The U.S. military killed Abu Baqir al-Saad senior leader of the Kataib al-Hezbollah militia and its drone commander inside Syria

Retaliation for Jordan drone attack continues

The U.S. military killed a top official from an Iran-backed militia Wednesday night in Baghdad, 10 days after a deadly drone attack near the Jordanian border killed three American soldiers and wounded more than 40 others. The U.S. initially responded this past Friday when more than 85 targets were hit in a wave of U.S. airstrikes inside Iraq and Syria. But White House and military officials promised more attacks would unfold over the following days; Wednesday’s strike in the Iraqi capital appears to be linked to that response.


The man targeted is Abu Baqir al-Saadi, and he was known as a senior leader of the Kataib al-Hezbollah militia and its drone commander inside Syria, according to the Guardian and the Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister. U.S. military officials at Central Command said the Kata’ib Hezbollah commander they killed (they did not specify his name) was “responsible for directly planning and participating in attacks on U.S. forces in the region.”


Worth noting: Saadi also held a position within the Iraqi government’s Popular Mobilization Forces, which the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS leveraged to push ISIS out of Mosul, Iraq, in the summer of 2017. While receiving a salary through the Iraqi government, “he murdered and abducted Iraqi citizens, fired drones at Arab nations [including the UAE several times], and attacked coalition forces—all in violation of Iraqi law and the constitution,” Michael Knights of the Washington Institute noted on social media.

 The Iraqi military expressed its purported outrage at the strike, claiming it “undermine[s] the understandings and the start of bilateral dialogue” on the future of U.S. troops based in Iraq. “This path pushes the Iraqi government, more than ever before, to end the mission of this coalition, which has become a factor of instability for Iraq, and threatens to drag Iraq into the circle of conflict,” wrote Maj. Gen. Yehia Rasool.

According to post-strike imagery, the U.S. appears to have used its AGM-114R9X Hellfire missile, which is also known as the “flying ginsu” knife—so named for blades it deploys upon impact to reduce the collateral damage of a traditional explosive projectile. The U.S. is believed to have used the same kind of missile to kill Iranian paramilitary chief Qasem Soleimani in early 2020 as well as former al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in the summer of 2022.

In the hours after Saadi was killed, Iran-linked proxy groups in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Palestine, and Lebanon have all vowed to retaliate against U.S. forces in response to the Wednesday night strike in eastern Baghdad. “They don't call it a network for nothing,” Lister quipped on social media.