Who Killed An American Soldier in Iraq? Conflicting Iraqi 'Resistance' Claims

On 1 October 2017, an American soldier- Alex Missildine- was killed in an improvised explosive device attack in Iraq, marking a rare U.S. military casualty in the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The operation was never claimed by the Islamic State, however, suggesting it was rather the work of a pro-Iranian Shi‘i group opposed to the American presence in Iraq.

But which group did it? When in late April I first interviewed the group Ashab al-Kahf (“Companions of the Cave”)- one of the most prominent newer ‘resistance’ groups advertising their supposed existence via Telegram- the group claimed that it had been operating since 2017. As Michael Knights suggested at the time in commenting on the interview, the group seemed to be implying that it had a role in killing Missildine. Sure enough, in May, the group formally claimed the attack though it did not offer any proof for its role beyond the claim- just as Knights had suggested.

Now, in a rather strange turn of events, the operation has been claimed today by another of the newer ‘resistance’ groups: Liwa Tha’ar al-Muhandis. The group’s name translates as “The al-Muhandis Revenge Brigade,” named after Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq’s Hashd Sha‘abi (“Popular Mobilisation”) Commission who was killed in the U.S. strike that took out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Clearly, the group- if it is real and carried out the 2017 operation- could not have existed under this name at that time.