Drone blast hits airport in new tactic against US troops in Iraq

An explosives-packed drone slammed into Iraq’s Arbil airport in the first reported use of such a weapon against a base used by Us-led coalition troops in the country, officials said on Thursday.

There were no casualties in the strike on the capital of northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region late on Wednesday, although it did cause damage to a building in the military part of the airport.

It comes after around 20 bomb and rocket attacks blamed on pro-iran armed groups against facilities used by coalition troops or diplomats in Iraq since US President Joe Biden took office in January.

“A drone packed with TNT targeted a coalition base at Arbil airport,” the Kurdish region’s interior ministry said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which caused an explosion heard across Arbil.

But a shadowy pro-iranian group calling itself Awliyaa Al Dam (Guardians of Blood), which claimed a previous attack on the same airport in February, hailed the strike on the messaging app Telegram.

In the February attack, more than a dozen rockets targeted the military complex inside the airport, killing an Iraqi civilian and a foreign contractor working with Us-led troops.

Washington — which has promised to withdraw the troops it deployed in support of Baghdad’s successful fightback against the Daesh group but has resisted setting a date — said it was “outraged” by the latest violence.

“The Iraqi people have suffered for far too long from this kind of violence and violation of their sovereignty,” State Department spokesman Ned Price tweeted.

Leading Kurdish politician, ex-foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, explicitly blamed pro-iranian “militia” for the attack.

“It seems the same militia who targeted the airport two months ago are at it again,” Zebari tweeted. “This is a clear & dangerous escalation.”

A senior US defence official said that while Wednesday’s strike marked the first use of a drone to target US troops inside Iraq, Iran’s allies in the country had already shown they had the technology.

Washington has said a January drone attack on the Saudi capital Riyadh was carried out from southern Iraq on behalf of Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

“The Iranian-backed militias have drones now with a 15-foot wingspan,” the defence official said.

“It’s an Iranian-made CAS-04 which we’ve already seen weaponised by the Houthis against Saudi.”

The official said the technology was constantly being improved.

“They now have the capacity for a rocket-assisted launch. The range is 1,200-1,500 kilometres if they add fuel tanks to it. “They can even be loaded onto a ship from (the Iraqi port of) Basra and brought even closer to target. These can be pre-programmed with a GPS destination.” —