Base housing US-led forces at Baghdad airport comes under rocket fire

An airbase housing the United States-led coalition’s forces at Baghdad International Airport comes under rocket fire.

A security source alleged in remarks to AFP that one of the projectiles fired during the Sunday incident had been intercepted.

Another landed inside “the military section” that surrounds the airport, Iraq’s al-Sumaria television cited a source as saying.

No person or party has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, the second one of its type in a week.

Various Iraqi resistance groups, however, regularly claim such incidents, pledging not to lay down their arms until the US-led coalition withdraws from their country.

The US first invaded Iraq in 2003 under the pretext of fighting “terror.” The invasion was followed by strong anti-American sentiment across Iraq as well as sweeping and unchecked sectarian violence.

America reportedly took all of its combat forces out of Iraq under Barrack Obama. In 2014, however, the same American president flooded the Arab country with military forces again as part of the Washington-led coalition.

The coalition claims to be fighting the Takfiri terrorist group of Daesh that rose amid the chaos that had resulted from the US’s military intervention. It retains its forces on the Iraqi soil, although, Baghdad and its allies defeated the terror outfit in 2017.

Obama’s successor Donald Trump took down the number of the forces to 2,500 by January 15. Many, however, downplayed the drawdown as a gesture aimed at boosting his re-election chances that Trump would very likely reverse if he was chosen president again.

Last January, the Iraqi parliament overwhelmingly passed a law ordering the withdrawal of all the US-led forces. The legislation was a response to an earlier US drone strike that martyred senior Iranian and Iraqi anti-terror commanders, Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad.

Under current US President Joe Biden, the US and Iraq announced through a joint statement in April that they had agreed on the pullout of “all” American combat troops from the Arab country.

Many observers, though, put it past the US to enable such a prospect, citing the repeated history of Washington’s refusal to commit to its promises to Baghdad.

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