US Congress votes to limit Trump’s war power on Iran

The US Congress on Wednesday gave its final approval to a bid to restrain President Donald Trump from attacking Iran, a sign of lawmakers' alarm after soaring tensions.

A month after the resolution cleared the key hurdle of the Senate, which is controlled by Trump's Republican Party, the Democratic-led House of Representatives voted 227-186 to approve the measure that bars any military action against Iran without an explicit vote from Congress.

But the resolution is virtually certain to be vetoed by Trump, and the coalition of most Democrats and a handful of war-skeptic Republicans lacks the votes to override him.

"If President Trump is serious about his promise to stop endless wars, he will sign this resolution into law," said Senator Tim Kaine, the Democrat who spearheaded the move.

The House voted moments after a rocket fired on a military base north of Baghdad killed an American soldier, a British soldier and a US contractor, in the deadliest such attack on foreign forces in Iraq in several years.

A similar attack in December that killed a US contractor set off a chain of escalation after the United States blamed it on Iranian-aligned Iraqi Shia militias.

On January 3, Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Iran's most powerful general, Qassem Soleimani, at the Baghdad airport.