Ten rockets fell on Wednesday (March 11th) at an Iraqi military base sheltering American soldiers near Baghdad, said the Iraqi army, leaving three dead and several injured, according to an official of the Washington-led international anti-jihadist coalition in Iraq. .
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The attack killed three people, including two American and British soldiers, and wounded several foreign members of the coalition to varying degrees, some of them seriously, the official said without giving their nationality. The Iraqi army had previously announced that the 22nd attack on American interests in Iraq since the end of October had resulted in no casualties or damage.
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Rocket attacks on US soldiers, diplomats, or installations in Iraq have killed an American contractor and an Iraqi soldier in the past. None of these attacks have been claimed, but Washington accuses the pro-Iranian armed factions of being responsible for them. The number of rockets launched on Wednesday is particularly high.
A country plunged into political slump
Two days after the death of an American in the firing of 30 rockets at an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk at the end of 2019, the American army had struck five bases, in Iraq and Syria, of a pro-Iran armed faction, the Hezbollah brigades. Tensions then increased between Washington and Tehran, leading to the assassination in Baghdad of the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant in an American strike, as well as to Iranian bombings of Iraqi bases sheltering American soldiers in reprisals.
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The international coalition formed against the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014 and led by the United States has dozens of member states and thousands of soldiers in Iraq. Because if the IS has lost its territory, it retains clandestine cells still capable of carrying out attacks. The Iraqi parliament recently voted to expel 5,200 American soldiers from the country, a decision that has yet to be implemented by the government. But Iraq has been plunged into political slump for months.
The government which has resigned since December has still not been replaced due to the lack of an agreement in the most fragmented parliament in the recent history of Iraq.
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