(Washington) Pointing to pro-Iran groups, United States President Joe Biden promised to respond after the drone attack in Jordan which killed three American soldiers and injured more than thirty, Iran refuting on Monday any questioned.
This is the first time that American soldiers have been killed in the Middle East since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip on October 7, raising renewed fears of an escalation of tensions against a backdrop of war. latent between Israel and Iran.
“We will respond,” Mr. Biden said on Sunday on the sidelines of a trip to South Carolina, after this attack launched against a military base located in the middle of the desert on the border with Iraq and Syria.
“Today, America has a heavy heart. Last night, three American service members were killed, and several injured, in a drone attack on our forces based in northeastern Jordan, near the Syrian border,” the American president previously said in a statement.
“We know this was carried out by Iranian-backed radical fighter groups operating in Syria and Iraq,” Biden said. “Have no doubt: we will hold all those responsible to account, when and how we want.”
According to the US military Middle East Command (Centcom), the attack injured at least 34 people at the base, eight of whom had to be evacuated.
Around 350 members of the army and air force carry out essential support missions from this base, including in the fight against the Islamic State group, Centcom specifies in a press release.
Iran has denied any involvement. “These accusations are made with a political aim aimed at reversing the realities of the region,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani, quoted by the official Irna agency.
“They also show that they are influenced by third parties, including the child-killing Zionist regime,” added Mr. Kanaani to qualify Israel. “The resistance groups in this region are responding to the war crimes and genocide committed by the Zionist regime”, “they do not take orders” from Iran and “they decide their actions based on their own principles “, further assured the Iranian spokesperson.
Claim
In this election year in the United States, Joe Biden’s Republican opponents did not wait to criticize his diplomatic record, with Donald Trump denouncing the Democrat’s “weakness, abandonment” on Sunday.
The spokesperson for the Jordanian government, Muhannad Mubaidin, for his part condemned “the terrorist attack which targeted an advanced position on the border with Syria”, striking American troops “who cooperate with Jordan to confront terrorism and secure the border. He initially claimed that the attack had occurred in Syria.
PHOTO PLANET LABS PBC, VIA REUTERS
The military base, seen from the air.
The attack was also condemned by Egypt, Bahrain and the United Kingdom, whose head of diplomacy, David Cameron, called on Iran for “de-escalation in the region”.
On its Telegram account, the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq”, a nebula of fighters from pro-Iran armed groups, for its part claimed “attacks carried out on Sunday at dawn with drones” against three bases in Syrian territory, including those of Al-Tanf and Rukban, very close to the point where Iraq, Syria and Jordan meet.
Sami Abou Zahri, a Hamas spokesperson, said the death of the three soldiers “is a message to the American administration”: “the continuation of American-Zionist aggression in Gaza risks a regional explosion.”
Regional explosion
These American military deaths occur in an eruptive context: in addition to the war in Gaza, there have been multiple strikes and attacks between, on the one hand, Iran and its regional allies, and on the other Israel, the United States. United and their partners.
Since mid-October, more than 150 drone strikes or rocket attacks have targeted American and coalition soldiers in Iraq and Syria. They are generally claimed by the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq”. Washington had so far responded with targeted strikes in Iraq.
Further south, the Houthis, who have been targeting international maritime traffic off the coast of Yemen for several months, have also been the target of American strikes since the beginning of January.
PHOTO @INDIANNAVY VIA X, VIA REUTERS
Smoke rises from the ship Marlin Luandaafter a strike carried out by the Houthis on January 27.
Furthermore, Israel has intensified its strikes against the Syrian regime and pro-Iranian groups in this country. Israel also faces, on its northern border, regular exchanges of fire with the Lebanese Hezbollah, very close to Iran.
Early Monday, a 21-year-old Palestinian man was hit in the abdomen by Israeli army fire near the village of Al-Yamoun west of Jenin in the West Bank, before dying from his injuries in the clinic where he was taken, medical sources told AFP.
The war in Gaza was triggered by the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Israel on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count carried out in based on official Israeli figures.
In response, Israel launched a vast military operation in Gaza, which left 26,422 people dead, the vast majority of them women, children and adolescents, according to the latest report from the Hamas Ministry of Health.