A rocket attack on a US airbase in the Kurdish region of Iraq has killed one civilian contractor and injured nine other people, sparking fears of escalation in the first serious test of Joe Biden’s policy towards Iran.
A volley of approximately 14 rockets was fired at the base hosting US troops next to the airport in the region’s main city of Erbil late on Monday, which witnesses told local television appeared to come from an area to the south.
Three “107mm rockets” landed inside the base while others fell on residential areas nearby, killing one person identified by a US coalition spokesperson as a foreign national, but not a US citizen, and injuring one US service member. At least five Iraqi civilians were also injured, with one in a critical condition.
It was the most deadly attack in almost a year to hit US-led coalition forces deployed to fight Islamic State in Iraq, where tensions between the US, its Iraqi and Kurdish allies on one side and Iran-aligned militias on the other soared during the Trump presidency’s “maximum pressure” stance on the Islamic republic.
Western military and diplomatic sites and personnel have been targeted since 2019 by Katyusha rockets, roadside explosives and sometimes direct fire in assaults the US has blamed on pro-Iranian paramilitary forces, but most of the violence has taken place in the capital, Baghdad.
The rare attack on Erbil was claimed by a little-known Shia group calling itself Saraya Awliya al-Dam, or Guardians of Blood. It is one of a dozen or so newly formed small organisations believed to be fronts for prominent factions funded and directed by Iran that are hostile to the US, such as Kata’ib Hezbollah and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. The group previously claimed responsibility last August for two bombings targeting US military convoys.
Iran said on Tuesday it opposed any acts that harmed Iraq’s security and denied suggestions by some Iraqi officials that it had any link to Saraya Awliya al-Dam. “Iran considers Iraq’s stability and security as a key issue for the region … and rejects any action that disturbs the peace and order in that country,” a foreign ministry spokesperson, Saeed Khatibzadeh, told state media.
When US president, Donald Trump had said further deaths of American civilians would be a red line provoking US escalation in Iraq, making Monday’s incident an early challenge for the Biden administration, which is seeking to revive the nuclear deal – scrapped by Trump in 2018 – between Iran and world powers.
Trump retaliated to the December 2019 killing of a US civilian contractor in a rocket attack in Kirkuk with a drone strike last year which killed the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani and the powerful Iraqi Shia militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. The tit-for-tat on Iraqi soil brought the country to the brink of a proxy war.
The last deadly attack on coalition forces was in March 2020 on the Taji military camp north of Baghdad, in which a British servicewoman, L/Cpl Brodie Gillon, as well as a US contractor and a US service member, were killed.
“We are outraged by today’s rocket attack,” the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in a statement on Monday evening, vowing to “hold accountable those responsible”.
On Tuesday, a state department spokesperson, Ned Price, said it was “premature” to talk about any form of retaliation as the investigation was in its early stages. He said the US would “respond in a time and place of our choosing”.
Hoshiyar Zebari, a politburo member of the Kurdistan Democratic party, said security officials were investigating the source of the assault. “There will be consequences against the culprits. This aggression will not stand,” he tweeted.
The Iraqi president, Barham Salih, said in a statement posted online that the incident marked a “dangerous escalation”, while Masrour Barzani, prime minister of the autonomous Kurdish region, condemned the attack “in the strongest terms”.
Kurdish authorities temporarily closed Erbil’s airport and have cautioned the city’s residents to stay away from targeted areas and to remain at home if possible.
On Tuesday morning, Saraya Awliya al-Dam said it would carry out more attacks on US forces. “The American occupation will not be safe from our strikes in any inch of the homeland, even in Kurdistan, where we promise we will carry out other qualitative operations,” a statement said, according to the Site Intelligence Group, an NGO that tracks the online activities of armed organisations.
The frequency of attacks blamed on Iran-linked militias had diminished late last year before Biden’s inauguration, although Tehran is now urging the US to return to the 2015 nuclear deal, which lifted international sanctions in return for curbs to the country’s nuclear programme.
Dr Michael Knights, an expert on Iraq and Iran at the Washington Institute, said the militia that was most likely ultimately to have been behind the attack was Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, which is Iranian backed but not under Tehran’s total control. The group’s most likely motive, he suggested, was to assert its primacy among Iraqi Shia militias.
“I doubt this was conceived by the Iranians as a test of the Biden administration, but it has the effect of being a test anyway. Everyone is now looking at the administration,” Knights said. “Quite possibly nothing much happens and the Iranians take a message from that, even though they weren’t necessarily seeking one.”
Iraqi leaders, stuck in the middle of tensions between their two biggest allies, last month asked Tehran to intervene to stop rocket attacks on diplomatic missions in Baghdad, calling the violence an “embarrassment” to Iraq’s already fragile central government.
Since Iraq declared victory against Isis in late 2017, the coalition has been reduced to fewer than 3,500 troops in total, 2,500 of them Americans, who no longer take part in combat operations. Most are concentrated at the military complex at the Erbil airport.
Agencies contributed to this report
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