Trump says Iran is ‘orchestrating attack’ on US embassy
For the Iraqi government, it’s the stuff of nightmares: A proxy war between the United States and Iran in a country already wracked by protests, crippled by political paralysis and threatened by renewed terrorism.
But that war has come a step nearer with Sunday’s US airstrikes against a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq.
The target of the US airstrikes is a group called Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most radical Shia militia in Iraq, with close links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. US officials hold it responsible for a growing number of rocket attacks against US facilities in Iraq. The death of a US contractor in one such attack last week was the last straw for the Trump administration.
Kataib Hezbollah is militantly anti-American. In 2017 and 2018, its fighters in Syria tried to attack the US-supported garrison at al-Tanf on the Iraqi border. Earlier this month it boasted of the failure of the «Saudi-American-Zionist axis of evil.»
It has provided hundreds of fighters for the Assad regime in Syria — part of a broader Iranian effort to help stamp out the insurgency there — and is an important element in Iranian efforts to extend its influence through northern Iraq and into Syria. The US strikes, notably, were against targets along the main route between Iran and Syria.
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