Beirut, Lebanon – Since President Biden entered the White House, Iranian-backed militants across the Middle East have attacked an airport in Saudi Arabia with a drone explosion and are accused of murdering a critic in Lebanon and targeting US military personnel at an airport in northern Iraq, killing one Filipino contractor and injuring six others.
On Thursday, the world had the first glimpse of how Biden is likely to address one of the biggest security concerns of American partners in the region: the network of militias supported by Iran and committed to subverting the interests of the United States and its allies.
US officials said Biden-ordered night air strikes hit a cluster of buildings on the Syrian side of a border crossing with Iraq on Thursday and targeted members of Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia and an affiliated group.
A Kataib Hezbollah official said one of the fighters in his group had died in air strikes. But Iranian state television and the Syrian Human Rights Observatory, a Britain-based conflict monitor, reported that 17 fighters were killed in the air strikes, which took place near Abu Kamal, in Syria, across the border. with Iraq.
While the exact death toll remained uncertain, Biden appears to have calibrated the attacks, hoping that they would do enough damage to show that the United States would not allow rocket attacks like the one at Erbil airport in northern Iraq on February 15, but not so much as to risk causing a wider conflagration
“He’s putting on his first red line,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
She said the attacks signaled Iran that its eagerness to return to a nuclear deal would not lead Biden to ignore other regional activities by Iran and its allies, especially attacks on American troops.
“It’s sending a message: the end result is that we will not tolerate this and will use military force when we feel that you have crossed the line,” said Yahya.
Militia members fled six of the seven buildings hit in the attacks after detecting what they believed to be an American surveillance aircraft, according to the news channel Sabareen on Telegram, used by Iranian-supported groups.
In a sign of increased tensions between the Iraqi government and Iranian-backed groups who are also part of Iraq’s security forces, Sabareen said the US attacks were aided by an Iraqi intelligence officer who pretends to be a pastor.
In an interview with a local television network on Thursday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said that those who call themselves “the resistance” and launch rocket attacks in Iraq are nothing more than terrorists.
Sabareen called Hussein’s comments “a green light for the international community to target and eliminate resistance under the guise of terrorism”.
“We see these attacks as attacks on the Iraqi government,” Hussein said in a recent interview with The New York Times, referring to the attacks on the US embassy and other American targets. Hussein is one of several Iraqi officials who have traveled to Iran in recent months to try to persuade him to use his influence to control militia forces.
“I and others went to Tehran and had a frank and open discussion with the Iranians,” he said. “For a period of time, these attacks stopped.”
“In the end, the conflict camp is in Iraq,” said Hussein.
Senior Iraqi officials said they expected a more nuanced policy from the Biden government towards Iraq. Hussein said Baghdad had no expectations that the government would make Iraq a foreign policy priority, but he said relations would be helped by the long experience of Biden and key government officials with Iraq and Iraqi politicians.
Kataib Hezbollah says it maintains a presence at the border crossing to prevent the infiltration of Islamic State fighters into Iraq.
The Iraqi government has struggled to contain the Iranian-backed militias that have grown in influence since the mobilization to fight ISIS, when it took over much of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The group lost its last piece of territory two years ago, and many of the Iran-backed paramilitary groups have been absorbed by Iraq’s official security forces.
Iraq has warned that the conflict between the United States and Iran on its soil threatens to destabilize the country.
Attacks on American interests in Iraq by alleged Iranian-backed militias intensified after the United States killed an Iranian general, Qassim Suleimani, and an Iraqi security officer, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in a drone attack in Baghdad in 2020.
“In the past year, Iraq has become a playground and battleground for this type of activity driven by the US-Iran escalation,” said Renad Mansour, director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, a London-based policy group . “These groups started to emerge after the killing.”
“There is a clear message from all of them: the revenge for the deaths is not over yet,” he said. “For them, time is not an issue.”
Mansour, who tracks armed groups in Iraq, said the younger groups appear to be made up of combatants armed with weapons connected to the large paramilitaries linked to Iran.
Some of the Iran-backed paramilitary groups are on the Iraqi government’s payroll as part of the Iraqi security forces, but are only nominally under government control.
The eye-for-an-eye attacks come as the Biden government begins the difficult task of trying to restore the nuclear deal with Iran, from which President Donald J. Trump withdrew the United States in 2018. Behind the question of the parameters of a new deal is the question of Iran’s destabilizing activities in the Middle East, which are of particular concern to American allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Iran has spent decades building a network of partnerships with militia groups across the region that has allowed it to project power far beyond its area of influence. These groups include the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, a number of groups in Iraq and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
All of these groups have received at least some funding, support and armament from Iran over the years, and all share their “resistance” ideology, or the fight against Israeli and United States interests in the region.
The groups have developed several ways, usually low-cost, to create headaches for the United States and its allies. Hezbollah has become Lebanon’s most powerful military and political force, with an arsenal of more than 100,000 rockets aimed at Israel and experienced fighters who helped turn the tide in Syria’s civil war in favor of President Bashar al-Assad.
This month, the group’s enemies in Lebanon accused the group of murdering Lokman Slim, an editor, filmmaker and vocal critic of the group who had close ties to Western officials. Hezbollah officials denied any connection to Slim’s death.
Days after Slim’s death, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, which an Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia has attacked since 2015, targeted an airport in the Saudi city of Abha with a drone loaded with explosives, damaging a civilian plane.
The Erbil rocket attack was claimed by a previously unknown armed group that calls itself Guardians of the Blood. United States officials said he appeared to be affiliated with one or more of Iraq’s best-known militias, and Thursday’s attacks in Syria targeted facilities belonging to them.
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, Lebanon and Jane Arraf from Amman, Jordan. Falih Hassan contributed reports from Baghdad.