“Any [US] strike will result in an appropriate response,” Akram al-Kaabi, the movement’s leader, said in a statement posted on X. Kaabi added that attacks would continue until a ceasefire in Gaza is reached and US troops withdraw from Iraq.
Harakat al-Nujaba comprises the PMF’s 12th brigade, and is among the Iran-backed groups that Washington blames for a spate of drone attacks on American interests in Iraq and Syria since mid-October in response to American support for Israel in its war against Palestinian Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a network of shadow Iraqi militia groups backed by Iran and affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has claimed responsibility for most of the recent attacks, numbering at over 165, on US troops in Iraq and Syria.
A drone strike on Sunday killed at least three US service members in an American military base in northeast Jordan, near the Syrian border. Washington previously blamed groups supported by pro-Iran Kataib Hezbollah for the attack.
The US has warned several times that “multiple actions” would be taken in retaliation for the drone strike, which marks the first fatal attack on American troops in the Middle East since the outbreak of the war in Gaza in October.
US President Joe Biden is facing mounting domestic pressure with elections coming up later this year, particularly from Republicans who are urging the president to take action against Iran for the drone strike.
In light of repeated warnings of retaliation by the US, Kataib Hezbollah on Tuesday announced the suspension of attacks on US troops.
The Iraqi government previously denounced the attacks on US personnel in the country, but American retaliatory attacks have triggered heavy backlash from Baghdad, who condemned the attacks as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty, reopening calls by Iran-backed factions for the withdrawal of US troops.
In January an American drone strike against Harakat al-Nujaba in Iraq’s capital of Baghdad killed two, including Mushtaq Talib al-Saeedi, better known as Abu Taqwa, a former commander of al-Nujaba and the deputy commander of PMF’s Baghdad Belt Operations.
Similarly to Harakat al-Nujaba, the True Promise Brigades, part of the Iran-linked Islamic Resistance in Iraq, announced in a statement on Wednesday the "continuation of military operations" targeting US interests in the region "until the Zionist-American-British aggression against our Palestinian people stops."
