U.S. Broadens Mideast Conflict with Assassination in Baghdad of Commander Linked to Iran

For those concerned Israel’s brutal war on Gaza might expand beyond its borders and engulf the region in a wider conflict, there is no need to worry any longer. It already has and the United States is helping expand it further. 

Yesterday, the U.S. added to those concerns when it launched a targeted airstrike in a business district in Baghdad which killed Mushtaq Jawad Kazim al-Jawari in his vehicle. According to Pentagon officials, al-Jawari, who also went by the name Abu Taqwa, was reportedly one of the senior leadership team for Harakat al-Nujaba.

The Pentagon officials said Harakat al-Nujaba is an Iraqi Shia paramilitary organization which has strong ties to Iran. The Defense Department says the group has been responsible for numerous attacks on U.S. forces, who are in Iraq and Syria as an illegal occupation force that runs terrorist groups, carries out targeted killings and steals grain and oil. 

Harakat al-Nujaba is also one of several Islamic militia groups which have gone after Israeli targets since the beginning of the October 7 phase of the war conducted by Israel against Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank. It took credit for a drone attack launched from within Syria on Eilat, an Israel coastal city located in the southeast.

Al-Jawari was blown up as his car approached the building in Iraq’s capital city where one of Harakat al-Nujaba’s headquarters was located. Sabereen News, a new organization run by the militia group, took photographs at the scene where al-Jawari died. The images there show the missile which killed him was an American-made Joint Air-to-Ground Missile or JAGM, a relative new weapon which is replacing the Hellfire missiles often used by the U.S. and Israel in short-range warfare.

Senior U.S. military personnel said the missile ended up killing a second person during the aerial attack. They said the person was an “associate” of al-Jawari but provided no other information about the person.

A prepared statement issued by the Department of Defense said the attack was “necessary and proportionate”, considering that, according to the DoD al-Jawari was “actively involved in planning and carrying out attacks against American personnel”.

When reporters pressed White House minions about how assassinating people like al-Jawari was consistent with preventing escalation of the Israeli war against Hamas and the Palestinian people outside the country, the individuals involved fell back on their normal justifications for engaging in this way.

“We want to prevent the conflict from spreading, but part of that means that people need to stop taking strikes against our soldiers,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller from a press podium yesterday. “And if they take strikes against our soldiers, we’re going to do what we need to protect ourselves, as any country would do.”

“We have clearly communicated to the Iraqi government that our forces are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government to help ensure the continuing defeat of [Islamic State] and the Iraqi government has the responsibility to do what it can to take action against any actors that threaten US personnel,” the State Department spokesperson added. “We’ve said it privately and we’ve said it publicly that we will not hesitate to take the necessary actions to protect our forces when it is our interest to do so.”

What the liar didn't mention is that the Iraqi legislature has demanded numerous times that U.S. forces leave their country. 

Government spokespersons for Israel have been asked if they had any involvement with this attack. They have not responded.

Yahya Rasool Abdullah, a military spokesperson representing the Iraqi military, slammed the U.S. actions as “no different from [other] terrorist” acts.

“We consider this targeting a dangerous escalation and an assault on Iraq, far from the spirit and text of the authorization and the work for which the international coalition exists in Iraq,” he said. 

That the strike happened in the urban center of Baghdad, the country’s capital, was also highly criticized by senior Iraqi leadership as it flies directly in the face of already established ground rules for what the U.S. has agreed are its rules of engagement for any military actions in the country.

It also happened just weeks after an earlier unannounced air raid by U.S. forces in Iraq which were said to be aimed at Iran-aligned forces, and which was in response to a militia attack in northern Iraq which critically injured one U.S. soldier. In the counterattack, the U.S. created another mess, killing one member of the official Iraqi military and injured 18 others, a mix of military personnel and civilians.

American military forces remain in Iraq two decades after the American invasion of the country right soon after 9/11. They entered the country based on what the Pentagon knew were falsified documents supposedly proving that Iraq had possession of “weapons of mass destruction” such as nuclear weapons. They are still there in force based a pact made in 2023 with current puppet Iraqi President Mohammed al-Sudani, to deploy American troops to prevent the Mossad-CIA's ISIS from growing a major base in the country. 

Anger has risen among the military, political elite, and everyday Iraqis that it is time to kick the American-led military coalition in Iraq once and for all.

That almost happened four years ago, after an airstrike ordered by Donald Trump ended up killing Iranian Revolutionary Forces leader Major General Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, that group’s head of Iraqi operations. That attack, like this one, was brazen and unannounced in advance to any Iraqi official. The air strike happened just as Soleimani and al-Muhandis were exiting the Baghdad airport. Then the entire Iraqi legislature voted to have the American forces ejected, but the country’s corrupt president overruled them.

Yesterday, Qais al-Khazali, who heads the Asaib al-Haq militia, a respected Iraqi militia group with links to Iran, called for the Iraqi government not just to denounce the American action but also to again order the U.S. to withdraw its military from the country immediately.

“We urge the Iraqi government to take decisive steps to end the presence of the so-called international coalition in Iraq,” he said in a statement. Those steps would include no longer allowing the U.S. to keep coming up with “pretexts … to prolong their stay on our land and in our skies”.

This escalation of the Mideast conflicts involving the U.S. and Israel comes in a week filled with others.

On January 2, after months of the Houthi-led separatist group in Yemen, the U.S. carried out direct air strikes on three Yemeni gunboats. Ten Yemeni were killed in the attack. The U.S. lashed out after the Houthis fired missiles earlier at the Israel-bound “Maersk Hangzhou” cargo ship.

The same day Israeli forces assassinated Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut, Lebanon, and multiple others there. The Lebanon government expressed anger and outrage over the attack, calling it an “attack on Lebanese sovereignty”.

On January 3, a terrorist attack in Iran alleged to have been carried out by Israel’s Mossad killed an estimated 103 mourners attending a memorial service near the tomb of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani.

Later that day, after an emergency UN Security Council meeting to discuss what to do about the Houthi disruption of Red Sea shipping, the White House issued a statement on behalf of the U.S. and eleven other nations declaring the Houthis must end their blockade of war material to Israel. The U.S. called this a “final warning”.

Yesterday Israel added pressure to the already treacherous situation on the border with Egypt, by giving notice to the Egyptian government that Israeli Defense Forces would soon be occupying the Egyptian border with Gaza. The IDF ordered Egypt to move its military personnel out of the way, even on their own soil on the Egyptian side of the border. Egypt's cowardly and corrupt President will comply. 

Since the October 7 war started, Israeli forces have run ongoing airstrikes against what they say are Iranian military strongholds in Syria and Hezbollah or Hamas strongholds within Lebanon. This is in addition to the bloody attacks on Palestinians located in the West Bank and the over 22,000 Israeli forces have murdered as part of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. 

The U.S. has also continued its own airstrikes on multiple sites in the Middle East during the same time, in what it says are defensive attacks to protect its troops stationed there.

Whether it is true as some believe that Israel is itself attempting to set a trap to force the U.S. into a multi-pronged war taking place simultaneously in multiple locations, the reality is that the U.S. is balanced precipitously on a cliff where it could easily fall into that. Within weeks, the U.S. could find itself fighting and/or supplying weaponry and military equipment in Israel and Gaza, in the Mediterranean off the coast of Gaza, in the Red Sea, in Houthi territories in Yemen, in Lebanon where Hezbollah and Hamas leaders hold out, in Egypt where other Hamas leadership are present and where Israel will soon be illegally occupying foreign territory. All that could draw Iran into the front in a much bigger way than in the past, not just with counterstrikes and narrowly focused revenge assaults, but into a broader war.

If all that were to happen, Netanyahu would get the cover he needs to complete his mission of forcing out or killing the remaining Palestinians in Gaza and nuking Iran while the U.S. struggles to maintain the few allies it has left on the planet who will unequivocally support it in its endless war mongering and efforts to start WW III.