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Iraq’s foreign minister has summoned the ambassadors of the United States and United Kingdom over a series of deadly air raids against Iraqi military positions overnight.
“The foreign minister held an emergency meeting in which the ministry’s undersecretaries, advisors and official spokesman discussed the measures regarding the recent American aggression. He has ordered the summoning of the United States and British ambassadors to Baghdad,” a spokesman said.
It came after Iraq’s military said at least one civilian and five security personnel were killed in the US raids, which it denounced as a violation of sovereignty and a targeted aggression against Iraq’s armed forces.
The civilian killed in the overnight attack was a cook working at an airport under construction in Karbala, the military said in a statement. The death toll included three soldiers and two policemen, while four soldiers, two policemen, one civilian and five militiamen were wounded, it said.
Earlier, the Pentagon said the US conducted “defensive precision strikes” against the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah facilities across Iraq, in an attack that was in response to an earlier rocket barrage that killed two US troops and one British soldier.
A US official said that the raids were a joint operation with the British.
Reporting from Baghdad, Simona Foltyn said there had been “widespread condemnation” of the attacks that targeted different southern positions belonging to the Popular Mobilisation Forces, an umbrella organisation of several armed militias, with the latest incident likely to once again ignite calls in Iraq for the expulsion of US troops.
Citing the military’s statement, Foltyn said the “fatalities suggest that these air strikes were not as precise as the US said that they were, and this is rather embarrassing for the US because the Iraqi army and police are its partners under the coalition to fight ISIL.
“Essentially, rather than deterring Kataib Hezbollah and other Iranian-linked groups from conducting further attacks on US servicemen, the US in fact ended up further rupturing the relationship between its Iraqi partners and its presence here in Iraq.” — Al Jazeera
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