(3 Feb 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Beirut, Lebanon - 1 February 2024
++STARTS AND ENDS ON SOUNDBITE++
1. SOUNDBITE (English) Abby Sewell, AP News Director for Syria, Lebanon and Iraq:
"For the past four months, a group calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has launched dozens of drone strikes on US troops in Iraq and Syria and in Jordan, where three U.S. troops were killed. This group is actually a coalition of multiple Iranian-backed militias, including the powerful Kataib Hezbollah, not to be confused with the Lebanese Hezbollah. Many of these groups rose up in the power vacuum that followed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2014, a group of the militias known as the Hashd al-Shaabi or Popular Mobilization Forces joined the fight against the Islamic State and became officially part of the Iraqi military. But in practice they have continued to operate outside of state control. This has sometimes been a point of tension with the Iraqi government, which would prefer not to have tensions with the United States."
STORYLINE:
There has been a dramatic spike in attacks by Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Syria since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Iraq says it is working with the U.S. to contain the militias there, which have launched dozens of strikes under an umbrella group calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.
Earlier this month, the U.S. unleashed an airstrike against the headquarters of an Iran-backed militia in central Baghdad, killing a high-ranking militia commander.
It was an attempt to discourage more attacks, but the strikes have continued.
A week before Sunday's attack that killed U.S. troops at a base in Jordan near the Syrian border, an attack at another base in western Iraq had injured several U.S. and Iraqi personnel.
The drone strike that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan was the latest in a flurry of attacks and reprisals across the Middle East that are linked to Israel's war in Gaza and threaten to ignite a wider conflict.
AP video shot by Fadi Tawil
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