Baghdad, March 13 (IANS) The US military carried out overnight airstrikes on the headquarters of Iraqi Hashd Shaabi paramilitary forces south of Baghdad, it was reported on Friday.
“At 1.15 a.m., there were US airstrikes on headquarters of Hashd Shaabi, emergency regiments and commandos of the army’s 19th Division, in the areas of Jurf al-Sakhar, Musayib, Najaf and Askanriyah,” the media office of the Iraqi Joint Operations Command said in a statement.
The airstrikes came after Wednesday’s rocket attack on Camp Taji north of Baghdad that killed two US soldiers and one British service member and wounded a dozen others, reports Xinhua news agency.
On Thursday, the Pentagon confirmed that the US forces conducted strikes against the Shia militia group Kata’ib Hezbollah’s (KH) facilities across Iraq, also as a response to the rocket attack.
The strikes targeted five weapon storage facilities to degrade their ability to conduct future attacks against coalition forces, adding that these weapon storage facilities include the facilities that had housed weapons used to target US and coalition troops.
The military bases housing US troops across Iraq and the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad have been frequently targeted by insurgent mortar and rocket attacks.
The Iraqi parliament passed a resolution on January 5 requiring the government to end the presence of foreign forces in the country, just two days after a US drone attack killed Qasem Soleimani, former commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy chief of Hashd Shaabi forces.
Over 5,000 US troops have been deployed in Iraq to support local forces in battles against the Islamic State terror group, mainly for training and advisory purposes.
–IANS
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