U.S. strikes militia targets in Syria.
BEIRUT — Since President Joe Biden entered the White House, Iranian-backed militants across the Middle East have struck an airport in Saudi Arabia with an exploding drone, and are accused of assassinating a critic in Lebanon and of targeting U.S. military personnel at an airport in northern Iraq, killing a Filipino contractor and wounding six others.
On Thursday, the world got its first glimpse of how Biden is likely to approach one of the greatest security concerns of American partners in the region: the network of militias that are backed by Iran and committed to subverting the interests of the United States and its allies.
U.S. officials said that overnight airstrikes ordered by Biden hit a collection of buildings on the Syrian side of a border crossing with Iraq on Thursday and targeted members of the Iran-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and an affiliated group.
A Kataib Hezbollah official said that one of his group's fighters had been killed in the airstrikes. A statement by the group later described the dead fighter as a member of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces, a collection of paramilitaries that includes Kataib Hezbollah and is officially part of Iraqi government security forces.
But Iranian state television and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a conflict monitor based in Britain, reported that 17 fighters had been killed in the airstrikes, which occurred near Abu Kamal, Syria, just across the border from Iraq.
While the exact death toll remained unclear, Biden appears to have calibrated the strikes, hoping they would cause enough damage to show that the United States would not allow rocket attacks like that on the Irbil airport in northern Iraq on Feb. 15, but not so much as to risk setting off a wider conflagration.
“He is kind of putting his first red line,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
She said the strikes signaled to Iran that his eagerness to return to a nuclear agreement would not lead Biden to ignore other regional activities by Iran and its allies, and particularly attacks on U.S. troops.
“It is sending a message: The bottom line is that we won't tolerate this and will use military force when we feel you've crossed the line,” Yahya said.
Militiamen fled from six of the seven buildings hit in the strikes after spotting what they believed to be a U.S. surveillance aircraft, according to the Sabareen news channel on Telegram, which is used by Iran-backed groups.
In a sign of heightened tensions between the Iraqi government and Iran-backed groups that are also part of Iraq's security
forces, Sabareen said the U.S. strikes had been aided by an Iraqi intelligence official posing as a shepherd.
Iraq's interior and defense ministries issued statements denying they had provided intelligence for the attack.
Kataib Hezbollah says it maintains a presence at the border crossing to prevent the infiltration of Islamic State fighters into Iraq. It called the U.S. strikes on the border a crime aided and abetted by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and said it reserved the right to respond. It also repeated calls for the Iraqi government to expel U.S. forces.
Kataib Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the attacks on Irbil airport this month that killed the military contractor and an Iraqi civilian.