President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. military to carry out retaliatory strikes against Iranian-backed militia groups after three U.S. servicemembers were injured in a drone attack in northern Iraq.
National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said one of the U.S. troops suffered critical injuries in the attack that occurred earlier Monday. The Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups, under an umbrella of Iranian-backed militants, claimed credit for the attack that utilized a one-way attack drone
Biden, who is spending Christmas at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, was alerted about the attack by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan shortly after it occurred on Monday and ordered the Pentagon and his top national security aides to prepare response options.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. military to carry out retaliatory strikes against Iranian-backed militia groups after three U.S. servicemembers were injured in a drone attack in northern Iraq.
National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said one of the U.S. troops suffered critical injuries in the attack that occurred earlier Monday.
Biden’s deputy national security adviser, Jon Finer, was with the president at Camp David and convened top aides to review options, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and requested anonymity.
The U.S. has blamed Iran, which has funded and trained Hamas, for the rising violence by its network of proxy groups across the region, including attacks by Yemen’s Houthis against commercial and military vessels thorough a critical shipping choke point in the Red Sea.
The Biden administration has sought to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spiraling into a wider regional conflict that either opens up new fronts of Israeli fighting or that draws the U.S. in directly.
The U.S. has thousands of troops in Iraq training Iraqi forces and combating remnants of the Islamic State group, and hundreds in Syria, mostly on the counter-IS mission.
The original article contains 464 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!