WANA NEWS AGENCY / REUTERS
The Revolutionary Guard Corps claims to have destroyed a Mossad spy center, the Israeli intelligence service, in Erbil, in the autonomous region of Kurdistan.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards announced early Tuesday January 16 that they had launched several salvos of ballistic missiles at targets “terrorists” in Iraq and Syria, killing at least “four civilians” in Iraqi Kurdistan according to the local authorities of the autonomous region. The strikes carried out by Iran on the night of Monday to Tuesday come in an already tense regional context, against a backdrop of war in Gaza between Israel and Palestinian Hamas which raises fears of a regional conflagration between the allies of the two camps.
In Washington, an official denounced “a series of reckless and imprecise strikes” Who “undermine the stability of Iraq”,. “No American personnel or installations were targeted”however, specified Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the National Security Council of the White House.
On the outskirts of Erbil, capital of autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards claimed to have targeted and destroyed “a spy headquarters” which they attributed to Israel, just as was targeted “a gathering of anti-Iranian terrorist groups”, according to the official IRNA news agency. In Syria, the Guards Corps announced on its Sepah News website that it had “identified the gathering places of commanders and key elements linked to recent terrorist operations, particularly the Islamic State” (IS), in Syria, and have them “destroyed by firing a number of ballistic missiles”.
Four civilians killed in Kurdistan
He explained that this attack in Syria was carried out in “response to the recent crimes of terrorist groups who have unjustly martyred a number of our dear compatriots in Kerman and Rask”. On January 3, attackers carried out a suicide attack against a crowd gathered in Kerman, southern Iran, during a memorial ceremony near the tomb of General Qassem Soleimani, the former architect of Iranian military operations in the Middle East, killed in January 2020 by an American strike in Iraq. The attack, claimed by ISIS, left around 90 dead and many injured.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, at least “four civilians” were killed and six others injured in Iranian missile strikes, authorities of the autonomous region announced in a statement. An AFP correspondent in Erbil heard several loud explosions, as the missiles hit an upscale residential area on the outskirts of Erbil, northeast of the Kurdistan capital.
“A blatant violation of the sovereignty of the region and of Iraq”
In a press release, the Kurdistan Security Council accuses Tehran of resorting to “baseless justifications” for its repeated bombings against the region. “What happened is a blatant violation of the sovereignty of the region and of Iraq. The federal government and the international community must not remain silent in the face of these crimes., insists the press release. Earlier, the ruling party in Erbil, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), reported the deaths of civilians, including a real estate tycoon, Peshraw Dizayee, and members of his family, their homes having been hit.
A year ago, Tehran repeatedly bombed the positions of the various groups of the Iranian Kurdish opposition, accused in particular of being involved in the protest movement triggered after the death in detention, in September 2022, of Mahsa Amini, a Iranian Kurd arrested by the moral police.
Reprisals
Early Tuesday, the Revolutionary Guards assured that they had targeted and destroyed an Israeli target in Iraqi Kurdistan – “the headquarters of the Zionist regime’s spies (Mossad)», according to IRNA. According to them, the targeted site was used for “develop espionage operations and plan terrorist actions in the region”, according to the same source. If Iraq criminalizes any contact with Israel, politicians from autonomous Kurdistan have been able to be complacent on the subject in the past. But the official line of Kurdistan remains cautious and denies any relationship or desire for normalization with Israel.
According to IRNA, the attack in Erbil comes in retaliation for the recent assassinations of several commanders of the Revolutionary Guards but also of leaders of “the axis of resistance” – name given to Tehran’s allies in its fight against Israel. On January 2, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a strike attributed to Israel killed Hamas number two, Saleh al-Arouri, and six other officials and executives of the Palestinian Islamist movement. In mid-January, Wissam Tawil, a senior military official of the powerful Lebanese Hezbollah, was killed in southern Lebanon by a strike also attributed to Israel.