Dozens of Iraqi Shiite militiamen and their supporters, backed by the Iranian Ayatollah, broke into the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad on Tuesday, smashing a door and setting fire to a reception area.
It went down as one of the worst attacks on the embassy in recent memory — but was stopped by a quick intervention by the U.S. Marines, sent by President Donald Trump in just 13 minutes.
And the attack just so happens to be connected to Obama.
The Daily Mail reported that the former president invited the leader of Tuesday’s terror attack to the Oval Office — and the publication has a 2011 picture proving it.
You can view that photo below, courtesy of Daily Mail:
Daily Mail writes that the one depicted in the photo is Hadi al-Amiri, Iraq’s former minister of transport at the time.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called al-Amiri as a “proxy” — in other words — a representative figure of the attackers in Tuesday’s siege on the U.S. Embassy.
But that’s not all… al-Amiri had been long considered a potential threat.
The Washington Times reported that he was connected to a 1996 bombing in Saudi Arabia which took the lives of 19 U.S. Air Force officers.
The attackers at the U.S. embassy, many of them in militia uniforms, shouted “Down, down USA!” and “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” outside the compound, hurling water and stones over its walls. The mob set fire to three trailers used by security guards and some tried to scale the walls.
Others then smashed the gates used by cars to enter, and dozens pushed into the compound. The attackers stopped in a corridor after about 16 feet, and were only about 200 meters away from the main building.
The mob taunted the embassy’s security staff, which remained behind glass windows in the gates’ reception area. They hung a poster on the wall declaring “America is an aggressor” and sprayed graffiti on the wall and windows reading, “Closed in the name of the resistance.”
Flames rose from inside the compound and U.S. soldiers on the roof of the main embassy building pointed guns at the Iranian-backed attackers. American guards fired tear gas, and palls of smoke rose over the embassy grounds.
A man on a loudspeaker urged the mob not to enter the compound, saying, “The message was delivered.”
The State Department said all American personnel were safe and that there were no plans to evacuate the embassy.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper later announced the immediate deployment of an infantry battalion of about 750 soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to the Middle East. He did not specify their destination, but a U.S. official familiar with the decision said they will go to Kuwait.
Esper said additional soldiers from the 82nd Airborne’s quick-deployment brigade, known officially as its Immediate Response Force, are prepared to deploy over the next several days. The U.S. official, who provided unreleased details on condition of anonymity, said the full brigade of about 4,000 soldiers may deploy.
“This deployment is an appropriate and precautionary action taken in response to increased threat levels against U.S. personnel and facilities, such as we witnessed in Baghdad today,” Esper said in a written statement.
The 750 soldiers deploying immediately are in addition to 14,000 U.S. troops sent to the Gulf region since May in response to concerns about Iranian aggression.
The breach at the embassy followed U.S. airstrikes on Sunday that killed 25 fighters of the Iran-backed militia in Iraq, the Kataeb Hezbollah. The U.S. military said the strikes were in retaliation for last week’s killing of an American contractor in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base that the U.S. blamed on the militia.
President Donald Trump blamed Iran for the embassy breach and called on Iraq to protect the diplomatic mission.
“Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many. We strongly responded, and always will. Now Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. They will be held fully responsible. In addition, we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!” he tweeted from his estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
By early evening, the protesters had retreated from the compound but set up several tents outside where they said they intended to stage a sit-in. Dozens of yellow flags belonging to Iran-backed Shiite militias fluttered atop the reception area and were plastered along the embassy’s concrete wall along with anti-U.S. graffiti. American Apache helicopters flew overhead and dropped flares over the area.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham echoed the sentiment contained in Trump’s tweet earlier Tuesday.
“As the president said, Iran is orchestrating this attack, and they will be held fully responsible,” Grisham said in an emailed statement. “It will be the president’s choice how and when we respond to their escalation.”
Mahmoud, a fighter with the Imam Ali Brigades said, “This is a victory in retaliation to the American airstrike. This is the initial retaliation, God willing, there will be more.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article