Iraqi government officials condemned the retaliatory U.S. airstrikes, saying the attacks showed U.S. forces had become a threat to their host country.
Iraqi government officials on Saturday condemned U.S. airstrikes on Iran-linked targets in Iraq, saying the attacks showed that U.S. forces had become a threat to their host country — a sentiment that will likely hasten demands for the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq to leave.
Militia officials named 16 fighters they said were killed in the strikes late Friday, including five medics they said died when an airstrike hit a base hospital in western al-Anbar province.
The Popular Mobilization Forces made up of armed groups that are now part of Iraqi government security forces — said seven of the 16 fatalities were killed when the U.S. bombed its al-Anbar province operations headquarters. It said at least 36 more people were injured and searches were ongoing for missing fighters.
The mayor of al-Qaim, a city close to the border with Syria where some of the targets were located, told NPR by phone that at least one civilian was also killed in the strikes and at least five homes near the operations headquarters were destroyed.
“We had information that the area would be bombed a day or two before,” said the mayor, Turki Muhammad Khalaf. He said many of the residents near the base had evacuated their homes as a precaution.
The U.S. said it launched the attacks as retaliation for the killing of three U.S. soldiers in a drone attack last Sunday on a remote base in Jordan, also close to borders with Syria and Iraq. The U.S. blamed the strike on the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of militias, and said it believed the attack bore the fingerprints of Kataib Hezbollah, the most powerful militia in the group.
Kataib Hezbollah said after the attack in Jordan that it was suspending strikes on U.
