Iranian Drones Cast Intimidating Shadow Over Iraq
9th November 2021
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived an armed drone attack Sunday on his official residence in Baghdad that wounded seven of his guards.
The attack, which involved Iranian-made drones, was an assassination attempt that sends a message of intimidation to Kadhimi and any other Iraqis who pose a challenge to the influence of Iran and its proxy militias inside Iraq.
Although no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, Iraqi security officials blamed Iran-backed Iraqi militias, which increasingly have challenged the authority of Iraq’s weak coalition government. They claimed that Kataib Hezbollah (“Brigades of the Party of God”) and Asaib Ahl al-Haq (“League of the Righteous”), two of Iran’s most powerful Iraqi surrogates, carried out the attack.
Those two Iraqi Shia militias also have launched many drone and rocket attacks on U.S. military personnel supporting the Iraqi armed forces. In January 2020, the United States retaliated for repeated attacks on American troops in Iraq by launching a drone strike that killed the commander of Kataib Hezbollah and his Iranian master, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Quds Force, which trains and equips Iran’s network of regional proxy groups, has transferred thousands of drones, rockets, and missiles to Iran-backed groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen.