A US airstrike in Iraq killed a senior commander of an Iranian-backed militia group, the Pentagon confirmed on Thursday.
The strike was a response to a series of rocket attacks on US forces in Iraq that killed one American contractor and wounded several US service members.
The target of the strike was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy chief of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella group of mostly Shiite militias that are aligned with Iran and have been integrated into the Iraqi security forces. Al-Muhandis was also the founder of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful and hardline factions of the PMF.
The Pentagon said that al-Muhandis was “directly responsible” for orchestrating the attacks on US forces, and that he was planning further attacks in the region. The strike was aimed at “deterring future Iranian attack plans” and “protecting American lives”, the Pentagon said.
The strike also killed Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, a elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that oversees Iran’s military operations abroad. Soleimani was widely seen as the architect of Iran’s regional influence and a close ally of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
