Fear of war's spread as US, Saudi hit Iran-backed fighters in Iraq
By Parisa Hafezi, Jana Choukeir and Ahmed Tolba
DUBAI/CAIRO, July 29 (Reuters) - The United States and Saudi Arabia jointly struck Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq on Wednesday, the first U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East since President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran last week.
Iran, for its part, said it had fired on U.S. bases in Jordan and at ships in the Strait of Hormuz, prompting Trump to promise retaliatory strikes against Iran, which earlier reported a U.S. projectile hitting its northwestern city of Piranshahr near the Iraqi border.
"We'll be hitting them hard," Trump told Fox News, adding, however, about the possibility of future talks with Iran: "We're going to let them keep talking."
In a diplomatic setback, Tehran earlierrejected an Omani proposal to jointly manage the strait.
With renewed fighting and no quick end in sight to the war that broke out in February, oil prices rose sharply for the first time since last week.
Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces, powerful Iran-backed paramilitary groups incorporated into the Iraqi security forces, said at least 20 members were killed and 32 wounded in U.S.-Saudi strikes targeting several bases across Iraq.
Iraqi men shouted Shi'ite sectarian slogans and "Death to America!" as they carried the bodies of slain fighters in body bags out of a hospital in Mosul in northern Iraq, footage from Iraq's Al-Ahad television showed.
Washington and Riyadh said they had jointly struck Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq in retaliation for drone attacks on Saudi oil targets launched from Iraq.
It was the first major U.S. military action in the Middle East, and, if confirmed, in Iran, since last Friday, when Trump abruptly suspended an intensive bombing campaign after 13 days, having been advised by commanders that the strategy had run its course.
STRIKES COULD WIDEN CONFLICT
It was also the first time during the war that Saudi Arabia had publicly announced participating in strikes alongside the United States. That could widen the conflict by drawing Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia into combat against Shi'ite proxies of Iran on a new front.
Iraq's Shi'ite-led government, one of the few in the world to maintain close military and diplomatic ties with both Tehran and Washington, called an emergency meeting.
The Iraqi presidency denounced the strikes on the paramilitaries as "an unacceptable attack and a flagrant violation of Iraq's sovereignty", while also calling for a halt to attacks by armed groups against Iraq's neighbours.
Iran said the U.S.-Saudi attacks were an attempt by the United States and Israel to spread their war further in the region. One of the Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, said U.S. and Saudi forces would pay a "heavy price".
Washington has long called on the Baghdad government to crack down on Iran-backed paramilitaries, but efforts to do so in the past have provoked domestic unrest.
The deep ties between Iran and Iraq, the two biggest Shi'ite-majority countries, are heightened this week as hundreds of thousands of Iranian religious pilgrims head to shrines in Iraq for an annual day of mourning for martyrs. Some carried portraits of Iran's slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Saudi Arabia has also been drawn into the conflict on another front, with the Iran-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen announcing a blockade of Saudi oil exports in the Red Sea last week and firing on ships and oil facilities.
Hours before launching the joint attacks with Saudi Arabia on Iraq, the U.S. military said its air defences had averted a surpriseIranian attack on U.S. troops in the region.
Jordan's military said it had shot down five Iranian missiles. U.S. bases in Jordan have become primary Iranian targets, where three U.S. service members were killed this month in the worst U.S. losses since March.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards said they had fired several ballistic missiles at U.S. military installations in Jordan, and had struck three tankers that were attempting to transit through the Strait of Hormuz along an unauthorised route.
TEHRAN REJECTS OMANI PROPOSAL
Fighting had first resumed this month after a U.S.-Iran interim deal reached in June collapsed over the fate of the strait, the world's most important energy shipping route, which Iran says it controls and where it aims to collect fees.
Oman proposed a plan for joint regional control of the strait this week, with the backing of Gulf states, that would allow the payment of voluntary service charges. But a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Wednesday that Iran had rejected the Omani proposal as "unreasonable".
The official said a 50-50 joint control arrangement with Oman would not serve Iran’s interests, though Tehran considers Oman a valuable neighbour. Iran wants sole control over the inbound route and partial control over the outbound route.
The United States has been telling ships to use a route near the Omani shore rather than sailing close to Iran. Iran's Revolutionary Guards Navy said in a statement it continued to maintain full control over the strait and would respond to "unlawful U.S. military interference".
The renewed fighting sent oil prices soaring 6.8%, with Brent crude futures nearing $90 a barrel at 1230 GMT. The price, which had briefly spiked above $100 last week for the first time since May, had tumbled into the mid-80s this week after Trump called off the bombing over the weekend.
(Reporting by Timour Azhari, Parisa Hafezi, Doina Chiacu, Ahmed Tolba, Kanishka Singh and Reuters bureaux; Writing by Peter Graff, editing by Andrei Khalip)
