A U.S. airstrike in central Baghdad killed the commander of an Iran-backed militia Thursday, potentially escalating tensions in the region amid rising fears of Israel’s war against Hamas spiraling into a wider international conflict.
An anonymous U.S. official told Reuters that the strike in Iraq targeted a leader of Harakat al Nujaba, which the American military blames for attacks on U.S. forces inside the country. The official said that a vehicle had been hit and the commander and one other person were killed.
The Popular Mobilization Force (PMF), a coalition of militias nominally controlled by the Iraqi military, released a statement saying its deputy head of operations in Baghdad was dead, according to the Associated Press. Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi, or “Abu Taqwa,” was killed “as a result of brutal American aggression,” the statement read.
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Harakat al Nujaba, one of the militias in the PMF, was designated a terror group by Washington, D.C., in 2019. But Yehia Rasool, a spokesperson for the Iraqi military, slammed the strike as an “unprovoked attack on an Iraqi security body operating in accordance with the powers granted to it by” the Iraqi military.
Two militia officials told the AP that, in addition to the two killed, five others were wounded in the strike. One source said al-Saidi was driving into the garage of the Baghdad headquarters of Harakat al Nujaba with another militia official when the car was struck, killing both of the occupants.
The strike comes amid rising calls in Iraq for U.S. forces to leave, with bases housing American troops coming under attack in recent months over Washington’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas. A group calling itself Islamic Resistance in Iraq has launched over 100 attacks against U.S. installations in Iraq and Syria since Hamas’ war against Israel broke out on Oct. 7.
The airstrike also came as Iran swore to take revenge against the culprits of a bomb attack Wednesday that killed 84 people and wounded hundreds more at a memorial ceremony marking the fourth anniversary of the U.S. assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. The so-called Islamic State has since taken responsibility for the the pair of explosions which tore through crowds that had gathered for the procession in the Iranian city of Kerman.
“The enemy should know the soldiers on Soleimani’s bright path won’t tolerate their vileness & crime,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a statement Wednesday. “The hands stained with the blood of innocent people & the corrupt, evil minds that misdirected them will definitely be the target of a severe pounding & a deserving retribution.”
He added that the “perpetrators of this tragedy will be met with a strong response,” but did not blame any particular group or nation for the blasts, which appear to be the deadliest attacks inside Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Authorities in Iran were still investigating the explosions Thursday, which is being marked as a day of mourning in the country. State media reported that the explosions were caused by a pair of devices that were remotely detonated.
An initial death toll saying that over 100 had been killed in the blast was revised downwards in the hours after the attack. Jafar Miadfar, the head of Iran’s emergency services, said officials realized some names had been added to the list of victims more than once, and that dismembered bodies had been inadvertently counted “several times,” Al Jazeera reports.
The bombing exacerbated already-rising tensions across the region caused by Israel’s war against Hamas—a group supported by Iran—in Gaza. The explosions in Iran also came the day after a senior Hamas official was killed in Beirut, with authorities in Lebanon claiming Israel was behind the assassination.
Mourners had assembled in Kerman on Wednesday to mark the fourth anniversary of the death of Gen. Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force. Donald Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Soleimani in Iraq in 2020, calling the general the “number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.”
