Iranian ballistics missile attacks on two Iraqi military bases housing American troops early Wednesday was a “slap on the face” to the U.S., Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech hours after the strikes.
But “such military actions are not enough,” Khamenei said on Twitter, suggesting further acts of revenge for the U.S. killing of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
Khamenei went on to describe the U.S. presence as a source of corruption in the Middle East and demanded that U.S. troops leave the region. He named Iran’s enemies as the U.S., Israel and the “arrogant system” in an apparent reference to the West. Washington and Tehran have not had formal diplomatic relations since 1980.
Battle damage assessments of the overnight attack — which saw more than a dozen ballistic missiles hit Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq’s western Anbar province and a base in Erbil in the country’s north — are ongoing. Iraq and the U.K. have announced no casualties from their countries, while the U.S. has not yet made a formal announcement. Al-Asad airbase also houses British forces, and was the second-largest U.S. military airbase used in the country during the Iraq War.
The missile barrage followed three days of mourning over the U.S. assassination of Soleimani, longtime leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ elite extraterritorial Quds Force and the architect behind Iran’s expansion of influence and proxy networks around the Middle East. The general, who was highly revered as a hero in Iran and a terrorist by the United States, was killed along with colleagues and the leader of Iraqi Shiite militia Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis by drone strike at Baghdad airport early Friday.