How Iran-Backed Groups Provoke Widening Mideast Conflict

As the war between Israel and the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas has continued, it’s stoked violence in other parts of the Middle East. Militant groups backed by Iran, which supports Hamas and for years has engaged in a shadow war with Israel, have joined in. These groups — part of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance — have attacked Israeli targets, ships in the Red Sea, and US forces, provoking retaliation. After three American soldiers died in a drone strike in Jordan in late January, US forces began to counterstrike more forcefully against Iran-linked targets in Syria and Iraq, marking a fresh escalation.

On Jan. 28 a drone struck US forces stationed in northeast Jordan near the Syrian border, causing the first confirmed American deaths under enemy attack since Israel and Hamas went to war. The US blamed the attack on an umbrella entity of Iran-aligned militias in Syria and Iraq calling itself the Islamic Resistance. It includes the group Kataib Hezbollah, which said a couple of days later that it was suspending military operations in Iraq after pressure from the Iraqi government. In retaliatory airstrikes Feb. 2, the US, according to American officials, hit 85 targets at seven locations linked to militant groups that Iran funds and to the country’s Quds Force, the wing of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps focused on foreign operations. On Feb. 7, the US said it conducted an airstrike in Iraq that killed a Kataib Hezbollah commander.