Two drones detonated near a U.S. diplomatic facility adjacent to Baghdad International Airport on Thursday, according to Iraqi security sources. [1] Four people were wounded in the blasts. Flights at the airport continued without interruption, and the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad did not issue a new security alert beyond its standing advisory warning American citizens against travel to Iraq.

The attack follows a pattern that has accelerated since the U.S.-Iran war began on February 28. Iran-aligned militia groups operating in Iraq have claimed more than 30 attacks on U.S. facilities in the country since mid-March, targeting the embassy compound, military installations, and commercial infrastructure associated with American companies. [2] The U.S. Embassy's most recent security bulletin, posted on Wednesday, warned that "Iraqi terrorist militia groups aligned with Iran may intend to target U.S. citizens, businesses, universities, diplomatic facilities, energy infrastructure, hotels, airports, and other locations." [3] The list of potential targets now covers essentially every category of American presence in Iraq.

The Baghdad airport facility has been targeted before. A drone struck a U.S. diplomatic compound near the airport on March 21, in what CGTN reported as one of the first direct hits on a diplomatic building since the war began. [4] The Iraqi government has not publicly attributed either attack, maintaining a posture of neutrality that satisfies no one: Washington wants Baghdad to suppress the militias, Tehran wants Baghdad to facilitate them, and Baghdad wants the war to end before it is forced to choose.

The Fox News liveblog, which has carried more granular detail on the Iraq theater than any other Western outlet, noted the Thursday drone attack in its rolling updates without further analysis. [1] The incident did not produce a standalone headline in the New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN. In the hierarchy of the war's daily violence, two drones that wound four people near an airport perimeter register as background noise. The accumulation of that noise -- 30-plus attacks in five weeks, each one a line item, none of them a story -- is itself the story that is not being told.

-- Yosef Stern, Jerusalem