>>3870326
>>3870326
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/09/trump-warns-iran-shia-militia-iraq/569989/
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Shia militants in Baghdad are always prepared to attack U.S. facilities: They have encased pipes, which are aimed in the direction of the U.S. Embassy, in the ground near east Baghdad’s soccer pitches, Michael Knights, an expert on Iraq at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me.
“So any time you want to rocket the U.S. Embassy, you can just go find one of these holes in the ground, slide a rocket in, and fire it—and it’s going to head in that direction,” he said. “So that really gives you a sense of what a machine they’ve built for rocketing the U.S. Embassy.”
Indeed, recent rocket attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and near the U.S. consulate in Basra, which the White House condemned in a statement on Tuesday, fit into a larger pattern. Shia militia in Iraq have spent years rocketing these facilities—though there has been an unspoken truce with the United States since 2014, when both sides fought ISIS. “This doesn’t come out of the blue,” Knights said. “This is their exact modus operandi. They have undertaken these kinds of attacks literally hundreds of times in the past.”