WarSclerotic

Iranian-backed terrorists in Yemen shot down a U.S. military drone over international waters on Wednesday, which comes after U.S. forces throughout the region have been repeatedly attacked by Iran’s terrorist proxies.

A U.S. defense official confirmed the incident to CNN and said that U.S. Central Command was investigating.

The Houthis, an Iranian-backed terrorist group in Yemen that the Biden administration delisted as a terror group back in 2021, claimed credit for downing the $56.5 million MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Red Sea.

Iran shot down a U.S. drone back in June of 2019 with a surface-to-air missile and then-President Donald Trump initially approved a retaliatory strike against Iran before backing off his decision.

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The U.S. launched airstrikes later in the day but they were against Iranian-backed terrorists in Syria, not the Houthis in Yemen.

The strikes came after Iran and its terrorist proxy groups have launched 22 attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and another 18 attacks against U.S. forces in Syria, leading to 46 U.S. soldiers being injured, including 25 who have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the “self-defense” strikes were on “a facility in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups.”

“This strike was conducted by two U.S. F-15s against a weapons storage facility,” he said. “This precision self-defense strike is a response to a series of attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by IRGC-Quds Force affiliates.”

This was the second such strike U.S. forces have launched against Iranian forces in Syria over the last couple of weeks. The administration has not released any footage of the strikes.

Austin added that the U.S. will continue to conduct counter-ISIS missions in Iraq and Syria.

This report has been updated to include additional information. 

Top U.S. Senators said over the weekend that they are introducing a bipartisan resolution calling for military strikes against Iran if its terror proxies in the Middle East kill any U.S. soldiers or if Hezbollah opens up a second front against Israel.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) made the remarks during a CNN interview Sunday morning with Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

The segment comes after Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis in an unprecedented terrorist attack last month and Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, has conducted small scale attacks against Israel as it weighs whether to launch a full-scale attack.

“It basically says, if the war expands, if Hezbollah opens up a second front in the north against Israel in a substantial way to overwhelm Iron Dome, then we should hit the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Graham said. “There is no Hamas without the Ayatollahs’ support. There is no Hezbollah without the Ayatollahs’ support. The great Satan in the region is not Israel or the United States. It’s Iran.”

Graham said that he and Blumenthal just came back from the region and that Israel had begged them to deter Iran from entering the war as they deal with wiping out the Hamas terrorist organization inside Gaza.

“If any of our troops are killed in Syria and Iraq by Iranian-backed militias, I think that’s an expansion of the war,” Graham said. “So, the resolution puts Iran on notice that all this military force in the region will be coming after you if you expand this war by activating Hezbollah or killing an American through your proxies in Syria and Iraq. And they need to hear that. They need to believe that.”

Graham’s remarks come after there have been at least 31 attacks from Iranian-backed terrorists on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria over the last two weeks, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.