Rocket attack hits US-occupied Taji base in Iraq for 2nd time in a week

An Iraqi colonel inside the base, located 27 kilometers north of the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad, told Reuters that he had heard at least 10 rockets hitting the facility Saturday.

Security sources said the army had found an abandoned truck with a rocket launcher and some unused Katyusha rockets on its back in the nearby area of Umm al-Izam.

There has been no immediate report of casualties or any claim of responsibility for the attack.

On Wednesday, a similar rocket attack on Taji killed two US troops and a British soldier.

No group has yet claimed the attack in which some 18 107mm Katyusha rockets struck the US-occupied camp.

However, US President Donald Trump claimed that the attackers were a group that “most likely looked like it could be backed by Iran,” a claim rejected by Tehran as “baseless.”

Iran: Trump must reassess behaviour of US forces in regionIran says US President Donald Trump must reconsider behavior of occupying American forces in the region instead of leveling groundless accusations against other countries.

US attacks military bases along Syrian-Iraqi border

On Friday night, the United States carried out artillery and missile attacks on military bases along the Syrian-Iraqi border less than a day after it launched airstrikes on several bases in Iraq.

Iraq’s Arabic-language al-Sumaria television network reported that American forces, stationed at the al-Omar oil field in Syria’s eastern Dayr al-Zawr province, had targeted bases west of the Euphrates River.

At the same time, it added, US warplanes flew over the districts of al-Musayab, Eskandariya and Jurf al-Sakhar in Iraq’s central Babil province.

On Thursday night, the US conducted a string of airstrikes that killed three Iraqi soldiers, two police officers and a civilian worker, and damaged an unfinished civilian airport.

The air raids targeted the headquarters of the Iraqi army’s 19th division and the 46th PMU brigade as well as the under-construction airport in the holy city of Karbala and emergency regiments and commandos in several Babil areas.

The Iraqi military condemned the strikes as a violation of its sovereign and targeted aggression against its official armed forces, with the Foreign Ministry announcing that the country will complain to the United Nations and the Security Council.

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry on Friday summoned US and British ambassadors to Baghdad to protest the airstrikes. 

Iraq condemns US airstrikes; says soldiers, police, civilians killed The Iraqi military and the presidency have condemned new US airstrikes, saying they killed soldiers, police officers and civilians Thursday night.

On January 5, the Iraqi parliament obliged the government “to work towards ending the presence of all foreign troops,” including some 5,200 American forces.

The vote came two days after the US military – acting on Trump’s order – launched a fatal drone strike on Iran’s prominent anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani upon his arrival in the Iraqi capital at the invitation of the Baghdad government.

The attack also claimed the lives of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the PMU’s second-in-command, along with eight other Iranian and Iraqi people.

Infuriated by the Iraqi parliament’s vote, Trump threatened sanctions should US troops be expelled from the country.