Just hours after U.S. warplanes bombed facilities of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and its proxies in Syria early Friday, the proxies fired back and launched a drone attack on U.S. forces in western Iraq.
American air defense forces shot down the drone several miles from Al Asad Air Base without causing injuries or damage on the ground, U.S. officials said Friday. Pentagon officials also said that missiles were fired into northern Syria on Friday, but that they landed far from American troops.
Pentagon officials have attributed the attacks to Iran-backed militias.
But the dispute raised questions about whether the airstrikes, which came after a spate of missile and drone strikes against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, can achieve one of their main goals: deterring further attacks.
“The United States does not seek conflict and has no intention or desire to engage in further hostilities, but these Iran-backed attacks against U.S. forces are unacceptable and must stop,” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement after what he said were “self-defense strikes.”
The airstrikes, carried out by two Air Force F-16 fighter jets, were designed to send a strong message to Iran, but not so strong that they escalated hostilities, U.S. officials said. The targets were weapons and ammunition caches that supplied Iranian-backed militias involved in recent attacks against Americans, Pentagon officials said.
“It was our way of saying, ‘Stop,’ but nothing more than that,” said Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington. “The Iranians are of course undeterred, so this will likely be the first step in several attempts to increase deterrence.”
Since Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel on October 7, President Biden and his aides have been trying to prevent the war between Israel and Hamas from degenerating into a regional conflict with Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. To make this clear, the Pentagon has sent two aircraft carriers and dozens of additional fighter jets to the region.
But with near-daily attacks on U.S. forces over the past 10 days – the Pentagon’s count rose to at least 19 as of late Thursday – pressure had increased for a military response.
Republican critics and some air force advocates said Friday that the U.S. retaliatory strikes, while important, were not enough to deter Iran and its proxies.
“They show that we do not simply accept incoming attacks without responding, but they were and are not sufficient to deter further future attacks,” said David A. Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force general and dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said U.S. retaliation, particularly against unoccupied proxy camps, “only confirms Iran’s strategy of using proxies to attack Americans.”
“They are laughing at us in Tehran,” he added.
Biden administration officials say a similar spate of attacks involving Iran-backed militias and American retaliatory airstrikes in March ultimately led to a troubling six-month lull in missile and drone strikes against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria led to the recent attacks.
A U.S. official said Friday that Biden administration officials did not believe the Iranian government wanted war with the United States. The official said Iran is expected to be cautious if Shiite militias escalate attacks to the point of drawing Washington and Tehran into direct conflict.
At the same time, the official said Tehran wanted to give the militias space to express their anger.
But Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, warned that Iran knows the Biden administration has little appetite for another war in the region. Officials in Tehran may be miscalculating and thinking they have more leeway to bully the United States because they don’t believe President Biden wants war.
“The U.S. dilemma is that after two decades of failure in the Middle East, there is little popular support for greater U.S. military involvement in the region,” Sadjadpour said. “The Islamic Republic knows this, which makes deterring Iranian aggression more difficult.”
The U.S. retaliatory strikes on Friday came before dawn just hours after the Pentagon announced that 19 U.S. military personnel at Al-Asad in Iraq and al-Tanf Garrison in Syria suffered traumatic brain injuries after they were last Iranian-backed militants attacked Iran with missiles and drones last week.
There are 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria, mostly helping local allies carry out counterterrorism missions against the Islamic State.
In 2016, the American military turned al-Tanf into a small outpost. It lies on the Baghdad-Damascus highway – a key link for forces backed by Iran, Syria’s ally, in a corridor that runs from Tehran through Iraq and Syria to southern Lebanon.
In October 2021, Iran ordered an armed drone strike on al-Tanf in retaliation for Israeli airstrikes against Iranian forces in Syria, American and Israeli officials said, an escalation of Iran’s shadow war with Israel that posed new threats to U.S. forces in the Middle East brought with it.
Pentagon officials said they were still assessing the damage caused by Friday’s attacks to gauge their success. The Air Force’s two F-16s, accompanied by MQ-9 drones, dropped more than 20 precision-guided bombs on a weapons depot and an ammunition depot near al-Bukamal, Syria, officials said.
Mr. Lister said the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its deputies were using the al-Bukamal area to move their troops, weapons and other supplies between Iraq and eastern Syria.