Middle East, Power & Security, United States U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, explained

The United States has carried out airstrikes targeting Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria in recent days. The Biden administration said the attacks on weapons storage facilities were meant to deter increasing violence by the militias Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada. The Iraqi Shia paramilitary groups had conducted drone attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq over the last few months.

Who exactly are those militia groups, and why is the U.S. responding in this way at this time?

Sara Plana is a 2021-22 Postdoctoral Fellow at Perry World House, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a pre-doctoral fellow at the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for 2020-21. She researches proxy warfare and is working on a book that examines how states control non-state armed groups they sponsor in foreign civil wars through case studies of state-proxy relationships in the Syrian civil war from 2011 to the present. 

Penn Today sat down with Plana to get her take on the U.S. airstrikes along the Iraq-Syria border and the bigger picture of what’s happening in the region.

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