machine gun fire, customary during funerals, illuminated the night sky as dozens of men converged in a dimly lit, unpaved alley on the edges of the sprawling slums of Sadr city to pay their respects. A giant picture of Ali Hassan al-Daraaji had been erected outside the family home in north-east Baghdad to announce his “martyrdom” in this week’s US airstrikes on Iraqi armed groups.
The series of strikes left nine fighters dead, including Daraaji, the first Iraqi fatalities linked to the Israel-Hamas war. Even as a tenuous truce takes hold in Gaza, the pace and intensity of clashes in Iraq has picked up, highlighting the risk of spillover in a country that has long been mired in conflict.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the US targeted fighters it believed were responsible for dozens of attacks carried out on American troops in Iraq and Syria. The operations have been claimed under the banner of the so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq in response to “the crimes committed by the enemy against our people in Gaza”, according statements released on its Telegram channel.
The Pentagon said it acted in defence of its troops, who returned to Iraq in 2014 to help the Iraqi government fight Islamic State. But the Daraaji family, whose history is steeped in fighting the 2003-11 US occupation of Iraq, sees the latest events as a continuation of a long history of unjust American policies in the Middle East, and as a sign that two decades after its invasion, the US is still treading on Iraqi sovereignty.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A salvo of machine gun fire, customary during funerals, illuminated the night sky as dozens of men converged in a dimly lit, unpaved alley on the edges of the sprawling slums of Sadr city to pay their respects.
Even as a tenuous truce takes hold in Gaza, the pace and intensity of clashes in Iraq has picked up, highlighting the risk of spillover in a country that has long been mired in conflict.
Others, like Ali and his uncle Dholfaqar al-Daraaji, followed suit in 2014, when Kataib Hezbollah ostensibly merged into the state security apparatus under the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), an umbrella of Shia paramilitaries that received Iranian support to fight IS.
Images of dead Palestinian children being pulled from under the rubble have brought those painful memories back to the surface and revived anger at the US, seen as a party to the conflict because of the diplomatic cover and military aid it provides to Israel.
While most members of the ruling alliance support Sudani’s efforts to advocate for a political solution to the Israel-Hamas war that would also calm the situation in Iraq, some think that negotiations are “not sufficient to deter Israeli aggression”, the official said.
A Kataib Hezbollah statement issued on Saturday announced a reduction in the pace of attacks until the end of the Gaza truce, but vowed that they would continue until Iraq was “liberated” from the “occupation forces”, no matter the sacrifice.
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