The 2019 K-1 Air Base attack was a rocket attack on the K-1 Air Base in Kirkuk province in Iraq on 27 December 2019. The air base was one of many Iraqi military bases that host Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) personnel and was attacked by more than 30 rockets. The attack occurred during the 2019–20 Persian Gulf crisis and preceded a series of events that eventually brought Iran and the United States to the brink of open conflict.
The rocket attack killed an American civilian contractor and injured four U.S. service members and two Iraqi security forces personnel.[2]
The American contractor that was killed, an Iraqi-American named Nawres Waleed Hamid from Sacramento, California, worked at the base as a linguist under the company Valiant Integrated Services. Valiant Integrated Services paid for his funeral and burial at the Greater Sacramento Muslim Cemetery, which took place on 4 January 2020, the day after his body was returned to the United States. He was a father of two.[3][4]
The U.S. blamed the Iranian-backed Kata'ib Hezbollah militia, a subgroup of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), for the attack. Kata'ib Hezbollah denied responsibility for the attack.[5] This led to a rapid series of events over the next week, starting with U.S. retaliation in Iraq and Syria, which targeted five Kata'ib Hezbollah weapon storage facilities and command and control locations in Iraq and Syria.[6][7] 25 militia members died[8] and 55 were wounded.[9]
It was followed by an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which in turn led to a U.S. airstrike near Baghdad International Airport, killing Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and PMU commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.