Two armed drones were shot down on Monday as they approached a military base housing U.S. forces near Baghdad’s international airport, according to Reuters.
“[A]n official of the U.S.-led international military coalition said the base’s defence system had engaged ‘two fixed-wing suicide drones. They were shot down without incident,'” the report stated.
“This was a dangerous attack on a civilian airport,” the coalition official also said, according to Reuters.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. Footage from the debris revealed that one of the drones had the words “Soleimani’s revenge” written on the wing in Arabic.
France 24 added, “Two fixed-wing suicide drones, or improvised cruise missiles, attempted to attack Baghdad Airport this morning at approximately 4:30 am” (0130 GMT), the official told AFP.”
The report also said that a C-RAM system took down the threat “without incident.”
“A counter-rocket, artillery and mortar, or C-RAM, system ‘at the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center engaged them and they were shot down without incident,’ added the source, speaking on condition of anonymity,” the report said.
January 3 marked the two-year anniversary of the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani by a U.S. drone strike at the Baghdad airport ordered by then-President Donald Trump.
Despite the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, about 2,500 troops remain in the country “to advise and assist Iraqi security forces,” according to The Hill.
Also on Monday, two Israeli media outlets were hacked in an effort apparently inspired by the anniversary of Soleimani’s killing. Both the Jerusalem Post website and Twitter account and the Twitter account of Maariv were taken over with an image added that showed the destruction of Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor.
“We are close to you where you do not think about it,” the image said in both Hebrew and English, according to AllIsrael.com.
As The Daily Wire reported in 2020, U.S. military forces reportedly killed two top Iranian military commanders involved in terrorism in Iraq in an airstrike in what analysts said was a significantly bigger deal than the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi:
Iranian Major-General Qasem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were the two Iranian military leaders who were killed. Al-Muhandis was in charge of the Iranian-linked Popular Mobilization Forces.
BBC reporter Ali Hashem reported: “My sources suggesting that commander of IRGC Quds force Qassem Suleimani and Deputy chief of PMU Abu Mahdi AlMuhandes were in the convoy hit by the U.S. airstrike near Baghdad airport Iraq.”
Five days after the Soleimani strike, Iran fired missiles at two locations, including Irbil in northern Iraq:
In a statement issued shortly after the attacks, the Pentagon provided some details on Iran’s strikes. “At approximately 5:30 p.m. (EST) on January 7, Iran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles against U.S. military and coalition forces in Iraq,” the Defense Department announced. “It is clear that these missiles were launched from Iran and targeted at least two Iraqi military bases hosting U.S. military and coalition personnel at Al-Assad and Irbil.”
According to Iraqi military officials, Iran fired a total of 22 missiles at two of the military bases in Iraq where U.S. personnel are stationed, the Times reported.