Iranian Proxies Join The Iran War |
Two more members of Iran’s Axis of Resistance have been drawn into the month-long war waged by the United States and Israel in Iran.
On March 28, the Houthis of Yemen launched their first attack against Israel since the end of the two-year war in the Gaza Strip last October. Targeting “sensitive Israeli military sites,” they fired a ballistic missile at Beersheba and a drone at Eilat, both of which were downed.
The Houthis, who have vowed to press ahead with more attacks, may yet try to block the Bab el-Mandab strait, a chokepoint at the mouth of the Red Sea between Yemen and the Arabian peninsula.
In the meantime, a network of pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), are also helping Iran. While the PMF is formally a part of Iraq’s state security apparatus, many of its militias maintain independent command structures and strong ideological and military ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Since the outbreak of the Iran war on February 28, the PMF has struck the US embassy in Baghdad and American bases throughout Iraq, turning it into a conflict zone.
US and Israeli aircraft have bombed PMF sites in retaliatory strikes, according to open sources such as the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, DC.
The participation of the Houthis and the PMF in the war means that all but one of Iran’s allies in the Axis of Resistance have been mobilized in defense of the Iranian regime, and that the Middle East is now embroiled in a regional war.
Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, entered the fray on March 2, triggering its third war with Israel in Lebanon in 20 years. Hamas, which was battered by Israel in the recent war and currently controls 47 percent of the Gaza Strip, is still inactive.
The Houthis, whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel and a Curse on the Jews,” joined........