US Forces Struck Three Houthis Missiles In Preemptive Attack

“It is the duty of the governments to cut off political, propaganda and arms aid and not to send consumer goods to the Zionist regime,” Khamenei said on Thursday.

Back in November, Khamenei urged Muslim states to cease oil, food and goods exports to Israel to force Israel into a ceasefire amid its war on Gaza sparked by the October 7 Hamas attacks. At least 1,200 mostly civilians were killed and at least 250 more taken hostage in the single most deadly day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Iran's Yemeni proxy, the Houthis, have taken over the critical Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait trade route, launching dozens of attacks on vessels since November and forcing shipping to take longer, more expensive alternative routes.

It has since led to multiple retaliatory joint attacks by the US and UK in a bid to harm the Houthis' infrastructure. The Houthis claim they only target Israeli and Israel-bound ships, but its victims have been multinational. The Galaxy Leader, taken captive in November, has 25 crew taken hostage, hailing from the likes of Bulgaria and Romania.

Though Iran has avoided any direct military involvement in the Israel-Hamas conflict, the regime has used its proxy groups such as the Houthis and Hezbollah to attack Israeli and American targets in the region.

"The biggest media giants are Jews; they know that the Islamic Republic of Iran has targeted the existence of the Zionist regime, and the groundwork for its eradication has been laid," Gholamreza Soleimani stated during a public gathering.

The statement comes after Iran vowed its proxy groups will rally around the Palestinian Hamas and eventually defeat Israel. However, the Iranian regime has stayed out of the Gaza war as Israel has vowed to dismantle Hamas.

Iran-backed Hamas has since been supported by Iran’s proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen who have attacked Israel from its northern border and Red Sea coast, and US facilities across the region, punishment for Biden's support for Israel's right to defend itself in the wake of the October atrocities.

Soleimani has repeatedly vocalized the regime's sentiments towards Israel as money is poured into overseas proxies in the war on Israel and the US, a justification of the misplaced budget priorities as the country suffers its worst economic crisis since the founding of the Islamic Republic.

In 2015, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who founded the proxy militias as a strategy to eliminate its archenemy, said the Jewish state must be destroyed in 25 years.

The government set up a countdown clock in Tehran and other cities to mark the journey, a gesture mocked by many Iranians.

The statement came after the US military conducted a precision missile strike Wednesday night eliminating a top commander of a prominent Iran-backed militia responsible for the deaths of three US troops in January.

The targeted killing is the second major US attack since President Joe Biden authorized a retaliatory military campaign against Iran and its proxies. The first major attack was launched on February 3, hitting more than 85 Iran-related targets in Iraq and Syria.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed the Wednesday attack, posting on X that it was “in response to the attacks on US service members” and that the target was “a Kataib Hezbollah commander responsible for directly planning and participating in attacks on US forces in the region.”

Sources in Iraq –and militia officials– named the commander as Wissam Mohammed “Abu Bakr” al-Saadi, in charge of Kataib Hezbollah’s operations in Syria.

Abu Baqir al-Saadi was once a bodyguard to Kataib’s founder Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. Muhandes was killed alongside IRGC top man Qasem Soleimani in another US drone strike early January 2020.

CENTCOM said there were “no indications of collateral damage or civilian casualties”. Still, followers of the militia at the scene were angry with the US and with the Iraqi government, which they believe is failing to take a stance against the Americans who “violate Iraqi sovereignty.”

The attack may further escalate the situation in the Middle East, where Iran and its proxies have been targeting US forces regularly since Israel began its onslaught in Gaza in response to Hamas’ rampage of Israeli border communities.

Following the large-scale US airstrike on Iraq and Syria, Kataib Hezbollah had announced that it was suspending attacks on American troops to avoid “embarrassing the Iraqi government”. That announcement may now be voided, as Kataib and other Iran-affiliated armed groups consider avenging Abu Bakr al-Saadi's death.

“These crimes will not go unpunished,” the militia Al-Nujaba movement threatened in a statement. .Several other groups from several countries in the region –all affiliated with Iran– also issued statements, threatening retaliation.

Officials from the Biden administration repeatedly said after last week’s retaliatory attack on Iraq and Syria that it was only the beginning and there were more to come. It’s unclear how far the administration would go while maintaining its view to avoid war with Iran at all costs.

Biden’s critics are adamant he should abandon that policy if he wants success in dealing with Iran.

“They say we don’t want to escalate anything with Iran,” Senator Bill Hagerty of foreign relations committee told Bloomberg. “You take escalation off the table, you take a big tool of deterrence off the table. We need to come back to a strong diplomatic, economic, and military position to deal with Iran. It needs to be consistent.

“We’ve been extraordinarily inconsistent in dealing with Iran and its proxies,” Hagerty continued. “We have failed to enforce the sanctions on Iran that would’ve stopped the flow of funds to that nation…"

Iran’s oil revenues have more than doubled since Biden abandoned Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’. This increase has coincided with Iran’s expansion of its missile program, as well as its growing, blatant support for armed groups like Hamas, Kataib Hezbollah, and the Houthis, which have proven most active and effective with their disruption of maritime trade at the Red Sea.

All these groups cite the crisis in Gaza as their main cause. It’s unclear how they would react to the Israeli prime minister rejecting the terms of a potential hostage-release agreement with Hamas that could have led to a permanent ceasefire. The war would continue until “absolute victory,” Netanyahu said. That would likely mean a direct confrontation between Iran and the United State.

"(US) forces conducted a unilateral strike in Iraq in response to the attacks on US service members, killing a Kataib Hezbollah commander responsible for directly planning and participating in attacks on US forces in the region," a statement from the military said. It did not name the commander.

Two security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the commander was Abu Baqir al-Saadi, killed in a drone strike on a vehicle in eastern Baghdad.

One of the sources said three people were killed and that the vehicle targeted was used by Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a state security agency composed of dozens of armed groups, many of them backed by Iran.

Three US troops were killed in January in a drone attack near the Jordan-Syria border that the Pentagon said bore the "footprints" of Kataib Hezbollah. The group then announced it was suspending military operations against US troops in the region.

Iran-backed militias have targeted US forces in Iraq and Syria more than 160 times since mid-October.

The US struck Iran-backed groups in Iraq and Syria last weekend in what it said was just the beginning of its response to the killing of the three US soldiers.

In January, a US drone strike killed a senior militia commander in central Baghdad, an attack Washington said came in response to drone and rocket attacks on its forces.

On Wednesday, Iraqi special forces were on high alert in Baghdad and further units were deployed inside the Green Zone housing international diplomatic missions including the US embassy, a security source said.

IRGC-linked Tasnim News Agency reported Wednesday that “Several foreign spies and terrorists, under central guidance, entered Iran from the Republic of Azerbaijan with the intention of carrying out sabotage operations within the country, but they were identified and arrested before taking action.”

Iran's intelligence agencies frequently announces busting spy networks and detaining saboteurs within Iran borders, although subsequent information about trials and convictions is scarce. Such incidents have been on the rise in recent years, with clandestine attacks targeting nuclear facilities, and military installations. Iran’s intelligence apparatus lost significant face after sabotage attacks on its Natanz nuclear facility in 2020 and 2021.

While the Iranian government often attributes such incidents to Israel, Israeli officials have never officially claimed responsibility.

In late January, the Iranian regime executed four Kurdish political prisoners on charges of plotting to bomb a defense facility. Human rights groups have criticized the executions, citing allegations of confessions obtained under torture and unfair trials.