Middle East situation "incredibly volatile" after deadly attack, Blinken warns

Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has warned that the Middle East faces its most “dangerous” conditions since at least 1973, as Washington considers its response to an attack that killed three service members at the weekend.

Blinken’s comments on January 29 underscored the concern in the Biden administration about the potential for an expansion of the conflict, even as it vows to retaliate against the Iran-backed militias it has blamed for the deadly strike,  The Financial Times reports.

The US military had failed to stop the enemy drone on January 28 after mistaking it for an American drone that approached a base near Jordan’s border with Syria at the same time, a US official said on Monday.

The attack was the first to kill US troops since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7 and triggered a wave of assaults by Iranian-aligned groups against American forces in the region. This has raised the pressure on President Joe Biden to find a way to halt the attacks on US personnel and interests.

“This is an incredibly volatile time in the Middle East,” Blinken told reporters during a press conference with Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg. “I would argue that we’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that,” he added, a reference to the year of the Yom Kippur war between Israel and neighbouring Arab states.

Earlier in the day, John Kirby, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, said that Biden was “weighing” the US reaction to the attack after meeting his national security team both on January 28-29.

Blinken said: “We will respond. And that response could be multi-levelled, come in stages, and be sustained over time.” But the secretary of state also insisted that the US wanted to “prevent broader escalation”.

US defence officials said Sunday’s attack also injured at least 40 service members, as it struck the Tower 22 outpost near Jordan’s border with Syria, which houses 350 US military personnel as part of the coalition against Isis. The drone struck early in the morning in an area where service members live and were sleeping, part of the reason the casualty rate was so high, officials said.

The US has about 2,500 troops in Iraq and about 900 in Syria, where they are deployed to help prevent a resurgence of the jihadist group.

The US military was still trying to better understand the incident and how the one-way attack drone was able to cause so many casualties, officials said.

“We are trying to figure out how a one-way attack drone was able to evade our defences,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said.

US officials said they were still assessing who was responsible for the drone attack but saw links to Iraq-based, Iran-backed militia Kataib Hizbollah.

“It has the footprints of Kataib Hizbollah, but not making a final assessment on that — our teams here are continuing to do the analysis,” Singh said.

Kirby said the US did not seek “war” with Iran, but said the administration was “fully cognisant of the fact that these groups backed by Tehran have just taken the lives of American troops”.

Iran has sought to distance itself from the deadly attack as it and the US appear keen to avoid a further escalation. Iran’s foreign ministry labelled any accusation that it was involved in the US troops’ deaths as a “baseless” conspiracy by those “interested in dragging the US into a new conflict in the region to intensify the crisis”.

But Singh said on Monday that “Iran bears responsibility because it funds these groups in Iraq and Syria that launch attacks on our service members”.

The US has hit targets linked to Iranian-backed militias across the region following 165 attacks by militants on US troops in Iraq, Syria and Jordan since October, as well as more than 30 strikes on international shipping in the Red Sea.

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said Washington would “take all necessary actions to defend the US and our troops”. American forces in Syria and Iraq have come under repeated assault by a newly created group of Iran-backed Iraqi militias known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which said it was retaliating against Washington’s backing for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.