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How Israel’s war in Gaza became a tangled crisis spanning the Middle East [1]

['Adam Taylor']

Date: 2024-01-04

Iraq

An Iranian-linked militia commander was killed in Baghdad in early January in a rare U.S. airstrike in the center of the Iraqi capital.

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The target in the Jan. 4 strike, Mushtaq Talib al-Saidi, was deputy commander of operations in the Baghdad region for the militia Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, according to a statement by the group. The militia had claimed responsibility for several attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq since Oct. 7 — part of a broader spate of recent attacks that aim to force the United States to end its presence in Iraq.

Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba is part of a coalition of Iranian-backed groups known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that worked with the Iraqi military to defeat the Islamic State after it took over much of the country in 2014. The militia falls under the authority of Iraq’s commander in chief.

Roughly 2,500 U.S. personnel are based in Iraq, with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani saying that their presence is needed to help stop the Islamic State from regaining ground.

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PMF militias have been behind at least 131 attacks on U.S. forces in the country since Oct. 17, according to U.S. counts, marking a significant escalation and resulting in rounds of retaliation.

Separately, on Monday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired missiles at what it said was an Israeli spy site in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region that had been used by the Mossad to plan “terrorist” acts against Iran.

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Iraqi and Kurdish officials denied the claim, with Iraq’s prime minister calling the attack on Irbil “an act of aggression against Iraq.”

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[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/04/middle-east-israel-gaza-war-iran-syria/

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