US Launches Airstrikes in Iraq, Four Members of the PMF Reported Killed

A US official told Reuters that the US carried out a strike in Iraq on Tuesday just hours after Israel bombed Beirut.

The official didn’t share details about the attack, but earlier, a drone strike was reported in the Iraqi province of Babylon that hit a base housing Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of mostly Shia militias that’s part of Iraq’s security forces.

A PMF official told AFP that the base was hit by four or five missiles. An Iraqi security source confirmed that four people were killed and said the death toll was expected to rise.

The US has a history of targeting the PMF as retaliation for rocket attacks on US bases in the region. The US’s latest bombing came a few days after rockets were fired toward the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq, which houses US troops. A US base in eastern Syria was also targeted in recent days.

From October 2023 until February, US bases in Iraq and Syria came under hundreds of rocket and drone attacks. Iraqi Shia militias, which include members of the PMF, began the attacks in response to US support for the Israeli onslaught in Gaza.

After three US troops were killed in an attack on Tower 22, a secretive base in Jordan on the Syrian border, Iran and the Iraqi government pressured the militias to stop, and there have only been a handful of attacks since February.

The Iraqi government strongly opposes unilateral US strikes on the PMF since the coalition is part of its military. US attacks on the PMF led to Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani calling for a US withdrawal.

The US and Iraq have entered talks about the future of the US military presence, but no concrete plans have been announced. Statements from the US suggest the plan is to leave troops in the country after formally ending the mission of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition. The lack of progress toward a withdrawal could be why rocket attacks on US bases started up again.