in late January.
The United States has blamed Iraq’s Islamic Resistance Army, a broad Iran-backed militia, for the attack on Jordan, and officials have said they particularly suspect Kataib Hezbollah as its leader.
Iraq’s Islamic resistance group regularly claims attacks on US military bases in Iraq and Syria against the backdrop of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, and the Gaza war that has killed 27,707 Palestinians. They claim that this is retaliation by the US government for its support for Israel. According to the Ministry of Health in Hamas-controlled areas.
Kataib Hezbollah said in a statement after the Jordan airstrike that it would suspend attacks on U.S. forces to avoid “embarrassing the Iraqi government,” but other groups have also vowed to continue fighting.
On Sunday, Iraq’s Islamic resistance group claimed a drone attack on a US military base in eastern Syria killed six fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led group allied with the US. .
The latest surge in regional conflicts came shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office on Wednesday. The terms proposed by Hamas were rejected. They called for a hostage release agreement that would lead to a permanent cease-fire, and vowed to continue the war until “absolute victory.”
