Several significant events in the Middle East took place while millions worldwide celebrated Christmas over the extended weekend.
Iraqi militants from Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups injured three U.S. service members, including one critically, in an attack on the Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq on Christmas Day. They have launched more than a hundred drone and rocket attacks at U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17, though there have been brief reductions in the attacks.
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The U.S. military, in response to the attack, conducted airstrikes on three facilities the groups use in Iraq, which it has done in a series of similar responses in October and November.
“Early assessments indicate that these U.S. airstrikes destroyed the targeted facilities and likely killed a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants. There are no indications that any civilian lives were affected,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement, while Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al Sudani said the U.S. strike killed one Iraqi service member and injured 18 others, including civilians.
“This constitutes a clear hostile act. It runs counter to the pursuit of enduring mutual interests in establishing security and stability, and it opposes the declared intention of the American side to enhance relations with Iraq,” the prime minister said.
The United States has repeatedly said, as it relates to the attacks from these militias and other attacks from U.S. adversaries in the Middle East, that it does not want to see the war between Israel and Hamas expand to a wider conflict, but many of the anti-U.S. actors are carrying out these attacks in response to Israel’s war and the U.S.’s support for its Middle Eastern ally.
An anonymous senior Kataib Hezbollah official told the Washington Post that the group’s continued attacks against U.S. forces are in part due to their support for Israel but also because it views the U.S. troops in Iraq as an “occupation.” There are roughly 3,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, which remain there to ensure the lasting defeat of the Islamic State.
Hundreds of miles away, a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was killed on Monday in an airstrike in Syria, Iranian media reported, which also noted that the Guard blamed Israel for carrying out the strike. An Israeli military spokesman declined to comment on the reports.
Brig. Gen. Sayyed Razi Mousavi, whom the Guard said was “in charge of logistics support for the Resistance front in Syria,” was reportedly killed in a strike in a suburb of Damascus. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi vowed that Israel “will certainly pay for this crime.”
Tehran has positioned itself opposite the U.S. and Western countries for decades, but it and its proxies have intensified the tension in the Middle East following Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel that prompted Israel’s military response. The Houthis, the Yemeni rebel group that is also backed by Iran, have carried out more than a dozen ballistic missile and drone attacks against commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
These attacks prompted numerous shipping companies to reroute to avoid these shipping lanes, raising concerns about what the long-term implications could be to the shipping industry if these passageways become no longer usable. Maersk, a major shipping company, announced on Sunday it is “preparing” to resume shipping operations in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden following the creation of a task force set up by the U.S. to protect these commercial vessels.
On Saturday, the motor vessel Chem Pluto, a Liberian-flagged, Japanese-owned, and Netherlands-operated chemical tanker, was attacked roughly 200 nautical miles off the coast of India. The drone originated from Iran, a deviation from the location where the drone originated from and where the target was located, a U.S. defense official told the Washington Examiner.
The Houthis have the war as the reason behind their missile and drone attacks.
U.S. National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said late last week that Iran “was deeply involved in planning” these Houthi attacks and that Iran’s “tactical intelligence,” which it provided to them, “remains critical.”
“We know that Iran was deeply involved in planning the operations against commercial vessels in the Red Sea. This is consistent with Iran’s long-term materiel support and encouragement of the Houthis’ destabilizing actions in the region,” she told the Washington Examiner. “Iranian support to these Houthi operations remains critical. We know the intelligence picture which the Houthis use to operate in the maritime space is reliant on Iranian-provided monitoring systems.”
All of this is occurring as Israel carries out its war against Hamas in Gaza. Israeli leaders have said in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, the worst terrorist attacks in the country’s history, that their war efforts are to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and to demilitarize the U.S.-designated terrorist group that has led the area for about a decade and a half.
Israel’s military campaign has led to unprecedented carnage in previous iterations of this conflict. The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry claimed about 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in the 10 weeks of the war, though that total does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
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The Biden administration continues to support Israel, even as it has spent weeks urging Israel to do more to prevent the growing civilian death toll. U.S. officials have pushed Israel to reduce its aerial bombardment of Gaza and its “high-intensity operations,” urging the country to use special operators to carry out specific operations to target Hamas leaders. While the U.S. claims it had an impact on how Israel has carried out its war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this weekend, “It will be a long fight, and it is not close to ending. We need patience, cohesion, unity, and adherence to the mission.”
Netanyahu, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Monday, said the three goals the country is determined to accomplish before ending its military campaign include the removal of Hamas from power, the group’s demilitarization, and the “deradicalization” of Palestinians.
