Iraq fumes as U.S. drone strike takes out Iran-linked militia leader in Baghdad

A U.S. military airstrike has killed a top Iraqi Shiite militia leader who the Pentagon says helped orchestrate recent attacks on American forces stationed in the country, bringing an angry protest from the Iraqi government.

Pentagon officials privately confirmed the strike, which killed Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi, a brigade commander for the militia organization Harakat al-Nujaba, along with at least one other militant based in eastern Baghdad. Iraqi sources said at least five others were reportedly injured.

The U.S. acted after dozens of attacks by the Iraqi Shiite militias against U.S. troop deployments in both Iraq and Syria in recent months. The attacks were seen as part of a campaign by Iran and its “Axis of Resistance” to harass and distract U.S. troops in the region as the war between Israel and Hamas grinds on in Gaza.

The militia groups, which have long enjoyed close ties to Shiite Iran, have played an ambivalent role on the Iraqi domestic scene. The umbrella group for the militias operates independently but has been incorporated into Iraq’s broader national security force.

But the militias have long opposed — at times violently — the U.S. troop presence in the country, which the Trump and Biden administrations have insisted is needed to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State and other terror groups. The Pentagon has roughly 900 troops deployed in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq, based far from Baghdad.

The State Department declared Harakat al-Nujaba a terrorist organization during the Trump administration. The Iraqi group has allied with Hamas and said in November it was behind a drone attack that hit a southern Israeli city.

The Iraqi government in a statement condemned the strike as a “terrorist act” and a “flagrant violation of the sovereignty and security of Iraq.” One local Iraqi militia commander told the Reuters news agency, “We will retaliate and make the Americans regret carrying out this aggression.”

The political wing of Hamas also condemned the American airstrike Thursday.

The killing extends an extraordinarily bloody series of targeted strikes this week across the region, strikes that have raised fears the nearly three-month war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza may be morphing into a larger clash drawing in the U.S. and Israel against Iran and its allied militant groups in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Israel is believed to be behind a drone strike in a Beirut suburb that killed a senior Hamas commander and other prominent militants on Tuesday, a day before a still-unexplained bomb attack killed more than 100 mourners in southern Iran who were gathered to commemorate the late Iranian commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Israel, which has vowed to track down the Hamas and allied Palestinian militants who masterminded the deadly Oct. 7 attack that killed more than 1,200 people, also announced Thursday that Mamdouh Lolo, a top official in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was killed in an airstrike in the northern Gaza Strip.

While rare, the U.S. military strike in Baghdad is not unprecedented — another such strike President Trump ordered in January 2020 killed Soleimani and a top leader of the Iraqi militia organization as they were meeting at a Baghdad airport.