American forces have been targeted by and are retaliating against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq in response to the war in Iran.
Kataib Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militias have fired rockets and drones at U.S. troops since the start of Operation Epic Fury, Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, told the Washington Examiner.
“U.S. forces have taken action in response to attacks from Iran-backed Iraqi militia groups against American forces and personnel since the start of Operation Epic Fury. We will not hesitate to protect our people,” he said.
The fighting between the United States and Iranian-backed militias in neighboring Iraq has not been a widely discussed aspect of the war between Iran, the U.S., and Israel, which has gone on for nearly three weeks and has resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and roughly 200 more injured in Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
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A large majority of the injured American service members have returned to duty, indicating their injuries weren’t severe.
The Iraqi militias targeting U.S. troops in and near Iraq have not caused any “significant injuries” to American forces, a CENTCOM official told the Washington Examiner, adding that the threat posed by the militias has had “no impact” on the U.S. military’s mission in Iran.
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that American AH-64 Apache helicopters have been striking the militia groups “to make sure that we suppress any threat in Iraq against U.S. forces or U.S. interests.”
Iran has spent decades supporting the various terrorist proxy groups in the Middle East that it has largely relied upon for its operations against Israel prior to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, but Israel’s military has systematically degraded those entities one by one over the past two and a half years.
With several Iranian allies, Iraqi-based militias included, still reeling from their own conflicts with Israel, their responses to the war in Iran have been limited.
Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, broke the ceasefire that had been in place for more than a year by launching rockets into southern Israel, which the group said was an attempt to avenge the death of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Renewed fighting subsequently broke out, and the Israel Defense Forces announced earlier this week that it began “limited and targeted ground operations” targeting key Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon.
In November 2024, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire, which called for Israel to stop its military campaign and to remove its ground forces in southern Lebanon in exchange for Hezbollah to willingly move all of its personnel and military equipment north of the Litani River, which would create a roughly 20-mile buffer in southern Lebanon separating the U.S.-designated terrorist group from the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Hezbollah has not lived up to its end of the deal, which was actually built on the proposal that ended the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, and Israel has continued bombing Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon.
Neither Hezbollah nor the Yemen-based Houthis have fired at U.S. forces since the war in Iran began on Feb. 28, the CENTCOM official said.
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The U.S. military carried out a weekslong campaign against the Houthis last year, and under the Biden administration, carried out multiple iterations of aerial strikes against the Houthis and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, who were firing rockets and drones at U.S. bases and personnel in the two countries.
An Iraqi militia killed three American service members and injured more than 40 others at Tower 22, a small American outpost in the northeastern part of Jordan, in a January 2024 drone attack.