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US troops on patrol in Syria earlier this month
The US has approved plans for a series of strikes on Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq, officials have told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
The strikes will take place over a number of days, officials said, and weather conditions will likely dictate when they are launched.
It comes after a drone attack killed three US soldiers in Jordan, close to the Syrian border, on Sunday.
The US blamed an Iranian-backed militia group for that attack.
That group, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, is believed to contain multiple militias that have been armed, funded and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards force. It has said it was responsible for Sunday’s strike.
Iran, meanwhile, has denied any role in the attack which injured 41 other US troops at the military base, known as Tower 22. Four US officials cited by Reuters have said that US intelligence believes that the drone used to attack the facility was manufactured by Iran.
At a news conference on Thursday, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said the US would “not tolerate attacks on American troops”.
“We will take all necessary actions to defend the United States, our interests and our people,” he said. “We will respond where we choose, when we choose and how we choose.”
The officials who spoke to CBS News did not give an exact timeline on the potential strikes. They said the US military could launch them in bad weather, but preferred to have better visibility to reduce the risk of inadvertently hitting civilians.
President Joe Biden has been under mounting pressure from Republican lawmakers, including some of Washington’s most hawkish voices on Iran, to strike targets on Iranian soil.
But while the US has repeatedly pledged to respond to the drone attack, Mr Biden and other defence officials have said Washington is not seeking a wider war with Iran or an escalation of tensions in the region.
“That’s not what I’m looking for,” Mr Biden told reporters at the White House earlier this week.
The reportedly approved plans appear to keep the targeting to Iranian targets Syria and Iraq, rather than inside Iran.
The death of three US servicemen and injuring of many others, turns up the heat in an already febrile region and ratchets up the pressure on the US commander-in-chief, President Joe Biden.
This marks the first time American troops have been killed by enemy fire since the Israel-Gaza war erupted.
And it may be the first time during this current crisis that Washington has to take such a hard look at such a difficult decision: where and how should it strike Iran?
Washington will want to send the strongest of messages to Tehran, which it blames for the fires now burning everywhere from Lebanon to Yemen. But it will also want to avoid sparking an even more dangerous escalatory spiral of strikes and counterstrikes.
This moment seems to have been all but inevitable. Since mid-October, US military installations in Iraq and Syria have repeatedly come under attack by Iran-backed militias, injuring a growing number of US soldiers. The US has retaliated, at least eight times, by hitting targets in both countries. It was only a matter of time before American lives were lost on this low-intensity, but high-risk, battlefield.
Several Iran-backed groups have increased attacks on US and Israeli-linked entities since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war on 7 October.
The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, for example, have attacked ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, prompting strikes from the US and its allies.
A US defence official told CBS that a drone was shot down overnight in the Gulf of Aden, while an unmanned sea drone was struck and destroyed in the Red Sea.
Citing unnamed sources, Reuters on Thursday reported that Iran had withdrawn senior officials from Syria following a series of Israeli airstrikes in a bid to avoid being directly drawn into a wider conflict in the region.
US officials told CNN this week that there were signs that the Iranian government was becoming increasingly concerned about the actions of its proxy groups in the region, who have launched over 160 attacks on US forces since October.
The bodies of the three US soldiers killed in the attack in Jordan are expected to be repatriated to a Delaware Air Force base on Friday. The White House has announced that President Biden will attend.
The three soldiers have been named as William Jerome Rivers, 46, Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, and Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23. All three were part of an army reserve unit based in Fort Moore, Georgia.
In his first response, President Biden left no doubt where the blame lies this time. The drone attack on Tower 22, a small outpost along Jordan’s border with Syria, was the work of “radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”
Iran has shot back, denying any responsibility. Referring to what Tehran calls “resistance groups,” a foreign ministry spokesman insisted “they do not take commands (from Iran) in their decisions and actions about how to support Palestine.”
Iran’s allies across this region have all been trained and armed by its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) or been instructed on how to arm themselves.
This web of contacts has tightened in recent years in their so-called “axis of resistance” and the Israel-Gaza conflict has visibly strengthened this military alliance of radical non-state actors.
But each actor has its agency, its own agendas and ambitions. In Iraq, most of the assaults appear to have been carried out by groups aligned in the umbrella grouping, named the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. Retaliatory strikes are complicated by the fact that some are also part of Iraq’s own armed forces.
In recent months, the US has aimed fire at Iranian assets in the region, including what was described as a training base in Syria and an IRGC weapons depot.
This time, the target will have to be the kind of “high value” one which hurts Iran far more – to prove Washington’s mettle in this region, and, just as importantly, at home.
In an election year, President Biden’s political adversaries are already exploiting this crisis to reiterate their charge that he is “soft on Iran.”
“It’s very tricky, very difficult,” analyst Fawaz Gerges, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science told the BBC. “All scenarios have consequences.”
In a range of options, striking Iran itself is the riskiest of all. It would be the first attack on Iranian soil since a bungled plot in 1980 to rescue American hostages seized in the wake of the Iranian revolution.
The last highly sensitive US operation against Iran was the assassination four years ago of top IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani, who was cut down by an American drone strike in Baghdad. He was accused of plotting to kill American diplomats and soldiers across the region and had been a pivotal figure in forging this “axis of resistance”.
“There has to be deterrent like the Soleimani attack,” underlined Joel Rayburn, a former US Special Envoy to Syria, who spoke to the BBC’s Newshour programme. “If a cost is not imposed on the Iranian mastermind these attacks will go on and on.”
Iran, also under significant pressures at home, has held back in recent months from its own strikes on Israeli or American sites in retaliation for the assassination of several of its senior Revolutionary Guard commanders, which it blames on Israel.
Earlier this month, in its first direct reply, it focused its fire on what was regarded as a “soft target” when it hit what it called a base of Israel’s Mossad agency in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The US knows it now has to be seen to be doing something, but even more it has to be seen to succeed.
That’s the dilemma for Washington and its allies as the devastating Israel-Gaza war drags on, causing a staggering number of civilian casualties and untold suffering. Iran’s allies insist they won’t cease fire until there’s a ceasefire in Gaza; so far, none is in sight as Israel wages a war it says will only end once Hamas is destroyed and hostages are freed.
Tensions on another front, in the vital shipping lanes of the Red Sea, tell a cautionary tale. The US, backed by the UK and others, already finds itself leading a military campaign against Yemen’s Houthis, but it hasn’t stopped their attacks on vessels sailing through this passage so pivotal to world trade.
It has only intensified Houthi defiance and catapulted them to the centre of world attention.
A recent Western intelligence estimate put Houthi losses at about 30% of their arsenal. But the Houthis, masters of irregular warfare after surviving nearly a decade of Saudi-led airstrikes, believe they’re winning far more than they’re losing.
The Houthis, and others in their Iran-backed alliance, have seized on this crisis to try to burnish their reputation as standard bearers for the Palestinians in their battles against Israel. While the Gaza war rages, the US looks set for a long struggle to extinguish multiple fires blazing all at once, and keep them from burning out of control.
