When Joe Biden assumed the presidency on 20 January 2021, he took the reigns from an administration which had seemingly been doing all it could in its final days to provoke some sort of crisis with Iran, stopping short of provoking a war. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal, had been the hallmark foreign policy deal of the Obama administration, and Biden had made statements claiming he sought to reenter the aforementioned agreement with Iran.
As such, many interpreted Biden’s moves to mean a more passive streak in US-Iranian relations. On 15 February 2021, about fourteen rockets landed near Erbil International Airport in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. The attack, claimed by the Kata’ib Hezbollah offshoot Saraya Awliya al-Dam (Guardians of the Blood), killed one person (a civilian contractor) and wounded eight others. This attack came as US forces withdrew from southern Iraq and reconstituted in Kurdistan after repeated rocket attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad in late 2020.
On Saturday, 20 February 2021, four rockets struck Balad Airbase north of Baghdad. Balad Airbase is home to Iraq’s F-16 squadron, and is thus a location with American contractors present. The attack was also claimed by Saraya Awliya al-Dam, and resulted in one contractor being injured. Finally, on 22 February 2021, several rockets landed near the US Embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone. There were no injuries or immediate claims of responsibility.
In response to these three attacks, the US military carried out a strike against Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kait’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada near the Syrian city of Al-Bukamal, which is often used as a staging area by Iran-backed militia groups transiting from Syria to Iraq and vice-versa. The attack took place in Syria in a likely attempt to reduce political repercussions for Iraqi politicians, and was probably deliberately kept lowkey and in-line with tit-for-tat retaliation, as opposed to an overwhelming response. Whether this more surgical method of kinetic foreign policy has a real impact on US-Iran relations remains to be seen, but the facts on the ground establish that this remains part of a pattern of clashes that has continued off-and-on for the last forty years.
