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The U.S. military hit a series of alleged small drone facilities across Iraq and Syria with airstrikes on Sunday evening. Two locations inside Syria and another in Iraq were hit in order to disrupt and deter...unmanned aerial vehicle attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq, the Pentagon said in a statement.

Four militiamen were allegedly killed in the strikes, the Associated Press reports, citing militia officials without specifying affiliations. The U.S. military alleges militiamen with Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada were among several Iran-backed militia groups that worked inside the buildings now destroyed. (According to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, those two groups are closely linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.)

Background: Since April, Iranian-backed militias have launched at least five drone attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, the Wall Street Journal reports. Reuters reported on one of earliest of those, which occurred on April 14 in Erbil. The apparent uptick suggests the units are turning to more sophisticated means of putting pressure on the American presence in the country, according to U.S. officials.

Iraqs prime minister and military condemned the strikes in statements via their spokesmen.

Defensive precision airstrikes on operational and weapons storage facilities is how the Pentagon described its actions in a statement from spokesman John Kirby. (The Pentagon also released three video clips of the strikes, which you can find here, here, and here.)

Disrupt and deter trivia: The last such strike was at the end of February, Reuters Idrees Ali tweeted Sunday evening.

Worth noting: At least two larger developments are unfolding as this militias-vs.-U.S. beef plays out:

One last thing about small drones: For at least the past year, CENTCOMs Gen. Frank McKenzie has been sounding the alarm bells over the disruptive and dangerous threat from unmanned aerial systems and armed small dronesnot that there are a whole lot of countermeasures widely available, as weve reviewed in our podcast as recently as this past October:

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Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson with Jennifer Hlad. If youre not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. On this day in 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

The Afghanistan conflict is not a winnable war, and the U.S. will continue withdrawing troops from the country, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday, the same day President Biden met with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani.One big reason this matters: Republicans had been pressing Biden to reverse course and stop the withdrawal, Defense Ones Jacqueline Feldscher reports.As for Ghani, he said he respects Americas decision to withdraw and rejects any false narratives of abandonment. But he still painted a grim picture of the security situation in Afghanistan, comparing it to 1861, when the Civil War began in the United States. The then-young republic of the United States was under attack and unity, determination, and ensuring that an exclusionary agenda was not allowed[this] is the type of moment for us, Ghani told journalists. Read on, here.

And finally today: Allegedly classified British documents were found in a soggy heap behind a bus station in Kent last Tuesday morning, the BBC reported this weekend.There were at least two sets of documents recovered in the almost 50-page heap, and one batch concerned the likely Russian reaction to [the Royal Navys HMS Defenders] passage through Ukrainian waters off the Crimea coast. (That event occurred one day after the documents were found.) The other bundle detail[ed] plans for a possible UK military presence in Afghanistan after the US-led Nato operation there ends, the BBC reports, and even shared photos of some of what was found.Said the British military in a statement: As the public would expect, the Ministry of Defence plans carefully. Read on, here.

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Today's D Brief: US strikes militias in Iraq, Syria; Afghanistan, cont.; the next pandemic; And a bit more. - Defense One