US PRESIDENT JOE Biden has said he has decided how to respond to a deadly drone attack that killed three US troops in Jordan, adding that Iran is to blame for supplying the weapons.
“Yes,” Biden told reporters when asked if he had made a decision on his response, adding, when asked whether Iran was to blame:
“I do hold them responsible, in the sense that they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it.”
While Biden did not specify what shape the response would take, the White House has previously vowed to delivery a “very consequential” response to the attack.
Despite this, he said that “a wider war in the Middle East” was “not what I’m looking for”.
Speaking to CNN’s Morning Joe yesterday, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Washington “don’t seek a war with Iran”.
“We’re not looking for a wider conflict in the Middle East,” he added.
Kirby would not speculate at the time on the options being considered by the president, including whether targets inside Iran were on the table.
He said Washington wants to “make it clear” that the attack – part of a series of other increasingly dangerous assaults by Iran-backed militants in the region in recent weeks – was “unacceptable.”
The deaths of three American troops in the attack have raised fears of an escalating conflict, as fighting still rages in Gaza. The attack marks the first US military deaths in an attack in the region since the Israel-Hamas war began.
Some of Biden’s Republican rivals have urged a direct attack on Iran, while Iranian officials have been quick to deny any links to the Jordan attack, reiterating that Tehran also opposes an “expansion” of the conflict in the region.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian today the solution to the crisis must be “political” and wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that “diplomacy is active in this direction”.
Tehran today also summoned the British ambassador to protest unspecified “accusation” against the Islamic republic, after London said Iran-aligned groups were behind the Jordan attack.
The killings in Jordan follow a spate of attacks on US forces in nearby Iraq and Syria, many claimed by the Iran-backed alliance Islamic Resistance in Iraq.
Britain, along with the United States, also imposed sanctions on a network that they allege targets Iranian dissidents.
Washington has repeatedly accused Iran of involvement in Red Sea attacks by Huthi rebels and of “actively facilitating” attacks on US forces in other parts of the Middle East.
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