Three US soldiers wounded in Iraq rocket attack

Three American troops and several Iraqi forces were wounded on Saturday in a rocket attack on an Iraqi base north of Baghdad, US and Iraqi officials said, according to Reuters.

Iraq’s Joint Operations Command said 33 Katyusha rockets were launched near a section of the Taji base which houses US-led coalition troops. It said the military found seven rocket launchers and 24 unused rockets in the nearby Abu Izam area.

The Iraqi military said several Iraqi air defense servicemen were critically wounded. Two of the three wounded US troops are seriously injured and are being treated at a military hospital in Baghdad, the Pentagon said.

This is the second rocket attack on the Taji base in less than a week. On Wednesday, a rocket attack on the base killed an American soldier, a British soldier and one US contractor.

The US responded a day later by targeting weapons facilities belonging to the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia inside Iraq.

Tensions have increased in the region since a rocket attack killed a US contractor working at a base in northern Iraq in late December.

Several days later, US F-15 fighter jets bombed five bases used by Kata’ib Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian Shiite group which straddles the boundary between Syria and Iraq, and is allied with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.

The tensions then continued when a US drone strike outside the Baghdad airport on January 3 killed the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, and the Hashed’s deputy chief Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Iran then retaliated by launching a volley of ballistic missiles at the western Iraqi base of Ain Al-Asad. While no US personnel were killed in that attack, at least 109 soldiers suffered from brain trauma.