The Americans begged us to only stop firing Ashtar rockets at their bases.” Jaafar al-Husseini, the military spokesman for the Iraqi Shia militia Kata’ib Hizballah, was talking about attacking U.S. forces in Iraq before they left the country in 2011. While uttering these remarks in a February 2018 TV interview, he looked directly to the camera, as if to seem more assertive. Since then he has threatened U.S. forces on numerous occasions. The number of attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq has since increased, though with much less lethal weapons than the Ashtar rockets. The attacks, however, have been assessed by the United States to be dangerous enough that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened to shutter the American Embassy in Baghdad if the Iraqi government fails to stop them.
