WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden said Friday that Iran should view his decision to authorize U.S. airstrikes in Syria as a warning that it can expect consequences for its support of militia groups that threaten U.S. interests or personnel.
"You can't act with impunity. Be careful," Biden said when a reporter asked what message he had intended to send with the airstrikes, which the Pentagon said destroyed several buildings in eastern Syria but were not intended to eradicate the militia groups that used them to facilitate attacks in Iraq.
Administration officials defended Thursday night's airstrikes as legal and appropriate, saying they took out facilities that housed valuable "capabilities" used by Iranian-backed militia groups to attack American and allied forces in Iraq.
John Kirby, the Pentagon's chief spokesperson, said members of Congress were notified before the strikes as two Air Force F-15E aircraft launched seven missiles, destroying nine facilities and heavily damaging two others, rendering both "functionally destroyed." He said the facilities, at "entry control points" on the border, had been used by militia groups that the U.S. deems responsible for recent attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq.
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In a political twist for the new Democratic administration, several leading Congress members in Biden's own party denounced the strikes, which were the first military actions he authorized. Democrats said the airstrikes were done without authorization from lawmakers, while Republicans were more supportive.
"Offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances," said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. And Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said lawmakers must hold the current administration to the same standards as any other. "Retaliatory strikes not necessary to prevent an imminent threat," he said, must get congressional authorization.
But Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, backed the decision as "the correct, proportionate response to protect American lives."
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Friday that Biden used his constitutional authority to defend U.S. personnel.
"The targets were chosen to correspond to the recent attacks on facilities and to deter the risk of additional attacks over the coming weeks," she said.
Among the recent attacks cited was a Feb. 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed a civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition troops.
At the Pentagon, Kirby said the operation was "a defensive strike" on a waystation used by militants to move weapons and materials for attacks in Iraq.
Kirby said the facilities hit in the attack were near Boukamal, on the Syrian side of the Iraqi border, along the Euphrates River.
"This location is known to facilitate Iranian-aligned militia group activity," he said. He described the site as a "compound" that previously had been used by the Islamic State group when it held sway in the area.
He said the strikes resulted in "casualties" but declined to provide details on how many people were killed or injured and what was inside the buildings pending the completion of a broader assessment of the damage inflicted.
An Iraqi militia official said Friday that the strikes killed one fighter and wounded several.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that monitors the war in Syria, said the strikes targeted a shipment of weapons that were being taken by trucks entering Syrian territories from Iraq. The group said 22 fighters from the Popular Mobilization Forces, an Iraqi umbrella group of mostly Shiite paramilitaries that includes Kataeb Hezbollah, were killed. The report could not be independently verified.
In a statement, the group confirmed one of its fighters was killed and said it reserved the right to retaliate, without elaborating. Kataeb Hezbollah, like other Iranian-backed factions, maintains fighters in Syria to both fight against the Islamic State group and assist Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces in that country's civil war.
The Iraqi militia official said the strikes against the Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades, hit an area along the border between the Syrian site of Boukamal facing Qaim on the Iraqi side. The official was not authorized to speak publicly of the attack and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Syria condemned the U.S. strike, calling it "a cowardly and systematic American aggression," warning that the attack will lead to consequences.
A MESSAGE TO IRAN
However, Biden's decision to attack in Syria did not appear to signal an intention to widen U.S. military involvement in the region but rather to demonstrate a will to defend U.S. troops in Iraq and send a message to Iran.
The U.S. has previously targeted facilities in Syria belonging to Kataeb Hezbollah, which it has blamed for numerous attacks targeting U.S. personnel and interests in Iraq. The Iraqi Kataeb is separate from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement.
Since Biden entered the White House, Iranian-backed militants across the Middle East have struck an airport in Saudi Arabia with an exploding drone, and are accused of assassinating a critic in Lebanon.
The tit-for-tat attacks come as the Biden administration begins the daunting task of trying to restore the nuclear agreement with Iran that President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from in 2018. Looming behind the question of the parameters of a new deal is the issue of Iran's destabilizing activities across the Middle East, which are particularly concerning to U.S. allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.
"We see these attacks as attacks on the Iraqi government," Iraq's foreign minister, Fuad Hussein, said in a recent interview, referring to attacks on the U.S. Embassy and other American targets. Hussein is one of several Iraqi officials who have traveled to Iran in recent months to try to persuade it to use its influence to rein in militia forces.
"I and others went to Tehran and had a frank and open discussion with the Iranians," he said. "For a period of time, it stopped these attacks."
"At the end, the field of conflict is in Iraq," Hussein said.
Attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq by suspected Iran-backed militias intensified after the United States killed an Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, and a senior Iraqi security official, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in a drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.
"In the last year, Iraq has become a playground and battleground for this type of activity driven by the U.S.-Iran escalation," said Renad Mansour, the Iraq Initiative director at Chatham House, a London-based policy group. "These groups began to spring up after the killing."
But the Iraqi government has struggled to rein in Iran-backed militias that have grown in influence since mobilizing to fight the Islamic State when it took over large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The group lost its last piece of territory two years ago, and many of the Iran-backed paramilitary groups have been absorbed into Iraq's official security forces.
Iran has spent decades building a network of partnerships with militia groups across the region that has allowed it to project power far outside its area of influence. These include the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, a number of groups in Iraq and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
All of these groups have received at least some financing, support and weaponry from Iran over the years, and all share its ideology of "resistance," or the struggle against Israel and U.S. interests in the region.
Iraq has warned that conflict between the United States and Iran playing out on its soil threatens to destabilize the country.
RUSSIA NOTIFIED
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he was confident Thursday's airstrikes had hit back at "the same Shia militants" that carried out the Feb. 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq.
Kirby credited Iraqis with providing valuable intelligence that allowed the U.S. to identify the groups responsible for attacks earlier this year. The U.S., he said, then determined the appropriate target for the retaliatory strike. He said the U.S. also notified Russia shortly before the strike as part of the deconfliction process of activities in Syria that calls for communication between the two militaries to avoid clashes between their aircraft.
"The operation sends an unambiguous message: President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel," Kirby said.
However, Russia was given only a few minutes warning of the Biden administration's action, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He said the warning came too late to reduce the risk of a potential clash between the two country's forces.
"Our military was warned four or five minutes in advance. Of course, this has no value even from the angle of deconfliction, as they say in relations between Russian and U.S. servicemen," Lavrov told a Moscow news conference. He said the U.S. notice was given when the strike was "already being delivered."
Russia emerged as a key player in Syria when President Vladimir Putin deployed forces in 2015 to back Assad, a longtime ally of Moscow. Russia claims to be the only foreign player legally in Syria, as Assad sought Russian help in confronting rebels in the country's civil war.
While the United States has not targeted the area hit Thursday since 2019, Israel regularly strikes sites near the Syrian-Iraqi border, bombing Iranian and Iranian-backed groups and their facilities, as well as positions of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, designated a terrorist group by the United States.
Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Russian state Duma's foreign affairs committee, said the attack proved that Washington was not interested in peace in Syria.
"Obviously, the priorities of the new U.S. administration do not include peace on Syrian land and the war on terror," Slutsky said, according to the Interfax news agency. "The airstrike killed members of pro-Iranian units fighting for Syrian government forces, and the attack was launched without any charge or trial," he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Lolita C. Baldor, Robert Burns and Qassim Abdul-zahra of The Associated Press; by Robyn Dixon, Sarah Dadouch and Mustafa Salim of The Washington Post; and by Ben Hubbard and Jane Arraf of The New York Times.
