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(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. will consider a full range of possible responses to a rocket attack against a base in Iraq this week that killed coalition personnel, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said.

All options are on the table as we work with our partners to bring the perpetrators to justice and maintain deterrence, Esper told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on Thursday. As weve demonstrated in recent months, we will take any actions necessary to protect our forces in Iraq and the region.

Two Americans and a British service member were killed in the Wednesday attack against a base in Iraq only months after a similar assault almost led to a direct military confrontation with Iran. About a dozen were wounded. Katyusha rockets struck Camp Taji, an Iraqi base that hosts coalition personnel for training and advising missions, the coalition said in an emailed statement. Iraqi Security Forces found a rocket-rigged truck a few miles from Camp Taji after the strike, according to the statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and U.K. Foreign Minister Dominic Raab discussed the attack in a call in which they reiterated U.S.-U.K. solidarity on this issue and condemned all attacks against coalition personnel supporting the Iraqi governments efforts to defeat ISIS, according to a U.S. statement. Those responsible for the attacks must be held accountable.

An Iranian-backed Shiite militia group was probably behind the deadly attack as the Islamic Republic continues to use asymmetrical warfare to target American interests across the Middle East, the head of U.S. Central Command said Thursday.

The Iranian proxy group Kataib Hezbollah is the only group known to have previously conducted an indirect fire attack of this scale against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, General Kenneth McKenzie said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. This indicates Irans desire to continue malign activities despite periods of decreased tension with the U.S., he said.

A rocket assault in late December that killed an American contractor and wounded U.S. service personnel resulted in the U.S. striking five bases in Iraq and Syria used by an Iranian-backed militia. Then in early January the U.S. killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who the Trump administration accused of planning more attacks against American targets. Iran responded by firing more than a dozen missiles at U.S.-Iraqi bases.

The military escalation at the start of the year fueled concerns that the U.S. and Iran could be drawn into an armed confrontation that could easily pull in other countries and destabilize the strategic oil-producing region of the Persian Gulf. Tensions between the two countries had been building since President Donald Trump pulled out of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal that had promised rapprochement between Iran and the West.

Close Call

Its a close call, but we doubt that Trump will escalate and attack targets inside of Iran in retaliation for the killing of the Americans in the latest episode, Eurasia Group Chairman Cliff Kupchan and colleagues wrote in a note on Wednesday. Trump faces a Dow in bear territory, faltering global markets, an oil price war and a public health crisis at home. An attack on Iran may push markets off the cliff and risk conflict in a region in the world he wants to depart. But the pressure for a meaningful retaliation will be intense.

Iraqs presidential office issued a statement on Wednesday condemning the attack and called on all sides to show restraint.

The attack Wednesday came as the U.S. House voted to restrict Trumps ability to take military action against Iran unless Congress gives its authorization. The Senate passed the resolution in February, but the president has said hell veto it. Votes in both chambers were far short of the two-thirds majority needed for an override.

Later on Wednesday, explosions were heard in the Iraqi border town of Qaim near Syria after unidentified war jets carried out air strikes targeting some locations, Iraqs al-Sumeria news reported. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war in Syria, said on its website that 18 Iraqi militiamen were killed after the unidentified fighter jets hit a base along the Iraq-Syria border used by Iranian-backed militias.

--With assistance from Daniel Flatley and Zaid Sabah.

To contact the reporters on this story: Glen Carey in Washington at gcarey8@bloomberg.net;Travis Tritten in Arlington at ttritten@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert

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U.S. Weighing All Options to Respond to Iraq Strike, Esper Says - Yahoo Finance

We heard the explosion, likely a car bomb. There were many that day. Thirty minutes later, three Humvees came barreling around the corner of nearby buildings with wounded civilians on their hoods and packed inside. They pulled up to our trauma-stabilization point, a makeshift medical unit in an abandoned home on the outer edge of Mosul, less than three miles from the front line. It was November 2016, and the operation to clear the city of ISIS fighters was fully underway. As we lifted the casualties onto stretchers, Pete, the lead medic of the team, shouted out their triage status: Two red, three yellow, three green! meaning two critically wounded, three moderately injured and three walking wounded. One was a very small girl with a head wound that wouldnt stop bleeding.

Our medical team treated each patient with the standard Tactical Combat Casualty Care method used in combat environments: stop the worst of the bleeding, make sure the patients airway is clear and blood is circulating and prevent hypothermia. Then we loaded the most grievously wounded into the first ambulance bound for a hospital in Erbil, at least three hours away by car, and it sped off in a cloud of dust.

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My heart sank when the ambulance returned minutes later. The back doors flung open and the Iraqi medics brought the stretcher down carrying the girls tiny, lifeless body wrapped in a blanket. Our translator broke down. He had a child the same age. Pete and I hugged. Then we turned off the tears and got back to work.

When I first arrived in Iraq a week earlier, I had no intention of going to Mosul. In addition to being a nurse, Im a photojournalist. My original plan was to photograph women living in displaced-persons camps. But then I met Pete, an E.M.T. and a former United States Marine. For the past several months, he had been in Iraq running a mobile medical team founded by Slovak medics and made up of foreign volunteers. Most of the medical facilities operated by humanitarian aid organizations were located far from the fighting, too far to treat severely wounded trauma patients in time. Because civilian trauma care was not close by, and the Iraqi security forces mandate was to only treat military victims, Petes team made a deal: Bring us civilians, and we will boost your capacity to treat your own men. They agreed.

The members of the team were almost all former military American, Slovak and Norwegian gruff and full of bravado. I liked them. Pete initially responded to my first Facebook message with Hey Alex, followed by a week of radio silence. When we finally met, he and his colleague Derek asked me briefly about my medical background, and that was that. I figured I would stick around for a week or two and then head back to the States. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

For the next eight months, we trailed Iraqi forces as they pushed deeper into the city. We set up makeshift aid stations in homes, schools and sometimes just on the side of the road. The fighting was relentless. Every time a neighborhood was liberated, we would be inundated with wounded soldiers and civilians; our busiest day brought us more than a hundred casualties. Between working in hospitals back home in Minnesota and the years I spent photographing the conflict in Yemen, I had been exposed to plenty of trauma, but nothing prepared me for a still-conscious young man whose brain matter was scattered across the stretcher or a teenage girl with four broken limbs and crushed pelvis delivered on a door frame, covered in glass. Almost worse than the physical wounds were the screams of anguish for lost parents and children.

Amid all of this horror, Pete and I grew close. Intense experiences lead to intense emotions. In him I saw a great leader with a big heart, one who was even more affected than I by the gore we witnessed every day. We became more than each others colleague and confidant. We fell in love quickly and deeply. Our sense of shared mission evolved, too. To treat more patients and run a more organized operation, we founded a new nonprofit, Global Response Management.

In June 2017, coalition forces began an assault to retake Mosuls historic Old City. By that point, our team had treated thousands of people. Each death left me deflated, but I was able to compartmentalize my grief and move on. The adrenaline kept me focused. Then, on June 19, the war suddenly became more personal. That afternoon, we received four casualties, all journalists. Samuel Forey, a French reporter I had got to know, appeared on our doorstep first with shrapnel lodged in his face. He and the other journalists were struck by a roadside bomb while reporting from the Old City, on foot. He told us that the others were still pinned down by the fighting. Theyre trapped, he said. Its bad.

Samuels colleagues eventually arrived. And just as he warned, it was bad. There was Bakhtiyar Haddad, an Iraqi-Kurdish reporter and translator; Stephan Villeneuve, a French video journalist; and Vronique Robert, a Swiss journalist. All three were severely wounded. There was shrapnel in Bakhtiyars chest cavity that had entered under his armpit. Vroniques lower limbs were shattered and she was bleeding from dozens of holes dotting her lower abdomen. Stephan, who managed to climb out of the Humvee ambulance on his own, had no face left at all.

I stabilized Vronique and then transported her to a group of coalition medics. My blood type, she said to me in the ambulance. Im B positive. She departed Mosul in a helicopter. Later that month, I heard that she died at a hospital in France.

Mosul was declared liberated on July 10, 2017. In the months to come, Iraqi families would return to broken homes and broken lives, with little to no resources to deal with the trauma they experienced. Pete and I decided to take a trip to Sri Lanka to decompress. We returned to Iraq two weeks later for the battles of Tal Afar, Hawija and Qaim, and then left again for a vacation in Scotland. It was during that trip that I first started to realize that something was off. One day, Pete and I were walking around Edinburgh, and I was trying to tell him a story, but I couldnt find the words. It was like my brain was tongue tied. I would draw a blank after every other word, unable to remember the names of places or people or everyday objects.

I remained in Iraq for several more months to report on the aftermath of the conflict. Our medical team disbanded when we couldnt obtain funds to initiate a response in Syria, and many of my friends and colleagues left the country. By that point, it was clear that the war had taken a toll on my mental health. I grew increasingly antisocial and lost my creative drive. I felt unmotivated to accomplish anything except the simplest goals, like increasing the number of pull-ups I could do. But the therapists I consulted online all seemed to think I was coping just fine. You dont meet PTSD criteria, I heard again and again.

Whatever was wrong with me, I knew I needed to make some dramatic changes. So I left Iraq. But I didnt return home to Minnesota. Instead, Pete and I moved to rural Idaho. Having burned out on nursing and journalism, I got a job as a wild-land firefighter and spent the next five months swinging a Pulaski ax in the Sawtooth Mountains.

The work was cathartic, and it also gave me ample space and time to think. I thought a lot about the Iraqis who had died in our care, the ones we couldnt save. There was no logic to the guilt we were good at our jobs but it plagued me nonetheless. The death I felt most acutely was Vroniques. Maybe it was because I could see myself in her place: as a woman, as a journalist, as someone who had inserted herself into a war that wasnt her own, who wanted to make a difference. The memory of her fading from consciousness in the back of the ambulance played on repeat in my mind. I drank often and usually alone. It was the only way I could cry.

Pete was experiencing it, too: the apathy, the anger, the high-functioning anxiety. We were comrades, in a sense. While our shared experiences at war added a degree of stress to our relationship small disagreements often escalated into drunken screaming matches we also understood each other better than anyone else. The war might have alienated us from the rest of the world, but it sealed us together.

Eventually, I made my way to a psychiatrist. Though therapy hadnt done much for me in the past, our first session was a watershed moment for me. Nearly a year after leaving Mosul, I finally let my guard down and acknowledged the anger and grief that I had been trying so hard to compartmentalize. Over time, this helped me see that I didnt need to carry the weight of things I could not change. With that revelation, I was able to start letting go of the past. As autumn came and the ground started to frost, I felt the opposite happening internally. The parts of me that had long been frozen my drive, my imagination, my capacity to love began to thaw. I have since returned to nursing and journalism, careers that require a great deal of compassion. That includes, Ive learned, for myself.

Alex Kay Potter is a photojournalist, registered nurse and co-founder of Global Response Management. Her photo book about her experiences in Mosul, The Jaw Still Speaking, will be released in March.

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I Went to Iraq to Take Photographs. I Stayed On as a Medic. - The New York Times

FILE PHOTO: A man and his wife wear protective face mask, following the outbreak of coronavirus, at a supermarket in Baghdad, Iraq February 29, 2020.REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq has banned entry to travelers coming from France and Spain, the Foreign Ministry said on Friday, bringing the total number of countries on its entry ban list to 11 as it tries to stem the spread of coronavirus.

The ban does not extend to Iraqi citizens and foreign diplomats, a ministry spokesman said in a statement. Iraq has so far recorded 38 cases of coronavirus and two deaths.

The health minister, who heads Iraqs coronavirus response task force, called on all Iraqis in Iran - which has suffered the worlds deadliest coronavirus outbreak outside China - to return by March 15 before border crossings are closed and only four airports open to them.

Overland trade with Kuwait and Iran is to be suspended between March 8-15, the health minister added in a decree.

Iraq is alarmed about any spread of the coronavirus from neighboring Iran. Iraqs first recorded case was of an Iranian student who was then sent home, and the rest had all visited Iran recently. Iraq has close cultural and religious ties with Iran and annually receives millions of Iranian pilgrims.

Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Mark Heinrich

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Iraq puts France and Spain on coronavirus entry ban list - Reuters

Iraqi hotel manager Badr al-Jilawi needs to think for a moment to remember when the last guest checked in to visit the holy Shi'ite Muslim city of Najaf, once a prime destination for millions of pilgrims.

With the coronavirus spreading, authorities have banned foreign pilgrims, paralyzing an industry already crippled by anti-government protests and an economic crisis in Shi'ite Iran, usually the source of five million pilgrims annually.

Hotels stand empty in Najaf, home to the Iman Ali shrine, and neighboring Kerbela, site of the Imam Hussein shrine - two of the holiest of the Shi'ite world. Souvenir shops and restaurants are also counting their losses.

"Business has stopped. We haven't had one single visitor since around six months, maybe some five Iraqis came but no foreigner," he said. "Unemployment has jumped (in Najaf)."

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He has laid off all but three of his 40 staff to hold the fort with him in the sparsely lit reception.

In total about 4,000 people working in the hospitality sector have lost their jobs in Najaf as the occupancy rate at the 350 hotels and their 40,000 beds is practically "zero", said Saib Radhi Abu Ghanem, head of the local hotel and restaurant association.

His last guest came in October when anti-government protests broke out and roads were blocked. News that 500 protesters had been killed scared off many pilgrims from Iran, the Gulf, Pakistan, Lebanon and other countries home to Shi'ites.

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More unemployment could fuel the protests, which are driven by complaints by many Iraqis about corruption, mismanagement and the lack of basic services despite Iraq's oil wealth.

Iraqi pilgrims still come but often only for day trips, benefitting the economy little. Many shops in the narrow streets clustered around the shrine have closed and those still open have little to do.

"Najaf has always been a harbor for pilgrims but now I have very little work," said Emar Saadoun, a tailor selling religious garments.

He has been running his one-room shop for 40 years but business has been rarely as bad as now, not even under Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, toppled by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, who used to supress Shi'ites.

'Second coronavirus'

Tourism is a key industry not just in Najaf but also in Kerbela, Baghdad and Samarra, home to other Shi'ite places of worshipping.

More than ten millions arrived annualy alone in Najaf, half of them Iranians, and hotels were usually booked at this time of the year when some Gulf countries have schools breaks, said Abu Ghanem.

Pilgrimage tourism has been in trouble for years due to an economic crisis in Iran, where the currency crashed in 2018 due to U.S. sanctions.

The crisis is worsened by a political void in Iraq. Caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, who quit in November over the unrest, walked away on Monday, a day after his designated successor, Mohammed Allawi, also left amid political infighting.

"This is a second coronavirus, that there is no state, no prime minister," said Jilawi. "I have monthly costs of $10,000 for electrity, taxes, water. We should get waivers."

One hotel still has business, the five-star Qasr Aldur where some 120 of its 420 rooms are occupied by Kuwaiti pilgrims, who stay here until their embassy has figured out how to bring them back. A doctor keeps checking on them.

"There are no flights anymore so we don't now when we can go home," said Mohamed Jasser, a Kuwaiti pilgrim.

Once they are gone the hotel owner, Nuri Nur, also thinks of closing up and send his 60 mask-wearing staff home.

"I might close in a week or so," said Nur.

Authorities check on health of non-resident travellers at road blocks to Najaf and Kerbala, and the latter has canceled Friday prayers for the first time since 2003.

Many pilgrims were still undetered, with few wearing masks and many kissing the Imam Ali shrine, a Shi'ite tradition.

"I have been here more than a thousands times," said 67-year old pilgrim Said al-Mussawi, head of a group from the southern city of Basra. "God is protecting us so why should I be afraid?"

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Coronavirus and protests wreck Iraq's pilgrimage industry - Haaretz

(MENAFN - Iraq Business News) UNICEF partners with the Republic of Korea to provide water and sanitation services for the most vulnerable children in Iraq

Approximately 3 million children and young people across Iraq need humanitarian support as they try to recover from years of conflict and violence.

The Republic of Korea has partnered with UNICEF and contributed US$1 million to provide water and sanitation services to the most vulnerable children living in displacement camps in Anbar, Ninewa and Salah al Din-areas hardest hit by the violence.

Hamida Lasseko, UNICEF's Representative in Iraq, said:

"An estimated 30 per cent of displaced children live in camps, where humanitarian needs are greatest. The contribution from the Republic of Korea will ensure we are able to continue providing critical services such as safe drinking water as well as maintaining sanitation facilities to promote hygiene and protect children from preventable diseases."

In addition to the provision of safe drinking water for nearly 60,000 people in the displacement camps, the contribution from the Korea will support the following activities:

In 2019, the Water, Hygiene and Sanitation Cluster (WASH) co-led by UNICEF and other non-governmental organizations reached over 1.8 million people with safe water in Ninewa, Salah al Din and Anbar.

(Source: UN)

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UNICEF, Korea to provide Water and Sanitation in Iraq - MENAFN.COM