The Pentagon has commenced its retaliation for a drone attack that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan, launching airstrikes that purportedly targeted militants affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force in Iraq and Syria.
“U.S. forces have begun a new bombing campaign in the Middle East to punish Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups for a series of drone and missile attacks on American military bases in the region.
Washington’s latest airstrikes began around midnight Baghdad time on Saturday and hit more than 85 targets in Syria and Iraq, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement. The operation involved ‘numerous aircraft’, including long-range bombers flown from the U.S., which dropped over 125 precision munitions on their targets.
Those targets included command and control centers, intelligence sites, weapons caches, and supply-chain facilities of Iranian-backed militias, as well as ‘their IRGC sponsors who facilitated attacks against U.S. and coalition forces’, CENTCOM said.
The bombings follow a series of assaults on American military bases in the Middle East, including a drone attack that killed three American soldiers and wounded more than 40 others at secretive U.S. installation in Jordan. That base, called Tower 22, is located near the Syrian and Iraqi borders.
The attack on Tower 22 was ‘planned, resourced and facilitated’ by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday. The group consists of multiple militias, including Kataib Hezbollah, which has launched multiple rocket and drone strikes against U.S. forces in the region since the Israel-Hamas war began in October”. -RT
As the current U.S. administration has come under increasing pressure from the American public on account of the numerous missile, rocket, and drone strikes on its bases over the last three months, the United States government is also well aware that such retaliatory airstrikes, like those recently launched in Yemen, will not affect the process of resistance attacks from Iranian-backed militants in Syria and Iraq.