© X / Partisangirl
The Pentagon has commenced its retaliation for a drone attack that killed three US troops at a secretive base in Jordan, launching airstrikes that hit dozens of targets in Iraq and Syria linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups.
"Our response began today" and "will continue at times and places of our choosing," US President Joe Biden announced on Friday night. The airstrikes started around midnight on Saturday local time and hit more than 85 Iranian-linked targets, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement.
The bombings come nearly one week after a drone packed with explosives struck Tower 22, a US base in Jordan located near the Syrian and Iraqi borders, killing three soldiers and wounding more than 40 others. The attack, which the US blamed on the Iranian-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq, marked the first deaths of American troops in a wave of assaults triggered by the Israel-Hamas war.
Comment: The background for this attack is that on Sunday 28 January 2024, three US soldiers were killed in a drone attack near Syria-Jordan border, following which Biden commented: "Today, America's heart is heavy." After a week of analysis and deliberation, the US is making good on its hegemonic interpretation of retributive justice - as if the US Government needed a PMU drone strike to do what it had in mind to do anyway, but needed 'legal justification' to plausibly execute.
Comment: The Iraqi PMU militia has attacked US forces around 160 times since Oct 7th because they want them out of Syria and Iraq, and to put pressure on Israel. The Pentagon chose the 'Jordan' incident to disclose that US troops died because they wanted to give Biden an election photo-op and to manipulate Americans into accepting 'justified limited strikes' against the Iraqi militia countering 'ISIS' in the region. Also, the base which that militia hit wasn't in Jordan, it was in Syria. And it's the one the Russians have for years said 'ISIS' comes from.
Whether this will escalate into a major war with Iran remains to be seen, but for now the US is at least acting in accordance with its stated goal of not wanting to see a major war in the Middle East. So long as it's everyone 'proxy/terrorist' forces targeting each other, it's 'kept below the threshold of an actual war'...