Think the recent round of U.S.-Iran tensions died with the killing of Tehran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani? Think again. Once again, a rocket attack attributed to an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq has killed two American troops and one British service member. And once again, the U.S. has carried out an airstrike on the same militia it says was behind both the recent attack and the one that led to a burst of rocket attacks in late December and early January. So are we headed for another clash with the Islamic Republic?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
It takes two, baby: The conventional wisdom after the U.S. strike against Qasem Soleimani was that Iran’s ballistic missile attack on an Iraqi base housing American troops represented the sum total of the Islamic Republic’s willingness to retaliate for the death of one of its most powerful generals—particularly after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down a civilian airliner, provoking mass outrage and diminishing some of the national unity built up in the wake of Soleimani’s death.
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That judgment hasn’t held up well, especially not now. Many believed that the relatively long lead-up to the ballistic missile attack and the warning that Iran provided to its neighbor beforehand meant that Tehran had no desire to harm American troops and was instead engaged merely in retaliatory theater rather than an earnest effort to hurt American troops.
The fact that the Pentagon later admitted up to 110 American service members had suffered traumatic brain injuries from the missile attack put rest to some of that.
In the interim, Iranian-backed militias have been signaling that their fight against the U.S. did not end with the death of their former commanders. In February, Akram al-Kaabi, the leader of another Iranian-backed militia, Harakat al-Nujaba, said the “countdown” to a conflict with the U.S. in Iraq had begun and that “we have closed all of our public offices in Iraq and are ready for war.”
There were also smaller-scale attacks leading up to Wednesday night’s lethal rocket barrage. In February, a small rocket attack targeted the K-1 base in Kirkuk which houses American and Iraqi forces, and just last week three katyusha rockets landed in Baghdad’s Green Zone, which houses a number of U.S. diplomatic and Iraqi government facilities.
U.S. military officials have also been growing concerned about what they see as an increased risk of retaliation from Iranian proxies in Iraq and the region. The Washington Post reported just last week that Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, had recently warned troops in the region about the possibility of further attacks and said Iran was “under greater pressure, and entities under great pressure can react very aggressively."
Symbolism: The atmospherics surrounding the attacks attributed to Iran sure do seem to coincide with an Iranian-sympathetic actor. The initial rocket attack on Camp Taji took place on March 11, which would’ve been Qassem Soleimani’s 63rd birthday had an American drone not killed him in January.
Chaos upon chaos: What makes the current round of fighting even more striking is the fact that it appears to show Iran is willing to provoke a new round of conflict even as the coronavirus rips through Iranian society.
In February, the U.S. withdrew a thousand troops rushed to Kuwait in expectation of possible further retaliation. One defense official told the Wall Street Journal just last week that dealing with rampaging coronavirus infection in Iran meant that Iranian officials’ “focus is internal.”
But even as the coronavirus outbreak in the Islamic Republic has killed so many people that it has had to build massive burial pits visible from space, Iranian proxies—not known for freelancing outside of Tehran’s command and control—appear perfectly willing to lash out on Iran’s behalf.
Owning it: The rocket attacks that triggered the last round of fighting between the U.S., Iran, and its Iraqi proxy came with no official claim of responsibility. That lead some to raise questions about whether the attack really had been perpetrated by Kataib Hezbollah, even though the rockets were fired from an area known to be controlled by the Shia militia group.
Whatever doubts may have been raised last time, there’s even less doubt this time about the group’s responsibility. After the incident in December, Kataib Hezbollah remained coy and neither confirmed nor denied its involvement. This time the group has inched closer to an announcement with a statement released on Thursday that stopped short of claiming responsibility but praised the attackers and emphasized the need for supporters to expel American forces from Iraq.
Targets: A statement from the Defense Department said U.S. airstrikes “targeted five weapon storage facilities to significantly degrade their ability to conduct future attacks against Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) coalition forces.” A second defense official was more specific and told reporters that the strikes targeted Kataib Hezbollah drone storage locations.
Why drones? In short, the U.S. has been concerned about what it says are increasingly sophisticated Iranian weapons transfers to proxies in Iraq.
After the current round of U.S.-Iran tensions kicked off in May, American intelligence officials said they were confident Iraqi proxy groups had launched Iranian-made drones against a pipeline in Saudi Arabia in May. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels had taken credit for the attack and claimed to have fired the weapons from Yemen.
American intelligence officials have also been concerned that Iran has been sending ballistic missiles to Shia militia in Iraq and moving them closer to where U.S. forces are based. Over the summer of 2019, Israel allegedly struck ballistic missiles being stored in Iraqi militia bases en route to Syria.
Horizontal escalation: One thing we learned from the campaign of Iranian attacks that kicked off in May of 2019 is that Iran has a number of geographic options when it comes to using proxies against the U.S., and both its allies and its pushback are rarely limited to one country. As Iranian forces allegedly carried out attacks on international energy shipments in the Gulf and later against U.S. forces in Iraq, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen stepped up their drone and missile attacks on the Trump administration’s close ally, Saudi Arabia.
And in Yemen, despite hopes of a ceasefire agreement, there are again worrying signs that Iran may be looking to increase the temperature of that conflict. Houthi forces have used drone technology to use remotely piloted boats packed with explosives as weapons against Saudi vessels. There hasn’t been a successful attack from one of the Iranian-made suicide drone boat kits in years but Saudi officials say the Houthis have attempted attacks with the drone boats at least three times over the past three months.
In February, U.S. Central Command also showed off a haul of Iranian weapons seized from a fishing boat attempting to smuggle the cardo into Yemen. Iranian-made weapons—and weapons from just about every other country—are a fixture of the war in Yemen but what marked this seizure as uniquely worrying was the presence of anti-ship cruise missiles. Houthi forces had targeted international shipping and U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea with anti-ship missiles in 2016 but until recently anti-ship missile shipments and attacks on non-Saudi vessels off the coast of Yemen hadn’t resumed.
That trend might not hold. And while Iraq offers Iran plenty of U.S. targets to strike and proxies to carry out those attacks, it seems unlikely that a concerted retaliatory campaign from Iran will stay contained within Iraq’s borders.
