Who failed a rocket attack on the US Embassy in Iraq?
Iraqi security forces have said that two rocket attacks have been carried out on Sunday in the Green Zone area of the capital Baghdad targeting US diplomatic and military sites.
The Iraqi Army has said that a rocket attack took place in a heavily guarded green zone where the US embassy is present. At the same time, the second rocket attack was targeted at the fresh military base near Baghdad, which has been thwarted.
According to the army, the rocket fell near a house located some distance away from the green zone in which a child was injured and the house was damaged.
The military issued a statement saying “At the same time our security forces foiled a second rocket attack and captured the Katyusha rocket and the launcher. The attack was carried out targeting the fresh military base in northern Baghdad.”
Iraq’s fresh military base houses American troops.
Since October, there have been more than three dozen missile attacks on US diplomats and security forces in Iraq. The United States blamed Iran-backed fighters for this.
At the same time, news agency Reuters has reported that no Iran-backed group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
Recently fighters were arrested
Recently, Iraq’s top security forces raided the headquarters of Qaitab Hezbollah, south of Baghdad, and arrested more than a dozen Iran-backed fighters.
Allegedly these boys were planning a new attack on the Green Zone of Baghdad. There are American and other foreign embassies in the green zone. However, some of these were later abandoned.
Iraqi government officials said at the arrest of the fighters that it would give a ‘message’ to thwart future attacks.
US Embassy thwarted attack?
According to a senior security source, the attack was attempted after the US embassy tested a new rocket defense system called C-RAM just hours earlier.
C-RAM was installed at the embassy earlier this year. It scans explosives, rockets and missiles coming through the sky and attacks them with thousands of bullets every minute.
In the test, C-RAM shot down a rocket into the air. However, the embassy has not yet commented that this rocket was killed by their system. The news agency Reuters quoted a police source as saying that the embassy system had already dropped this rocket attack.
