BAGHDAD, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi authorities announced on Thursday that the country's security forces arrested some of those involved in an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad last week.
Yahya Rasoul, the military spokesman of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani, announced in a press conference that "after an intensive intelligence effort, our security services managed to identify the perpetrators, as preliminary information showed that some of them were linked to some security services."
"The security services arrested a number of them, and investigations are continuing to identify everyone who contributed to this attack," he said, adding that the arrested people will appear before the courts to receive their punishment in accordance with the law.
He stressed that such attacks "cannot be tolerated because they represent a serious threat to the security and stability of the country."
Early on Dec. 8, a rocket barrage hit the vicinity of the U.S. Embassy located in the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad.
During the past few days, al-Sudani repeatedly confirmed that the Iraqi government and security forces would pursue the perpetrators of any attack on missions and advisors' sites and that they would deal with them in accordance with the law.
U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have recently become targets of attacks by armed Shiite militias as part of retaliatory measures for the U.S. support of Israel in its ongoing conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The repeated attacks by Iraqi militias prompted the U.S. forces to conduct airstrikes on positions of the Iraqi paramilitary Hashd Shaabi forces that killed around a dozen fighters and wounded a number of others. ■
