‘US to strike back if pro-Iran militias continue attacks’
After a weekend of retaliatory strikes, the United States on Sunday warned Iran and the militias it arms and funds that it would conduct more attacks if American forces in the Middle East continue to be targeted, but that it does not want an “open-ended military campaign” across the region.
“We are prepared to deal with anything that any group or any country tries to come at us with,” said Jake Sullivan, US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser. Iran should expect “a swift and forceful response” if it — and not one of its proxies — “chose to respond directly” against the US, he added.
Sullivan delivered the warnings during a series of interviews with television news shows after the US and the United Kingdom struck 36 Houthi targets in Yemen last Saturday. The Iran-backed militants have fired on American and international interests repeatedly in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
An air assault in Iraq and Syria last Friday targeted other Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in retaliation for the drone strike that killed three US troops in Jordan on January 28. The US fired again at Houthi targets on Sunday.
“We cannot rule out that there will be future attacks from Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria or from the Houthis,” Sullivan said, adding that the president had told his commanders that “they need to be positioned to respond to further attacks as well.”
The US has blamed the January 28 attack at the Tower 22 base in Jordan on the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition of Iranian-backed militias. Tehran has tried to distance itself from the drone strike, saying the militias act independently of its direction.
Biden “is not looking for a wider war,” Sullivan said, when questioned about the potential for strikes inside Iran that would expand the conflict in the volatile region. But when asked about the possibility of direct escalation by the Iranians, he replied: “If they chose to respond directly to the United States, they would be met with a swift and forceful response from us.”
While pledging to respond in a “sustained way” to new assaults on Americans, the adviser said he “would not describe it as some open-ended military campaign.”
Still, he said, “We intend to take additional strikes and additional action to continue to send a clear message that the United States will respond when our forces are attacked or our people are killed.”
There will be more steps taken, he said. “Some of those steps will be seen. Some may not be seen.”
The US attack on dozens of sites in Iraq and Syria hit more than 85 targets at seven locations. These included command and control headquarters, intelligence centers, rockets and missiles, drone and ammunition storage sites and other facilities that were connected to the militias or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, the expeditionary unit that handles Tehran’s relationship with, and arming of, regional militias.
The Biden administration has so far appeared to stop short of directly targeting Iran or senior leaders of the Quds Force within its borders.
The US military does not have any confirmation at this time of civilian casualties from those strikes, Sullivan said. “What we do know is that the targets we hit were absolutely valid targets from the point of view of containing the weaponry and the personnel that were attacking American forces. So, we are confident in the targets that we struck.”
Some of the militias have been a threat to US bases for years, but the groups intensified their assaults in the wake of Israel’s war with Hamas following the October 7 attacks on southern Israel that killed more than 1,100 people and saw 250 others taken hostage. More than 27,000 people have been killed by Israel’s offensive against the Palestinian militant group in the Gaza Strip, the territory’s Health Ministry has said.