The Iranian regime is pushing a propaganda narrative to misportray the security measures that the U.S. and U.K have implemented in response to attacks from Iran-backed forces in the Middle East as an act of aggression intended to expand the Israel-Hamas war.
At a weekly press conference on February 5, Iranian Foreign Minister Nasser Kanani called recent U.S. strikes against Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen a “clumsy attempt” to divert attention from events in the Gaza Strip.
“Instead of choosing peace in the region, the U.S. and the U.K. prefer to choose the Israeli regime and the interests of [prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu over those of nations and governments. … Their behavior is inconsistent with their claims on non-expansion of the [Gaza] war in the region,” Kanani said.
“Attacking other countries is a violation of the national sovereignty of Syria, Iraq and Yemen and a clumsy attempt to divert public attention from the focal point of the crisis.”
That is false.
Iran has been backing upwards of 100 violent militia groups across the Middle East, some of which systematically carry out attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, Israeli forces along the Israel-Lebanon border and military and commercial vessels off the coast of Yemen in the Red Sea.
The Iranian proxy attacks dramatically escalated after the Iranian-backed Palestinian group Hamas attacked Israeli towns and settlements near the Gaza Strip last October 7. The attack killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and precipitated Israel’s military operation against Hamas.
U.S. officials and analysts say that Washington is the conflict , as evidenced by its apparent decision to not retaliate by directly striking inside Iran or target senior Yemeni militant leaders.
Analysts also say Iran, while expanding the conflict through its proxy forces in the region, is seeking to calibrate its strikes on Israel and the U.S. a forceful response.
Tensions heightened on January 28, when the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of that includes the militant group Kataib Hezbollah, on a U.S. Army base in northeast Jordan, near the Syrian border, killing three U.S. troops and wounding more than 40 others.
Kataib Hezbollah used an Iranian-made Shahed drone, similar to those the Islamic Republic to prosecute its war against Ukraine.
The U.S. responded with a series of strikes against Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Syria, killing dozens of militants, but also several civilians.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq with another drone strike on a base used by U.S. forces in eastern Syria that killed six U.S.-allied Kurdish fighters on February 5.
On February 6, The Associated Press citing an unnamed U.S. military official, that Iran-backed militia forces had carried out 166 attacks on U.S. military installations since October 18, including 67 in Iraq, 98 in Syria and one in Jordan.
Earlier, on February 2, and that Iran had launched 165 drone, missile and rocket attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since October, injuring more than 120 U.S. service members.
In an opinion piece , Ibrahim Al-Marashi, an associate professor of Middle East history at California State University San Marcos, wrote that the figure of 165 drone, missile and rocket attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since October is “misleading.”
He said that a years-long “undeclared war between the United States and Iran-affiliated Iraqi Shia militias” had resulted in a “much higher” number of attacks on U.S. forces in the region.
Likewise, Charles Lister, director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria program, that Iranian-backed militias had been engaged in “an attritional campaign against the U.S.” over the past two decades.
Iran, via its so-called axis of resistance, has long engaged in proxy wars against regional rivals Israel and Saudi Arabia, and seeks to expel the U.S. from the Middle East.
The axis of resistance by some counts over 100 Shiite militias supported by the Quds forces of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Those proxy forces operate in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, among other countries.
Iranian support entails funding, training and other military support for Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The level of Tehran’s influence over these groups is unclear. Unnamed U.S. officials that when it comes to Shiite militias, Iran has the least amount of operational control over the Houthis, a Shiite Islamist political and military organization in Yemen that has been targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea and beyond since the Israel-Hamas war began.