WASHINGTON -- The U.S. launched airstrikes Thursday in Iraq, American officials said, targeting the Iranian-backed Shia militia members believed responsible for the rocket attack that killed and wounded American and British troops at a base north of Baghdad on Wednesday.
Officials said multiple strikes by U.S. manned aircraft hit five locations and mainly targeted Kataib Hezbollah weapons facilities inside Iraq. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because details about the operations were not yet public.
The strikes marked a rapid escalation in tensions with Tehran and its proxy groups in Iraq, just two months after Iran carried out a ballistic missile attack against American troops at a base in Iraq. They came just hours after top U.S. defense leaders threatened retaliation for the Wednesday rocket attack, making clear that they knew who did it and that the attackers would be held accountable.
Officials said Karbala province and Jurf al Sakhar were two of the locations.
A Defense Department official said the strikes were specifically designed to be punishing and retaliatory -- but not to escalate into a conflict with Iran.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters at the Pentagon earlier Thursday that President Donald Trump had given him the authority to take whatever action he deemed necessary.
"We're going to take this one step at a time, but we've got to hold the perpetrators accountable," Esper said. "You don't get to shoot at our bases and kill and wound Americans and get away with it."
At the White House, Trump had also hinted that a U.S. counterpunch could be coming, telling reporters, "We'll see what the response is." And Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Pentagon reporters the U.S. knows "with a high degree of certainty" who launched the attack.
On Capitol Hill earlier in the day, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, told senators the deaths of U.S. and coalition troops created a "red line" for the U.S., but said he didn't think Iran has "a good understanding of where our red line is."
'MALIGN' DESIRE
Two U.S. troops were killed and 14 other personnel, were wounded when 18 rockets hit the base Wednesday. He also said the injured personnel were a mix of U.S. and allied troops as well as contractors, and they will also be monitored for possible traumatic brain injury in the wake of the blasts.
A British service member, identified as 26-year old Lance Cpl. Brodie Gillon was also killed in the attack, according to London's Defense Ministry. The two Americans killed Wednesday were with the Army and the Air Force, according to one U.S. official. Their names were not released.
The U.S. military said the 107mm Katyusha rockets were fired from a truck launcher that was found by Iraqi security forces near the base after the attack.
The rockets struck Camp Taji, which hosts coalition personnel for training and advising missions, the coalition said in an emailed statement.
U.S. officials have not publicly said what group they believe launched the rocket attack, but Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shia militia group, was the likely perpetrator.
And the U.S. strikes, which came in the middle of the night in Iraq, targeted that group.
"The Iranian proxy group Kataib Hezbollah is the only group known to have previously conducted an indirect fire attack of this scale against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq," McKenzie said.
This indicates Iran's "desire to continue malign activities" despite periods of decreased tension with the U.S., he said.
Kataib Hezbollah was responsible for a late December rocket attack on a military base in Kirkuk that killed a U.S. contractor, prompting American military strikes in response.
That in turn led to protests at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. They were followed Jan. 3 by a U.S. airstrike that killed Iran's most powerful military officer, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a leader of the Iran-backed militias in Iraq, of which Kataib Hezbollah is a member. In response to the Soleimani killing, Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on Jan. 8 at al-Asad air base in Iraq that resulted in traumatic brain injuries to more than 100 American troops.
Wednesday's attack coincided with what would have been Soleimani's birthday.
Iraq's military said Thursday that it had opened an investigation into Wednesday's rocket attack.
A military statement from Iraq's joint operations command said caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi ordered the investigation into what he called "a very serious security challenge and hostile act."
The United Nations condemned Wednesday's attack, saying it took "critical political attention away" from Iraq's ongoing domestic challenges, which threaten to create a power vacuum in the Iraqi government.
"The last thing Iraq needs is to serve as an arena for vendettas and external battles," the statement said.
U.S. officials have described Soleimani's killing as an act of deterrence against Iranian aggression. U.S. troops had faced an increase in rocket attacks in the weeks leading up to the strike.
But analysts said Wednesday's attack demonstrated that Soleimani's assassination had done little to alter the behavior of Iran-backed groups.
"The attacks underline how negligible the strategic impact of Soleimani's assassination has been. The drivers of U.S.-Iranian escalation remain in place," said Fanar Haddad, senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.
"Such an attack closer to the aftermath of Soleimani's assassination would have been a lot riskier with Trump's attention focused on Iran. The passage of time was key."
ATTACKERS 'BLESSED'
Iran-backed militia groups issued statements Thursday supporting Wednesday's attack, but none claimed responsibility.
Kataib Hezbollah "blessed" those who carried out the rocket attack and described U.S. troops as "occupying forces that must bear the consequences of their illegal presence" in Iraq.
There are at least 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, training and advising Iraqi forces as part of a global coalition.
The American casualties in Taji on Wednesday marked a deadly several days for U.S. forces in Iraq. On Sunday, Capt. Moises A. Navas of Germantown, Md., and Gunnery Sgt. Diego D. Pongo of Simi Valley, Calif., two Marine Raiders, were killed during a gunfight against Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq.
The episode prompted a review of current American operations against the Islamic State, given the intensity of the mission and the fact that the Marines had not planned for such a battle in a sprawling cave complex. Members of the U.S. military's elite Delta Force were ordered to respond and recover the dead.
According to a Pentagon database, before Wednesday's attack, 19 Americans had been killed in combat in Iraq and Syria since the start of the campaign against the Islamic State, known as Operation Inherent Resolve.
McKenzie told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday morning that the killing of Soleimani and the increase in U.S. troops and assets in the region has made clear to Iran that the U.S. will defend its interests there.
He said the U.S. has reestablished a level of deterrence for state-on-state attacks by Iran.
However, he said: "What has not been changed is their continuing desire to operate through their proxies indirectly against us. That is a far more difficult area to deter."
On Thursday, Esper and Milley said they spoke with their British counterparts about the attack but declined to provide details.
Asked why none of the rockets was intercepted, Milley said there are no systems on the base capable of defending against that type of attack.
Information for this article was contributed by Lolita C. Baldor, Samya Kullab, Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Pan Pylas of The Associated Press; by Glen Carey and Travis Tritten of Bloomberg News; and by Eric Schmitt and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of The New York Times.
A Section on 03/13/2020