Biden orders strike on Iranian-aligned group after 3 US troops injured in drone attack in Iraq

After three US service men were injured in a drone assault in Northern Iraq, President Joe Biden directed the US military to conduct retaliation attacks against Iranian-backed militia groups.

According to National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, one of the US servicemen was critically injured in the early Monday incident. The Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and allied factions claimed responsibility for the attack under an umbrella of Iranian-backed militants.

Biden, who is spending the holidays at the presidential retreat in Maryland, was informed on the incident. And directed the Pentagon to plan a reaction.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Biden’s national security team quickly drew up plans and presented him with options in a call and Biden directed strikes against three locations utilized by Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups. The US strikes were carried out at about 4:45 a.m. on Tuesday in Iraq.

“The President places no higher priority than the protection of American personnel serving in harm’s way,” Watson said. “The United States will act at a time and in a manner of our choosing should these attacks continue.”

The latest attack on US troops follows months of escalating threats and actions against American forces in the region since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the devastating war in Gaza. The US has blamed Iran, which has funded and trained Hamas, for the rising violence by its network of proxy groups across the region, including attacks by Yemen’s Houthis against commercial and military vessels thorough a critical shipping choke point in the Red Sea.

The Biden administration has sought to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spiraling into a wider regional conflict that either opens up new fronts of Israeli fighting or that draws the US in directly. The administration’s measured response — where not every attempt on American troops has been met with a counterattack — has drawn criticism from Republicans.

The US has thousands of troops in Iraq training Iraqi forces and combating remnants of the Islamic State group, and hundreds in Syria, mostly on the counter-IS mission. They have come under dozens of attacks, though as yet none fatal, since the war began on Oct. 7, with the US attributing responsibility to Iran-backed groups.