US aircraft bombed five Shi’ite liberation targets in Iraq in retaliation for the earlier deaths of two US service members and a British nurse in a rocket attack on Camp Taji near Baghdad.
These strikes targeted five weapon storage facilities to significantly degrade their ability to conduct future attacks against Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) and ISIS coalition forces.
Branding the raids “defensive and proportional,” it said that the sorties were launched in “direct response to the threat posed by Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia groups.”
Earlier in the day, the Pentagon blamed the “Iran-backed” Iraqi Shi’ite militias for Wednesday’s rocket strike, which killed three and wounded 14 more people.
Kata’eb Hezbollah is one of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) militias that the US has blamed for attacks on its forces in Iraq.
The PMF are mainly composed of Iraqi Shi’ite militiamen who have fought alongside the mainly Sunni Iraqi army, and have been formally recognized as a part of it since March 2018.
The US regime considers them Iranian proxies, because they have received military and financial support from Tehran during the struggle against ISIS terrorists.
The PMF were also blamed for the attack on the K-1 base outside of Kirkuk in December, which killed one US military contractor. This triggered the drone assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, and Iran responding to that by launching ballistic missiles against two US bases inside Iraq.
RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2020.
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