President Joe Biden ordered the US military to carry out retaliatory strikes against Iranian-backed militia groups after three US servicemembers were injured in a drone attack in northern Iraq.

National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said one of the US troops suffered critical injuries in the attack that occurred earlier on Monday. The Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups, under an umbrella of Iranian-backed militants, claimed credit for the attack that utilised a one-way attack drone

Biden, who is spending Christmas at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, was alerted about the attack by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan shortly after it occurred on Monday and ordered the Pentagon and his top national security aides to prepare response options.

Sullivan consulted with Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin. Biden’s deputy national security adviser, Jon Finer, was with the president at Camp David and convened top aides to review options, according to a US official, who was not authorised to comment publicly and requested anonymity.

Within hours, Biden convened his nationals security team for a call in which Austin and Gen. CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed Biden on the response options. Biden opted to target three locations used by Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups, the official said.

The US strikes were carried out at about 4:45 a.m. on Tuesday in Iraq, less than 13 hours after the US personnel were attacked.

“The President places no higher priority than the protection of American personnel serving in harm’s way,” Watson said. “The United States will act at a time and in a manner of our choosing should these attacks continue.”

The latest attack on US troops follows months of escalating threats and actions against American forces in the region since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the devastating war in Gaza. The US has blamed Iran, which has funded and trained Hamas, for the rising violence by its network of proxy groups across the region, including attacks by Yemen’s Houthis against commercial and military vessels thorough a critical shipping choke point in the Red Sea.

The Biden administration has sought to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spiralling into a wider regional conflict that either opens up new fronts of Israeli fighting or that draws the US in directly. The administration’s measured response – where not every attempt on American troops has been met with a counterattack – has drawn criticism from Republicans.

The US has thousands of troops in Iraq training Iraqi forces and combating remnants of the Islamic State group, and hundreds in Syria, mostly on the counter-IS mission. They have come under dozens of attacks, although as yet none fatal, since the war began on October 7, with the US attributing responsibility to Iran-backed groups.

• An AP report