Washington:

A senior ISIS official was killed in a US airstrike in Syria on Sunday, the US Central Command said in a statement on Wednesday (local time). The senior ISIS official and facilitator have been identified as Usamah Jamal Muhammad Ibrahim al-Janabi.

The US Central Command said that his death would disrupt ISIS’s ability to conduct terror attacks.

In a statement shared on X, US Central Command stated, “US Central Command Airstrike in Syria Kills Senior ISIS Official On June 16, US Central Command conducted an airstrike in Syria, killing Usamah Jamal Muhammad Ibrahim al-Janabi, a senior ISIS official and facilitator.”

“His death will disrupt ISIS’s ability to resource and conduct terror attacks. CENTCOM, alongside allies and partners in the region, will continue to execute operations to degrade ISIS’s operational capabilities and ensure its enduring defeat. There is no indication any civilians were harmed in this strike,” it added.

The US military continues to target ISIS officials in Africa and the Middle East, CNN reported. Nearly three weeks back, an airstrike conducted in a remote area near Dhaardaar in Somalia was assessed to have killed three ISIS terrorists, CNN reported, citing US Africa Command.

From January to March, CENTCOM and its partners killed seven ISIS operatives and detained 27 others in Syria. During the same time period, 11 operatives were killed and 36 people were detained in Iraq, the report said.

Earlier in April, CENTCOM commander General Erik Kurilla said, “We are committed to the enduring defeat of ISIS because of the threat they pose both regionally and globally,” CNN reported.

General Kurilla further said, “We continue to focus our efforts on specifically targeting those members of ISIS who are seeking to conduct external operations outside of Iraq and Syria and those ISIS members attempting to break out ISIS members in detention in an attempt to reconstitute their forces.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Beirut:

Syria’s defence ministry said an Israeli air strike Wednesday killed a girl and wounded 10 civilians on the coast, as a war monitor reported another raid killed five pro-Hezbollah fighters.

“The Israeli enemy launched an air attack from the direction of Lebanon, targeting a central site and a residential building in Baniyas city in the coastal region, killing a girl and wounding 10 civilians,” a ministry statement said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor also reported the girl’s death and put the civilian wounded toll at 20.

The Britain-based Observatory also said the Israeli strike on central Syria killed three Syrian fighters working with Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group and two other non-Syrian fighters working for the same movement.

Earlier on Wednesday, state media said air defences intercepted Israeli “targets” over central Syria.

“Syrian air defence intercepts enemy targets in the skies of the city of Homs,” the official SANA news agency reported.

The Observatory said the Israeli strikes targeted “at least one military site… in the eastern countryside of Homs, causing plumes of smoke to rise”.

On Saturday, an Israeli drone strike in central Syria, near the border with Lebanon, killed two Hezbollah fighters, the Observatory had said.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes in Syria but has repeatedly said it will not allow its arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence there.

Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the outbreak of the civil war in its northern neighbour, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters including from Hezbollah.

The strikes have increased since Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip began on October 7, when the Iran-backed Palestinian militant group launched an unprecedented attack against Israel.

Syria’s war has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more since it erupted in 2011 after Damascus cracked down on anti-government protests.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Damascus:

Syria’s defence ministry on Friday said eight soldiers had been injured in Israeli air strikes near Damascus.

On Thursday night, “the Israeli enemy launched air strikes from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting a site near Damascus… injuring eight soldiers,” the ministry said in a statement.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes but has repeatedly said it will not allow its arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.

The Israeli military has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the outbreak of a civil war in its northern neighbour in 2011, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters.

But the strikes increased after Israel’s war with Iran-backed Palestinian operative group Hamas in the Gaza Strip began on October 7.

On April 19, Israeli strikes targeted a Syrian army position in the country’s south, Syria’s government and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said, as US media reported Israel had hit Iran.

Overnight on April 13, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles against Israel in an unprecedented attack that came in retaliation for a deadly strike — widely blamed on Israel — on Tehran’s consulate in Damascus.

Syria’s war has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more since it erupted in March 2011 with the repression of anti-government protests.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Despite their defeat in Syria in March 2019, IS sleeper cells have been blamed for deadly attacks. Representational file image.
| Photo Credit: AP

An attack on pro-government fighters by suspected members of the Islamic State group in central Syria killed 22 pro-government fighters, an opposition war monitor and pro-government media reported on April 19.

Gunmen attacked a bus carrying members of the Quds Brigade, a government and Russian-backed faction of mostly Palestinian fighters in Syria, near the town of Sukhna late Thursday night. Sukhna was once an IS stronghold.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but both the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based opposition war monitor, and the pro-government radio station Sham FM said IS was behind the attack.

Both the Observatory and Sham FM said 22 fighters were killed. Sham FM said they were all Quds Brigade gunmen, while the Observatory said the majority belonged to the group.

The Quds Brigade fought on the side of Syrian government forces during the country’s 13-year conflict, which has killed half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million.

The Quds Brigade is different from the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, which uses the same name.

Despite their defeat in Syria in March 2019, IS sleeper cells have been blamed for deadly attacks against both Syrian government forces and against members of the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

In June 2015, a few months after the Islamic State (IS) announced its Wilayat Khorasan, the Taliban wrote a letter to the IS chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Taliban’s demand was that the IS should stop recruiting jihadists in Afghanistan. Both the Taliban and the Islamic State were insurgencies that time.

The letter, signed by the then political committee chief of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour said there was room for “only one flag and one leadership” in the fight to re-establish Islamic rule in Afghanistan. Mullah Mansour would later become Taliban’s leader and be killed by a U.S. air strike in May 2016.

The Islamic State faction, which came to be known as the Islamic State-Khorasan, did not stop recruiting disgruntled Taliban fighters. Nor did it stop launching terror attacks across Afghanistan. Today, the Taliban are no longer an insurgency. They are the government in Kabul. And the IS-Khorasan has emerged as the most powerful branch of the Islamic State networks. It has training centres in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. It has recruited thousands of disgruntled Central Asians. It has carried out a number of attacks in recent months, including the January twin bombings in Kerman, Iran, a strike on a church in Istanbul and a massive attack on a concert hall in the outskirts of Moscow on March 22.

Armed gunmen opened fire at the Crocus City Concert Hall and threw explosives, killing at least 137 people and wounding nearly 200 others, in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Russia in years. Russian authorities have arrested and charged four Tajik nationals for the attack.

When the Islamic State announced the formation of the Khorasan Wilayat in January 2015, referring to an geographical area encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, the group’s immediate strategy was to exploit the divisions within the main jihadist groups operating in the region. It appointed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander Hafiz Saeed Khan as its leader and former Afghan Taliban commander Abdul Rauf Aliza as his deputy (both were killed in U.S. strikes). It attracted members from different militant organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Haqqani Network and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan into its fold.

The IS-K declared its allegiance to Abu Bakr Baghdadi, the self-declared Khalifa, who was killed by an American strike in 2019. In operational tactics and ideology, it followed its parental organisation. The key goal is to establish “Islamic rule” in the “province” and for that they are ready to wage “jihad”. In a video message released in in 2015. the IS-Khorasan stated: “There is no doubt that Allah the Almighty has blessed us with jihad in the land of Khorasan since a long time ago, and it is from the grace of Allah that we fought any disbeliever who entered the land of Khorasan. All of this is for the sake of establishing the Shariah.”

When the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came under pressure in 2015 and 2016, the core organisation shifted its focus to Afghanistan. The IS was losing territories to Kurdish militias in Syria and government forces and Shia militias in Iraq. In Afghanistan, a fractured country batted by civil war, the IS saw an opportunity to rebuild its organisation. Having built its base in eastern Afghanistan, the IS-Khorasan issued propaganda messages, calling on Muslim youth across Asia to join the group. Many radicalised youth, including dozens from India, travelled to Afghanistan to either join the IS or live an “Islamic life” under the Caliphate’s rule.

But this upset the Taliban, which did not want its monopoly of violent jihad to be challenged. The Taliban are a tribal, nationalist militant force, backed by Pakistan, whereas the IS-Khorasan doesn’t believe in national borders — they are global jiahdists fighting for a transnational Islamist Caliphate.

The ideological and operational differences led to open clashes between the IS- Khorasan and the Taliban. When the Taliban seized Kabul and took over prisons in August 2021, they freed several of their members, but executed IS-Khorasan militants and leaders. Currently, Shahab al-Muhajir is the Emir” of the group.

Why Russia?

The U.S. has carried out a number of targeted attacks, killing several of the IS-Khorasan leaders. In April 2017, then President Donald Trump ordered troops to drop the ‘Mother of all Bombs’, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb, on IS caves in eastern Afghanistan. But despite the U.S.’s targeted bombings and the Taliban’s counter-attacks on the ground, the IS-Khorasan has continued to expand its operations. When the Taliban established its regime in Kabul, the IS-Khorasan proclaimed that it is the real jihadist outfit. Militants from Central Asia who were part of the Islamic State Caliphate swelled the IS-Khorasan’s ranks after they relocated to Afghanistan.

The IS-Khorasan also launched propaganda videos targeting Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities such as Tajiks and Uzbeks, who were excluded by the Taliban’s Pashtun-only regime. Russia, its President Vladimir Putin and Iran emerged as the key enemies in the IS’s propaganda videos. After the Moscow attack, the IS said its soldiers had killed a “lot of Christians”. It also said Russia had “blood of Muslims on its hands”, referring to its military operations in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.

Why does the IS hate Russia and Iran?

The answer lies in Syria.

The IS was founded in in Syria in 2014 amid the country’s civil war. It had grand ambitions, which were thwarted by Russia’s 2015 intervention. The IS captured eastern Syrian cities of Raqqa and Der Ezzour in 2013 and 2014, and it wanted to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and capture Damascus, the seat of power of the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century.

But Russia’s intervention, along with help from Iran, which is a Shia majority republic, made sure that President Assad survived the civil war. In 2017, when the IS captured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, Russians fought along with the Syrian troops to liberate the city. Subsequently, the IS’s physical Caliphate was crushed by a host of forces — Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians and Iran-trained Shia militias with air cover from Russia and the U.S. Now, the IS-Khorasan sees ‘Christian’ Russia and ‘Rejectionist’ Iran (in the IS lexicon, Shias are “rejectionists”, who rejects the first three Caliphs of Sunni Islam) as top enemies.

Today, the IS-Khorasan wants to be the centre of global jihadism. Back-to-back attacks in different places from Istanbul to Kerman to Moscow suggest that the group is on a path to revival, six years after its physical Caliphate was destroyed. Chaos in West Asia, a base in Afghanistan, and foot soldiers from Central Asia are all helping the group expand its activities, with a highly sophisticated internet propaganda.

Reporting: Stanly Johny

Production: Shibu Narayan and Shikha Kumari

Tehran:

Israeli air strikes destroyed the Iranian embassy’s consular annex in Damascus Monday, Syrian and Iranian officials said, with a top Revolutionary Guard commander among seven members the force said were killed, amid worsening regional tensions.

Israel said it would not comment on the reported attack, but Iranian officials vowed a stiff response with fears of even further violence between Israel and Iran’s allies triggered by the Gaza war.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps named Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and another high-ranking officer, Brigadier General Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, as among seven of its members killed.

Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 11 people, including several Guards members, were killed when “Israeli missiles… destroyed the building of an annex to the Iranian embassy”.

The toll includes “eight Iranians, two Syrians and one Lebanese — all of them fighters, none of them civilians,” Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Observatory with a network of sources in Syria, told AFP.

Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, giving a lower toll, told Iranian state TV that “at least five people were killed in the attack which was carried out by F-35 fighter jets” which fired six missiles at the building.

AFP reporters saw the annex building had caved in, and emergency services were rushing to search for victims under the rubble as sirens wailed in the upscale Damascus district of Mazzeh.

Security personnel shielded the site where earth-moving equipment was brought in to clear the debris and remove charred vehicles from the road outside, watched by a crowd of onlookers.

Syria’s defence ministry said “the attack destroyed the entire building, killing and injuring everyone inside, and work is underway to recover the bodies and rescue the wounded from under the rubble”.

– Regional tensions –

 Iranian state TV said Zahedi — a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations arm, the Quds Force — was among the dead.

The Observatory said Zahedi served as the leader of the Quds Force for Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, adding that he was killed along with his deputy, his aide, and the Quds force chief of staff for the same three countries.

Two other members of the Guards and two Iranian advisers were also killed in the strike, the Observatory said.

The targeted building is next to the Iranian embassy, the front of which is decorated with a large portrait of Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s military operations in the Middle East, killed in January 2020 in an American drone strike in Iraq.

 The Damascus strikes were the fifth in a week to hit Syria, whose President Bashar al-Assad is supported by Iran, Israel’s long-time arch foe in the region.

Syria’s state news agency SANA had earlier reported that “our air defence systems confronted enemy targets in the vicinity of Damascus”.

Iran’s ambassador, Akbari, vowed the attack “will lead to our decisive response”, adding “the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate shows the reality of the Zionist entity which recognises no international laws and does all that is inhumane to achieve its goals”.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian called for a “serious response by the international community”.

– ‘Heinous attack’ –

Only the gate of the building was left standing after the attack, with a sign mentioning “the consular section of the embassy of Iran”, an AFP journalist said.

Window panes in buildings within a 500-metre (550 yard) radius had been shattered, and many parked cars were damaged by the blast.

Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad also denounced the attack after visiting the site, calling it a “heinous terrorist attack… killing a number of innocent people”, in a statement carried by SANA.

The Gaza war, which started with the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, has devastated the coastal territory and also seen Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah exchange near daily cross-border fire.

Israel has also struck targets in Syria, mostly army positions as well as those of Iran-backed combatants.

Hamas condemned “in the strongest terms” the attack which it called a “dangerous escalation.”

Moscow, a Damascus ally along with Tehran, blamed “the Israeli Air Force” for the “unacceptable attack against the Iranian consular mission in Syria.”

The Damascus strike came three days after the Observatory reported Israeli strikes that had killed 53 people in Syria, including 38 soldiers and seven members of Hezbollah.

It was the highest Syrian army toll in Israeli strikes since the Israel-Hamas war began, said the monitor.

“Syria and Lebanon have become one extended battleground from the Israeli perspective,” Riad Kahwaji, head of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, told AFP after the Friday strikes.

The bloodiest ever Gaza war erupted with the Palestinian militants’ unprecedented October 7 attack which resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign, aimed at destroying Hamas, has killed at least 32,845 people, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Emergency and security personnel extinguish a fire at the site of strikes which hit a building annexed to the Iranian embassy in Syria’s capital Damascus, on April 1, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Israeli air strikes destroyed the Iranian embassy’s consular annex in Syria on April 1, killing and wounding everyone inside, Damascus said as Iranian state TV reported a Revolutionary Guards commander among the dead.

Britain-based war monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said eight people, including several Guards members, were killed when “Israeli missiles… destroyed the building of an annex to the Iranian embassy”.

Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, giving a lower death toll, told Iranian state TV that “at least five people were killed in the attack which was carried out by F35 fighter jets”.

Israel did not immediately comment on the deadly attack in Damascus which comes at a time of soaring tensions over its Gaza war against Palestinian militants Hamas, and intensifying violence between Israel and Iran’s allies.

AFP reporters saw the annex building had caved in, and emergency services were rushing to search for victims under the rubble as sirens wailed in the upscale Damascus district of Mazzeh.

Security sources shielded the site where earth-moving equipment was brought in to clear the debris and remove charred vehicles from the road outside, watched by a crowd of onlookers.

Syria’s Defence Ministry said “the attack destroyed the entire building, killing and injuring everyone inside, and work is underway to recover the bodies and rescue the wounded from under the rubble”.

Iranian state TV said among those killed was a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations arm, the Quds Force, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi.

The Observatory said it had “confirmed the killing of a high-ranking leader who served as the leader of the Quds Force for Syria and Lebanon, two Iranian advisors, and five members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard”.

The Damascus strikes were the fifth in eight days to hit Syria, whose President Bashar al-Assad is supported by Iran, Israel’s long-time arch foe in the region.

Syria’s state news agency SANA had earlier reported that “our air defence systems confronted enemy targets in the vicinity of Damascus”.

Iran’s ambassador, Mr. Akbari, said that “the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate shows the reality of the Zionist entity which recognises no international laws and does all that is inhumane to achieve its goals”.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian called for a “serious response by the international community”.

‘Heinous attack’

Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad also denounced the attack after visiting the site.

“We strongly condemn this heinous terrorist attack that targeted the Iranian consulate building in Damascus killing a number of innocent people,” Mr. Mekdad said in a statement carried by SANA.

The Gaza war, which started with the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, has devastated the coastal territory and also seen Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah exchange near daily cross-border fire.

Israel has also struck targets in Syria, mostly army positions as well as those of Iran-backed combatants.

The Damascus strike came three days after the Observatory reported Israeli strikes that had killed 53 people in Syria, including 38 soldiers and seven members of Hezbollah.

It was the highest Syrian army toll in Israeli strikes since the Israel-Hamas war began, said the monitor.

“Syria and Lebanon have become one extended battleground from the Israeli perspective,” Riad Kahwaji, head of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, told AFP after the Friday strikes.

The death toll in Israeli air strikes on Syria has risen to 52, including 38 government soldiers and seven members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, a war monitor said on March 30.

The strikes on March 29 fuelled concerns of a wider regional conflagration.

They targeted “a rocket depot belonging to Lebanon’s Hezbollah” near the Aleppo airport in northern Syria, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

It was the latest deadly raid on Iran-backed forces in Syria, where Hezbollah has been backing the government in its fight against opponents since the 2011 Syria civil war erupted.

Israeli strikes on targets in Syria have increased since Israel’s war against the Hezbollah-allied Hamas group in the Gaza Strip broke out on October 7.

Israeli raids also regularly target Hezbollah in Lebanon in retaliation for cross-border fire.

Also Read: Battles, bombardment in Gaza as US says Israel talks back on

The strikes on March 29 killed 38 Syrian soldiers, seven Hezbollah members and seven Syrian pro-Iran fighters, the Observatory said, up from a total of 44 according to an earlier toll.

The number of Syrian soldiers killed was the highest in Israeli strikes since the war with Hamas broke out, said the war monitor, which relies on a network of sources in Syria.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes, and has neither confirmed nor denied the raids on Syria.

But Israel’s military has said it killed the deputy head of Hezbollah’s rocket unit in Lebanon, Ali Naim, whose death the Iran-backed group confirmed.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on social media that he visited northern Israel on March 29 “to closely examine another successful termination like the one that was executed this morning”, in Lebanon and Syria.

Israel’s army would keep up its operations against Hezbollah everywhere, he said, adding: “We will make them pay a price for every attack that comes out from Lebanon.”

Also Read | Could Israel’s Supreme Court ruling ending draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Israelis topple Netanyahu’s government?

Hezbollah, which has a powerful arsenal of rockets and missiles, has exchanged near-daily fire with the Israeli military since Hamas’s unprecedented October attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza.

“Syria and Lebanon have become one extended battleground from the Israeli perspective,” Riad Kahwaji, head of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, told AFP.

Washington:

The US military struck two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday.

“The precision self-defense strikes are a response to a series of ongoing and mostly unsuccessful attacks against US personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed militia groups that began on October 17,” he said in a statement.

One US citizen contractor died from a cardiac incident during the attacks, and 21 US military personnel suffered “minor injuries, but all have since returned to duty,” Austin added. 

The strikes in Syria follow a direct warning earlier Thursday from President Joe Biden to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei against the strikes on US troops, the White House said on Thursday.

“There was a direct message relayed. That’s as far as I’m going to go,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters, declining to say how it was delivered.

In his statement, Austin sought to distance the strikes against facilities used by the IRGC in Syria from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas members in Gaza.  

“These narrowly tailored strikes in self-defense were intended solely to protect and defend US personnel in Iraq and Syria,” he said. 

“They are separate and distinct from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and do not constitute a shift in our approach to the Israel-Hamas conflict,” he added.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

U.S. troops have been repeatedly attacked in Iraq and Syria in recent days, U.S. officials said on Thursday, as Washington is on heightened alert for activity by Iran-backed groups with regional tensions soaring during the Israel-Hamas war.

President Joe Biden has sent naval power to the Middle East in the past two weeks, including two aircraft carriers, other warships and about 2,000 Marines.

There has been an uptick in attacks on U.S. forces since the conflict in Israel broke out on Oct. 7 when Palestinian militants from Hamas attacked southern Israel. On Wednesday, a drone hit U.S. forces in Syria resulting in minor injuries, while another one was brought down.

During a false alarm at Al Asad airbase in Iraq, a civilian contractor died from a cardiac arrest.

Earlier this week, U.S. forces thwarted multiple drones targeting troops in Iraq. On Thursday, drones and rockets targeted the Ain al-Asad air base, which hosts U.S. and other international forces in western Iraq, and multiple blasts were heard inside the base.

“While I’m not going to forecast any potential responses to these attacks, I will say that we will take all necessary actions to defend U.S. and coalition forces against any threat,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters on Thursday.

“Any response, should one occur, will come at a time in a manner of our choosing,” Ryder said.

A U.S. Navy warship traveling near Yemen on Thursday intercepted missiles and several drones that were launched by what Ryder said was the Iran-aligned Houthi movement, though it appeared that the projectiles were potentially heading in the direction of Israel.

LINK TO ISRAEL-HAMAS CONFLICT?

Israel has called up a record 360,000 reservists and has been bombarding the Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip nonstop following Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault, which killed about 1,400 people, mostly civilians.

At least 3,785 Palestinians have been killed and 12,493 wounded in Israeli strikes on Gaza, the health ministry in Gaza said.

But Ryder said he did not see a link between the rise in attacks and the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

“At this point, again, the information that we have does not show a direct connection to the Hamas attacks on October 7,” he said.

The United States has 2,500 troops in Iraq, and 900 more in neighboring Syria, on a mission to advise and assist local forces in combating Islamic State, which in 2014 seized swathes of territory in both countries.

In Iraq, tension over the war in Gaza had already been high. Its top Shi’ite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, last week condemned Israel and called on the world to stand up to the “terrible brutality” in besieged Gaza.

Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful armed faction with close ties to Iran, accused the United States of supporting Israel in “killing innocent people” and said it should leave Iraq.

In past years, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq regularly targeted U.S. forces in Iraq and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad with rockets. Such attacks had abated under a truce in place since last year, and Iraq has had a period of relative calm.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)