SUBSCRIBER+REPORTING – A deadly strike by an unmanned aerial drone that took three American lives at a U.S. base in Jordan is stoking fears of broader war in the Middle East.
As anger soars over American support for Israel’s war in Gaza, Iranian-backed militia groups have launched non-stop attacks against U.S. bases in the region. The fear – before the weekend attack - was that one of those strikes would take American lives, turning what had been a careful pattern of smaller-scale strikes and counterstrikes between the U.S. and Iranian-backed groups into something far more dangerous, perhaps even a full-on war between the U.S. and Iran.
The deadly strike happened not in Iraq or Syria, where nearly all of the prior 150 attacks by Iranian proxy groups have been focused – and where most of the more than 3,000 American servicemembers in the region are deployed, but at Tower 22, a small American base in the desert in northeast Jordan, along the Syrian border. The three U.S. troops who were killed are the first American fatalities in the months-long series of strikes.
President Biden announced the deaths on Sunday, saying the attack had been carried out by “radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq,” and in a statement, a coalition of Iranian-backed militias who call themselves the Axis of Resistance claimed responsibility, saying the attack was a “continuation of our approach to resisting the American occupation forces in Iraq and the region.”
The government of Iran denies any role in the incident. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanani said Iran was "not involved in the decision making of resistance groups" in how they chose to "defend Palestinians or their own countries".
That denial won’t do much to influence the White House decision when it comes to a response. The challenge for the Biden Administration is a clash of two policy aims: Craft a response that sends a clear message and deters future attacks while avoiding wider war in the region.
“The president is in an election year,” Ralph Goff, former Senior CIA Executive who held a senior position in the Middle East before his retirement last fall, told The Cipher Brief. “He's got to make some tough calls. He has people in Congress on both sides of the aisle who get upset when he takes military action without consulting Congress.”
Fears of a “Dead Archduke Moment”
In the days prior to the Tower 22 attack, several analysts and former U.S. officials told The Cipher Brief that the U.S. military had been fortunate no lives had been lost earlier. Some argued that given the steady barrage of strikes by Iran’s proxies, the U.S. should move its soldiers out of the region.
“Targeting the proxies isn’t working,” former Senior CIA Officer Glenn Corn told The Cipher Brief. “The Iranians use those proxies for a reason. They provide a layer of defense for Iran itself, and they're using them and when we go after them, it's not sending the message to Iran that we need to send.”
Before the weekend attack, former CIA Chief of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, gave a name to the nightmare scenario that might follow a fatal strike on Americans in the region: he warned of a “dead Archduke moment” that would spark a major American retaliation, and cautioned of a spiral of events that could lead to large-scale conflict. The “Archduke” reference was to Austria’s Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 led to the outbreak of the first World War.
The U.S. deployments in Iraq and Syria, Hudson said, “are exposing us to those strategic ‘dead Archduke’ moments by having folks in harm’s way who can’t be protected and are surrounded by Iranian elements in both countries…This is a good opportunity to move our forces out of Iraq and Syria.”
Tower 22
Tower 22 sits in northeastern Jordan, hugging the Syrian border and close to the U.S. base in southeastern Syria known as Al Tanf Garrison, where several hundred U.S. forces have worked with local partners to combat Islamic State militants.
The location serves as a kind of logistics base for the Syria deployment. American Special Operations forces, military trainers and other personnel are based there.
It was unclear in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s strike why air defenses failed to intercept the drone. U.S. defenses had been credited with success in ensuring that none of those prior strikes in the region had taken American lives.
The Al Tanf base, just across the border in Syria, was set up by the U.S. military in 2016 as part of a deployment to help with the campaign against the Islamic State. Over the past several months, the Americans at al-Tanf have come under fire, but Sunday’s strike was the first to hit Tower 22.
What Next?
Was the Tower 22 strike “a dead Archduke moment”? Does a wider war loom?
The beginnings of an answer will come from the White House, as the President and his top national security aides consider their response, navigating the twin challenges of sending a powerful message (several leading Republicans are advocating a strike on Iranian territory) and avoiding a full-on war with Iran.
“Deterrence begins at home.” Said Goff. “If you don't have political will and unity, if you don't have a clear political voice on where you stand, how can you have credible deterrence? This is where Congress, on both sides of the aisle, rather than just pushing one agenda or the other and attacking the administration, they need to work with the administration. They need to stand behind them.”
As Iran denies that it had a direct hand in the Tower 22 attack, Tehran has backed and supplied these various groups without giving the orders or pulling the strings on their strategy and specific attacks. Indeed, the leadership in Tehran may have preferred the low-boil irritant of the earlier pattern of strikes.
As Cipher Brief expert and former head of U.S. Central Command General Frank McKenzie (Ret.) put it during a Subscriber+ briefing last week, Iran is the “moral author” of these attacks.
The adjective “Iran-backed” certainly applies to the Axis of Resistance, which claimed to have carried out Sunday’s strike, and in different degrees it applies to the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, smaller groups in the region and of course to Hamas, which started the current war with its raid and massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel nearly four months ago.
Biden vowed Sunday to “carry on their commitment to fight terrorism,” and added that “we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.”
All the attention now will be on what that means–and whether, for all the diplomatic efforts aimed at avoiding a wider war, the U.S. and Iran may be headed toward exactly that.
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