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04-02-2024
BAGHDAD/ MASCOW: The US has launched strikes on 85 targets in Syria and Iraq in response to last Sunday’s drone attack on a US military base
The White House had blamed an Iran-backed militia umbrella group for the attack that killed three US soldiers
Iraq says that the US retaliatory strikes will bring disastrous consequences for the region and that civilians were among 16 people killed
The US says its forces conducted airstrikes against Iran-backed militia groups based in Iraq and Syria
“Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” President Biden said in a statement on Friday
Iran has denied involvement in the attack on the US base, calling the accusations “baseless” and saying it was “not involved in the decision-making of resistance groups”
Meanwhile, Russia has called for an “urgent” meeting of the UN Security Council over the US strikes on Iran-backed militia groups based in Iraq and Syria.
“We just demanded an urgent sitting of the UN Security Council over the threat to peace and safety created by US strikes on Syria and Iraq,” Moscow’s diplomat at the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, said on social media.
Russia, a permanent council member has becomes a close ally of Iran.
Ukraine’s government and Western intelligence agencies say Russia has been using Iranian-made drones since February 2022 when it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
As we continue to analyse the US airstrikes against Iran-backed groups in Iraq and Syria, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, tells media that we are now likely to see a “reduction” of Iran’s rhetoric in the coming days.
Even though “we’ve already seen in the Red Sea that US-UK strikes have not really resulted in a cessation of attacks by the Houthis,” Mehran Kamrava says that “Iraqi proxies are a different story”.
Kamrava suggests that Tehran will now attempt “to cool the Iraqi militia so they don’t engage in these tit-for-tat attacks with the Americans”.
Three days ago, the leader of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the leading Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and a US-designated terrorist group, said it had suspended operations against US forces, a possible sign that Iran was already looking to avoid a further escalation but now that the US has struck back, could Tehran’s calculation change?
“The United States hasn’t struck Iran, so there isn’t anything for Iran to do,” Prof Mohammad Marandi of Tehran University told media on Saturday morning.
While it’s true that the Biden administration resisted the urge to target Iran directly, Tehran’s calculations are not likely to be so black and white. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
