Fire at will, apparently.

A PMF leader was killed in Baghdad on Thursday, the latest in a series of US and Israeli strikes against Iran-linked operators and proxies in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.

Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi (stage name Abu Taqwa) was a deputy operations chief for the PMF, the coalition of predominately Shiite Iraqi militia which, with allowances for recent splits and rifts, have in the past answered mostly to the Quds.

Over the past three months — which is to say since the onset of all-out war between Israel and Hamas — Iran’s proxies have attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria dozens of times, typically under the banner of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a Tehran-loyal PMF offshoot that includes Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat Al-Nujaba. Abu Taqwa was a senior Al-Nujaba commander. (If you’re already confused, don’t worry. It’s difficult to keep track of it.)

Mike Pompeo designated Al-Nujaba in 2019, noting the group’s close relationship with Qassem Soleimani and Hassan Nasrallah.

Apparently, Abu Taqwa was pulling into a garage in Baghdad on Thursday along with some friends when… well, you know the rest. A US drone was watching.

Al-Nujaba (and Iranian media) published the picture above, which allegedly shows what was left (or, more aptly, what wasn’t left) of Abu Taqwa following the drone strike. I don’t have any way to verify the authenticity of the visual, but it was widely circulated.

The PMF called the strike a “criminal act” and a violation of Iraqi sovereignty, apparently forgetting that the US specializes in violating Iraqi sovereignty. That’s one of America’s modern foreign policy calling cards. The umbrella group also said the Pentagon violated “international laws and norms” with the strike, which it described as an example of “brutal American aggression.”

Mohammed Shiaa Al-Sudani, Iraq’s prime minister, wasn’t amused. His office called the attack a “dangerous escalation.” “This action undermines the previously established understandings between the Iraqi Armed Forces and the Global Coalition Forces,” a statement said. “We view this action as an assault on Iraq.” He went on: “God’s Mercy for the martyrs and speedy recovery for the wounded.”

Al-Nujaba’s website decried “an air attack by the American invaders.” The portal, which features a hodgepodge of portraits depicting Soleimani and Mahdi al-Muhandis looking every bit like they visited a Glamour Shots together at an American mall in the 1980s, ran a predictably overwrought lament for Abu Taqwa.

“Oh, commander! No mourning will do you justice, beloved of our hearts,” it read. “The light of martyrdom was visible in your face for a long time.” That was hardly the end of it. Al-Nujaba went on to say that if there’s a silver lining, it’s that Abu Taqwa is with the general now:

Today Martyr Soleimani and Martyr Al-Muhandis will rush to welcome you with virtues soaked in blood. You mourned the loss of these two for four years, so let your blood flow today. I make a covenant with you to hold back my tears in such a way that they become a burning fire in my soul, and I will beat the cup of anger on the traitorous invaders and send down the sparks of revenge on them.

All that’s missing is Clark Griswold: “Oh, God, ease our suffering in this, our moment of great despair. Yea, admit this good and decent person into thine arms in the flock in thine heavenly area, up there. And yea, though the Hindus speak of karma, I implore you: Give him — give him a break.”

Iran’s proxies in Iraq were instrumental in the fight to defeat ISIS, but notwithstanding that relatively brief period of cooperation — during which the US military and Tehran-allied groups adopted a reciprocal “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” dynamic for the purposes of expediency — they routinely target US forces. And the Pentagon routinely responds by bombing their positions. It’s not harmless, exactly, but it’s usually asinine and barely gets a mention in the news.

Sometimes, though, when the temperature heats up in the region, things escalate, the US gets tired of the pot shots and people get incinerated. Four years and one day ago, the Pentagon, at Donald Trump’s direction, carried out the mother of all such fly swats, when an MQ-9 Reaper killed Soleimani and the above-mentioned al-Muhandis, Kataib Hezbollah’s chief, also in Baghdad. In December, US warplanes struck three Kataib Hezbollah targets in response to attacks on America’s military outpost in Erbil.

Thursday’s incident in Iraq came on a national day of mourning in Iran, where more than 100 died in a Wednesday attack on a memorial procession for Soleimani. The day before that, an Israeli drone killed Hamas’s envoy to Hezbollah in Beirut. And late last month, Israel assassinated Soleimani associate Seyed Razi Mousavi on a farm outside Damascus.