Palestinian Terror Groups: ‘Natural and Legitimate’ to Kill U.S. Troops

The Sunni jihadist terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad celebrated the deaths of American troops on the Jordan-Syria border on Sunday, warning Washington that any support for Israel would force it to confront “the entire Ummah.”

Ummah is an Arabic term meaning the entire Muslim community on earth.

Leftist American President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that a terrorist drone strike killed three American servicemembers between Saturday night and Sunday morning, acknowledging that “many” were also injured. Reports indicated at least 34 troops were wounded in the attack.

“Last night, three U.S. service members were killed—and many wounded—during an unmanned aerial drone attack on our forces stationed in northeast Jordan near the Syria border,” Biden said. “While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”

The government of Jordan denied that the attack occurred on its territory, stating that the terrorists appeared to be targeting the U.S. military presence at the Al-Tanf base in Syria. Biden did not name the militant groups involved, but a murky coalition known as the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” took responsibility for the attack and indeed asserted that al-Tanf was one of five targets in a wide-ranging drone attack meant to kill Americans, targeting outposts in both Iraq and Syria.

Iran-backed terrorists in Iraq began using the term “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” for their alliance following the unprecedented mass murder of an estimated 1,200 Israelis and the abduction of another 250 on October 7 by Hamas. On that day, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from their stronghold in Gaza and engaged in a wide variety of crimes against humanity, including gang rape, torture, infanticide, and desecration of corpses. Israel has been engaged in a self-defense operation in Gaza since, which Iran-backed regional jihadists have supported through attacks on Americans, Israelis, and perceived Western assets in the region.

Which member of the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” conducted the strike remains unclear at press time. On Monday morning, John Kirby, national security council coordinator for Strategic Communications, told CNN that intelligence implicates Kata’ib Hezbollah, or the Hezbollah Brigades, one of Iraq’s most powerful Iran-backed militias.

While many of the members of the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” are believed to be Shiite terrorist groups, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are both Sunni Muslim, all are believed to receive backing from the Shiite theocracy in Tehran and support each other’s genocidal ambitions against Israel. To that end, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad celebrated the killing of Americans this weekend.

“The killing of three American soldiers is a message to the American administration that unless the killing of innocent people in Gaza stops, it must confront the entire Ummah,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas spokesperson, said on Sunday, according to the Iranian state outlet PressTV. “The continuation of the American-Zionist aggression against Gaza is capable of setting the entire region ablaze.”

Islamic Jihad issued its own statement calling the killing of Americans “a natural and legitimate response to the US presence as an occupying force in our region.”

The U.S. State Department estimated in 2020 that Iran provides Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad with $100 million in funding a year.

The killing of Americans on the Jordan/Syria border was the first such incident since October 7. Iran’s proxies in the region – including the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq,” the Sunni groups in Gaza, and the Houthi terrorists of Yemen – have waged an ongoing campaign against American, Israeli, and Western interests in the region since October 7. The Pentagon has documented more than 150 attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria alone between October 7 and this week, many of them killing innocents. In one particularly belligerent incident in mid-January, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – both a U.S.-designated terrorist group and a formal wing of the Iranian military – bombed Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and killed a child in her home ten days before her first birthday.

The terrorists have vowed incessant attacks against America in support of Hamas, even if the government of Iraq negotiates the removal of U.S. troops from its land.

“Iraq’s negotiations with the Americans will never cause a decline in efforts by the Islamic resistance against the outsiders and they will even cause us to pile more pressure on the occupiers,” an anonymous “commander” of Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, one of the members of the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq,” declared on Sunday.

“Nujaba and other groups in Iraq, which operate under the umbrella organization of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), have repeatedly said attacks on US positions in Iraq and Syria will continue until Israel ends its genocidal war on Gaza,” the Iranian state outlet PressTV reported.

While most experts, and the U.S. government, agree that Iran-backed groups are responsible for the attacks, the Iranian Foreign Ministry denied any involvement in targeting U.S. forces in Syria.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran does not welcome the expansion of clashes in the region, and neither does intervene in the decisions made by the resistance groups on how to support the Palestinian nation or fend off themselves and the people of their countries against any act of aggression and occupation,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kana’ani said.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.