BAGHDAD (Dispatches) – Iraq’s Kataeb Hezbollah (KH) popular resistance movement, a powerful armed faction, brushed off U.S. sanctions on the group over attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and said such strikes aimed to “drain the enemy”.
The U.S. on Friday issued sanctions against several KH members and against another resistance movement and its secretary-general, accusing them of being involved in attacks against the United States and its partners in Iraq and Syria.
A statement on Telegram by Abu Ali al-Askari, a security official in the group, dismissed the sanctions as “ridiculous,” and said the measures would not affect the group’s operations.
“Well-studied strikes by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq against enemies, causing losses in their ranks and destroying vehicles or confusing or distracting them, is going according to a strategy to drain the enemy,” the statement said.
The Iraqi resistance front said the attacks were carried out in retaliation for U.S. support of the Zionist reime’s bloody aggression against and genocide in the besieged area.
Israel waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Strip-based Palestinian resistance groups of Hamas and Islamic Jihad carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Flood into the occupied territories in response to the occupying regime’s intensified crimes against the Palestinian people.
According to the Gaza-based health ministry, at least 12,300 Palestinians have been killed in the strikes, most of them women and children, and more than 32,000 others injured.
On Sunday, Iraq’s anti-terror resistance front carried out a drone attack on an American military base in the Arab country’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region in response to the U.S.-backed Israeli onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip.
In a statement cited by Iraq’s Saberin News, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of anti-terror fighters, claimed responsibility for an overnight attack on the al-Harir Air Base in Erbil in northern Iraq and said the operation was in retaliation for Israel’s ongoing crimes in Gaza.
“In response to the crimes committed by the enemy against our people in Gaza, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq targeted the American occupation base al-Harir in northern Iraq, with a drone that directly hit its target,” the statement said.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq also said it had attacked the Al-Tanf U.S. occupation base in the central Syrian province of Homs and targeted the strategic military site with combat drones.
The Iraqi resistance said in a similar statement that the drone attack was launched “in response to the crimes committed by the enemy against our people in Gaza.”
Late on Saturday, Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network reported several explosions at the U.S. base in al-Omar oil field, east of Syria’s Dayr al-Zawr Province.
The television news network also said the Conoco gas field, which houses American occupation forces in the eastern Syrian province, had been targeted by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq with a salvo of missiles.