The Iraqi Ministry of Defense announced on Wednesday, March 25, that the military clinic and the Works Division of its command site in Al-Habbaniya, in Iraq’s western province of Anbar, were subjected to aerial attacks by the US that left at least seven soldiers killed and 13 others wounded.
The attacks were carried out one day after a US airstrike had targeted the operations headquarters of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Anbar. PMF’s operations commander for the Anbar region, Saad Duwai, alongside 14 other fighters were killed in the assault.
The PMF issued a statement mourning Duwai and his comrades and denouncing the attack as a “flagrant and cowardly assault”.
“This heinous crime constitutes a flagrant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty, a dangerous disregard for the blood of its sons, and once again reveals the nature of the aggressive approach that places no value to international laws or humanitarian norms,” the statement reads.
The group also held political forces in Iraq “fully responsible” for confronting the repeated US violations, urging them to adopt “clear and firm positions that safeguard” the country’s sovereignty and put an end to these dangerous transgressions”.
The PMF is a state-sponsored [paramilitary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Mobilization_Forces#%3A~%3Atext=The+Popular+Mobilization+Forces+(PMF%2Cthe+supreme+leader+of+Iran.) comprising 67 armed groups, which was formed by the Iraqi government in 2014 for the purpose of confronting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In 2016, the PMF integrated into the official Iraqi armed forces. However, it is considered an integral part of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance in West Asia.
The offensive launched on PMF’s operation headquarters in Anbar is not the first. It followed a series of US-Israeli strikes on groups affiliated with the Axis of Resistance in the past three weeks, not only in Iraq but also in Lebanon, as part of the imperialist duo’s all-out aggression on Iran and its allies across the region.
Read more: Dozens killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon amid intense ground clashes between IOF and Hezbollah
Iraq’s National Security Ministerial Council allows Iraqi security sectors to confront the attacks
For its part, the Iraqi National Security Ministerial Council issued a decision on Tuesday, authorizing the confrontation of military attacks targeting the headquarters and official security formations of the PMF, and the rest of the Iraqi armed forces’ formations “by all possible means, in accordance with the principle of the right to respond and self-defense”.
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