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U.S. Central Command released this undated photo as part of its announcement of renewed airstrikes against Houthi targets on Saturday. U.S. Central Command hide caption

U.S. Central Command released this undated photo as part of its announcement of renewed airstrikes against Houthi targets on Saturday.

The U.S. struck Iranian-linked targets in the Middle East for a second consecutive day Saturday.

The U.S. and allies hit 36 Houthi targets at 13 locations in Yemen, the Pentagon said Saturday. On Friday, the U.S. struck facilities in Iraq and Syria, as part of a broader campaign that U.S officials say is in retaliation for a drone attack that killed three American soldiers. The U.S. says it struck Iran-backed proxies in each country.

The Pentagon said the U.K., Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand were involved in Saturday's strikes against Houthi targets, saying they were in response to Houthi attacks targeting international shipping vessels.

U.S. Central Command said strikes targeted "multiple underground storage facilities, command and control, missile systems, UAV storage and operations sites, radars, and helicopters" used by the Houthis.

The current round of U.S. strikes is more extensive and deadly than those from the previous few months.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the Houthis will "continue to bear further consequences if they do not end their illegal attacks on international shipping and naval vessels."

The attacks come in response to a drone attack on a U.S. support base in Jordan on Jan. 28 that killed three Army Reserve soldiers. An Iranian-backed militia group claimed responsibility for the attack. It was the highest death toll of U.S. troops in the Middle East in at least a decade.

Iran's foreign ministry called the attacks a "strategic mistake" and said they "will have no other result other than intensifying tensions and instability in the region."

Iranian-backed militias have mounted more than 165 drone, missile and rocket attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since the Israel-Hamas war began in October.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan would not rule out strikes within Iran when asked about that possibility Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press.

"Well, sitting here today on a national news program, I'm not going to get into what we've ruled in and ruled out from the point of view of military action," Sullivan said. "What I will say is that the president is determined to respond forcefully to attacks on our people. The president also is not looking for a wider war in the Middle East."

Sullivan did say that strikes against the militias will continue.

"It began with strikes on Friday night but that is not the end of it," he told NBC. "We intend to take additional strikes and additional action to continue to send a clear message that that the United States will respond when our forces are attacked, or people are killed."

The latest strikes came on the same day that U.S. military officials say U.S. forces destroyed six Houthi anti-ship cruise missiles in Yemen in "self-defense," saying that the missiles were to be used against ships in the Red Sea.

U.S. and British forces have carried out multiple attacks against Houthi military facilities, as the Iranian-backed group has continued to target commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Excerpt from:
The U.S. and allies launch strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen - NPR

Iranian pro-government media attempted to ignore the US airstrikes on pro-Iran militias that took place over the weekend. Even though the US struck half a dozen sites with dozens of munitions, the regime in Tehran appears to be downplaying them.

This is likely because very few Iran-affiliated operatives were killed in the attacks. Also, Iran had a week to wait and plan what to do after its Iraq-based militias killed three Americans in Jordan.

At the same time, pro-Iran media in the region, such as the Al-Mayadeen TV channel, have claimed that the sites that were struck had been evacuated, and they say that pro-Iran groups have already begun targeting the US again.

Iran and its militias have also made it clear that countries in the region should not assist the US. Jordan, for instance, had downplayed the attack on its territory after it took place on January 27. In essence, the region feels that this kind of tit-for-tat conflict, in which Iran uses proxies to attack the US and the Americans strike warehouses and other sites linked to the proxies, might as well be happening on another continent.

This is because in the last year, the region has sought to put the era of these kinds of conflicts behind it. For instance, China brokered a Saudi-Iran normalization deal. There is a ceasefire in Yemen with the Houthis. Yet the Houthis have carried out dozens of attacks on ships in the Red Sea, destabilizing the region.

Key US partners in the region, such as Egypt and Jordan, want to downplay the tensions. Egypt, for instance, is not interested in discussing the Red Sea, while Jordan put out a statement making it clear that it was not involved in the US strikes in Iraq and Syria.

The Royal Jordanian Air Force did not participate in the air strikes carried out by the US Air Force inside Iraqi territory, the Jordanian military said. There is no truth to the press reports about the participation of Jordanian aircraft in the operations carried out by US forces inside Iraq. The Jordanian Armed Forces-Arab Army respects the sovereignty of Iraq. The statement underscores the depth of relations that unite Jordan with all Arab countries, the statement read.

In the UAE, Al-Ain media likely reflects Gulf thinking when it reports that the US strikes were part of the rules of engagement and that there was a lot of noise in the strikes, but no major escalation is likely to result.

Iran's statements about the strikes portray the US as ultimately on the losing end of this encounter. Iran believes that, in the long term, the US is slowly withdrawing from the region. It has been read as the policy goal of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.

This likely emboldened Iran and its proxies to go for broke when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. The degree of Irans involvement in planning that massacre is still unclear, but within days, Iran had mobilized Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Iraq and Syria to carry out attacks.

Therefore, its clear that Iran believed that the October 7 attack was a turning point. This was a crossover point for Iran, beyond which it believes it will increasingly achieve victory in numerous arenas in the region.

Al-Mayadeen media, which is pro-Iran, quotes the Al-Nujaba militia in Iraq as saying they will respond to the US attacks. Hezbollah slammed the US strikes, claiming Washington was escalating the wars in the region. This is ironic, since it is Irans proxies, including Hezbollah and Nujaba, that are responsible for most of the problems in the region. Pro-Iran groups have already claimed to target US forces since the attacks, illustrating they are not deterred.

Iran has shown over the last several years that it can operationalize its militias to carry out hundreds of attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria and that those militias generally emerge unscathed. In general, the Iranian militias continue to be strengthened, and Iran believes it holds a winning hand.

Iran wants to get political parties in Iraq to demand that the US leave. As such, Iran gets militias in Iraq to target US forces, even in Jordan, and then, when the Americans respond, Iraq claims this is a violation of its sovereignty.

This is a lose-lose situation for the US. If the US responds more strongly, it will be accused of escalating the situation. Iran will then use the escalation as an excuse for more attacks. Iran also uses militias, so it has plausible deniability. Any attacks on Iran itself would be an escalation as well.

The US response to the January 27 attack, like the responses to the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, has not yet deterred the Iranian-backed groups.

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Iran undeterred by US strikes, as US withdrawing from Middle East - The Jerusalem Post

As Iran and the United States assessed the damage done by American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq on Friday, the initiative suddenly shifted to Tehran and its pending decision whether to respond or to take the hit and de-escalate.

The expectation in Washington and among its allies is that the Iranians will choose the latter course, seeing no benefit in getting into a shooting war with a far larger power, with all the risks that implies. But it is not yet clear whether the varied proxy forces that have conducted scores of attacks on American bases and ships and that rely on Iran for money, arms and intelligence will conclude that their interests, too, are served by backing off.

The Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group that controls parts of Yemen, have continued to attack ships in the Red Sea despite a series of American strikes, including one on Saturday, meant to deter them.

Fridays strikes were largely in retaliation for a drone attack by an Iran-backed militia that killed three American soldiers in Jordan on Jan. 28. The United States hit back at that group and several other Iran-backed militias with 85 targeted strikes. In the aftermath, American officials insisted there was no back-channel discussion with Tehran, no quiet agreement that the United States would not strike directly at Iran.

Theres been no communications with Iran since the attack, John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters on a call on Friday night after the retaliatory strikes were completed.

But even without direct conversation, there has been plenty of signaling, in both directions.

President Biden is engaged in a military, diplomatic and election-year gamble that he can first restore some semblance of deterrence in the region, then help orchestrate a pause or cease-fire in Gaza to allow for hostage exchanges with Israel and then, in the biggest challenge of all, try to reshape the dynamics of the region.

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U.S. Strikes Test Iran's Will to Escalate - The New York Times

Prominent Washington think tank the International Crisis Group, influential in the negotiation of the United States nuclear deal with Iran, has extensive but previously undisclosed connections to the Islamic Republics foreign ministry, according to a report from Iran International, a Persian-language news outlet frequently at odds with Irans government, which charges that the theocratic regime has used the experts to lobby the US government on its behalf.

The connections between the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the Crisis Group run through the formers in-house think tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), which Western governments and organizations have largely shied away from since the group sponsored a notorious Holocaust denial conference in 2006.

IPIS and the Crisis Group signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in 2016, predating much of the latters involvement in negotiations over Irans nuclear program and the lifting of sanctions on the regime.

The think tank has given recommendations to the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations on Iran, the report says, as well as the US Congress. However, the Crisis Group never made public the agreement it had with the Iranian foreign ministry, and its analysts never mentioned their close ties with the Iranian officials.

In reviewing the large cache of leaked Iranian Foreign Ministry correspondence and Tehrans interactions with Western organizations, wrote Jay Solomon of Semafor, with which Iran International shared the documents, I was startled, not only by its depth, but the lack of transparency involved.

The think tank, however, denies any wrongdoing and maintains that analysts coordination with Irans Foreign Ministry was merely a component in their research and due diligence, as experts who make a point of talking to all parties involved in a given issue before weighing in on it.

In public statements and threads on X, representatives of the Crisis Group think-thank asserted that the Iran International report selectively translated correspondence between the analysts and the Iranian officials, and pointed to a pattern of criticism the think tank has received from the Iranian government and media personalities.

Original post:
Major US think tank Crisis Group has secret ties to Iran - report - The Jerusalem Post

Iran has lambasted Fridays U.S. strikes on Iran-backed militant resources and facilities in Iraq and Syria, warning that they could lead to significant escalation.

The attack will have no result other than the escalation of tensions and instability in the region, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani said Saturday in a statement. He added that it was a strategic mistake from the Biden administration.

The attack was a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq and Syria, Kanaani said.

Iraqs Popular Mobilization Forces reported 16 of its members had been killed, while 23 were killed in Syria, Reuters reported. Iraq said civilians were also killed in the strikes, Al Jazeera reported.

Although the Biden administration said it informed Baghdad before the strikes, Iraqi government spokesman Basem Al-Awadi said this is an unfounded claim crafted to mislead international public opinion, according to the Iraqi News Agency.

The attack will push the security situation in Iraq and the region to the brink of the abyss, the Iraqi government said.

Iraqs Foreign Ministry said it has summoned David Burger, the U.S. charg daffaires to Baghdad, to protest the strikes.

The alarmed response from the Iranian and Iraqi governments reveals the precarious balancing act the United States must maintain in the coming days in order to avoid further escalation in the region after hitting targets of Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The strikes, which the Biden administration conducted as a response to the deadly Iran-backed attack on a U.S. outpost in Jordan that killed three American troops, are expected to be the first in a series of responses, the White House said Friday.

There will be additional responses. There will be additional action that we will take, all designed to put an end to these attacks and to take away capability by the IRGC, John Kirby, White House National Security Council coordinator told reporters on a call Friday.

The White House told reporters on Friday the targets were chosen because they were believed to be connected to attacks on U.S. personnel. The Director of Operations of the Joint Staff Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims told reporters that the targets were holding locations for munitions that have been used against U.S. forces and those that helped provide command, control and intelligence collection to the strikes that hit Americans.

The retaliation came after months of Iranian-backed militants conducting hundreds of attacks on U.S. forces in the region. And though the Biden administration killed a leader of an Iran-backed militant group last month and struck out at facilities linked to Kataib Hezbollah, the strikes this week mark a significant escalation in response.

It was not clear if either the Iranian or Iraqi responses in the region or the reported civilian casualties would alter the administrations next steps. The White House, and State Department did not immediately return a request for comment. The Pentagon declined to comment.

U.S. officials said Friday that the Biden administration is not seeking wider war with Iran. The goal here is to get these attacks to stop. We are not looking for a war with Iran, Kirby said.

The White House previously claimed that the attacks were chosen in order to avoid civilian casualties, Kirby said.

These targets were carefully selected to avoid civilian casualties and based on clear, irrefutable evidence that they were connected to attacks on U.S. personnel in the region, Kirby said, acknowledging that the Department of Defense was still in the early stages of assessing the damage.

Sims said that the United States hit exactly what it was intending to hit.

The initial indications were that we hit exactly what we meant to hit with a number of secondary explosions associated with the ammunition and logistics locations, Sims said.

The military struck over 85 targets with over 125 precision-guided munitions. The U.S. military struck seven different facilities overall, Sims told reporters in a call Friday.

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Iran Warns U.S. of Threat of Escalation After Strikes on Iran-Backed Targets - The Daily Beast