White House: Iran-Backed Groups Keep Attacking Troops, But No ‘Major’ Moves to Widen Conflict

On Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby stated that Iran-backed militia groups “continue to fire rockets at our bases” but “we haven’t seen another nation-state or actor move in demonstrable, major muscle movement ways to try to deepen and widen this conflict as yet.”

Kirby said, “Iran is a destabilizing actor in the region. They support groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. They’re supporting these militia groups that continue to fire rockets at our bases in Iraq and Syria.”

Co-host Phil Mattingly then asked, “You mentioned the rocket attacks on U.S. personnel, there have also been one-way drone attacks as well. I believe there [are] as many 38 or 39 U.S. personnel who have been injured in those attacks — or a number of attacks that have occurred. Does the U.S. believe that, at this point, the threshold for an expanded conflict has not been crossed yet?”

Kirby responded, “We are still working very hard to keep this conflict from widening, deepening, escalating. The attacks on our troops, obviously, are deeply concerning. You’ve seen us retaliate in the last week or so. We’ll evaluate what we’re going to do in terms of next steps. We’re obviously going to do whatever we have to do to protect our troops in Iraq and Syria, make sure that we make a strong statement about force protection and how much that means to us. But we haven’t seen another nation-state or actor move in demonstrable, major muscle movement ways to try to deepen and widen this conflict as yet. That’s one of the reasons why the president has added so much more force posture to the region, now including an Ohio-class submarine, which is now in the Central Command area of responsibility. We’re going to keep watching this. If we have to make additional force posture changes, well, we’ll do that, too.”

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