WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is sending thousands of additional troops to the Middle East to bolster security and its ability to respond quickly to expected violence throughout the region after a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad killed Iran’s most powerful general, defense officials said Friday. The new deployment will include roughly 3,000 82nd Airborne Division soldiers who were placed on prepare-to-deploy orders earlier this week amid growing tensions in Iraq between the United States and Iran, two officials said. At least several dozen special operations troops were also deployed to the region, one of the officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deployments had not been announced publicly early Friday afternoon.
The 82nd soldiers — members of the division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team — were expected to deploy to several locations throughout the Middle East, the officials said. An element of that brigade — some 750 soldiers from its 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment — arrived in recent days in Kuwait after they were rapidly deployed there in response to an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday.
Iran promised retaliation Friday after confirming the death of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike as he arrived Thursday night at Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani was the leader of that nation’s elite Quds Force, Iran’s military organization that works hand-in-hand with its proxy forces throughout the region, including in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
The Pentagon had designated Soleimani a terrorist responsible for the deaths of about 500 U.S. troops in Iraq, who were killed by Iran-built explosively formed penetrators — armor-piercing roadside bombs that wreaked havoc on American forces during the height of the war in Iraq.
Soleimani’s “reign of terror is over,” President Donald Trump said Friday afternoon in an address from Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla. resort.
The president warned Iran that the United States has the world’s strongest military and would use it again if threatened. But he said his decision to strike Soleimani was not meant to start a new war in the Middle East.
“We took action last night to stop a war,” Trump said, adding Soleimani should have been killed years earlier. “We did not take action to start a war.”
U.S. Army Paratroopers assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, deploy from Pope Army Airfield, North Carolina, on Jan. 1, 2020. Elements of the Immediate Response Force mobilized for deployment to the U.S. Central Command area of operations in response to increased threat levels against U.S. personnel and facilities.
CAPT. ROBYN J. HAAKE/U.S. ARMY
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said earlier Friday that Soleimani directed the rocket attack by the Iraqi-Shia militia Kataeb Hezbollah on Dec. 27 against a U.S.-Iraqi base in Kirkuk in northern Iraq that killed an American contractor and wounded four U.S. troops and two Iraqis. Soleimani was also to blame for the attack by Iran-controlled militiamen of the Popular Mobilization Forces on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday, Pompeo said in an interview on CNN.
The attempted siege on the embassy came as retaliation for a series of U.S. airstrikes Sunday against Kataeb Hezbollah locations in Iraq and Syria, which killed at least 25 militiamen and injured dozens more.
The strike on Soleimani could elicit a much stronger response from Iran and its proxy forces, which looked to the powerful Iranian as a cult leader-like figure, experts on the region and members of Congress warned.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said he worried the strike on the general increased the likelihood of war with Iran.
“Killing Soleimani in this manner strengthens the hardliners in Iran and increases the likelihood that Iran’s proxies will be triggered into action," Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. "And if his killing results in America abandoning the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, it will be a coup for the Iranians."
Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., cheered Trump's decision to strike Soleimani, calling him the second most powerful man in Iran.
"He was the right fist of the Ayatollah and we took the Ayatollah’s arm off," Graham said in a statement. "This is not an act of revenge for what he’d done in the past. This was a preemptive, defensive strike planned to take out the organizer of attacks yet to come."
Jon B. Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center of Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said Iranian retaliation was unlikely to turn into a full-blown ground war, but attacks on American positions through the region and cyberattacks were likely to come in the coming weeks and months.