Iran launches attacks on Iraq’s Kurdistan, 9 killed
Iran launched cross-border missile and drone strikes that killed nine people in Iraq’s Kurdistan region on Wednesday ater accusing Kurdish armed groups based there of stoking a wave of unrest that has rocked the Islamic republic.
The Sept.16 death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, 22, while in the custody of Iran’s morality police has sparked a major wave of protests and a crackdown that has let scores of demonstrators dead over the past 12 nights.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has in recent days accused the Iraq-based Kurdish groups of “atacking and infiltrating Iran from the northwest of the country to sow insecurity and riots and spread unrest.”
Ater several earlier Iranian cross-border attacks that caused no casualties, a barrage of missiles and drones on Wednesday claimed nine lives and wounded 32, said the regional health minister in Arbil, Saman Al Barazanji, while visiting the wounded in a hospital in the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region.
“There are civilians among the victims,” including one of those killed, a senior official of the
US ‘strongly condemns’ strikes, says ‘we stand with the people and government of Iraq in the face of these brazen atacks on their sovereignty’
Kurdistan region earlier said.
A correspondent reported smoke billowing from locations hit, ambulances racing to the scene and residents fleeing, at Zargwez, about 15km from Sulaimaniyah.
In Baghdad, Iraq’s federal government called in the Iranian ambassador to protest the deadly strikes, while the UN mission in Iraq deplored the atack, saying “rocket diplomacy is a reckless act with devastating consequences.”
“These atacks need to cease immediately,” the UN mission said on Twiter.
The United States said it “strongly condemns” Iran’s deadly strikes in Iraqi Kurdistan and warned against further atacks.
“We stand with the people and government of Iraq in the face of these brazen atacks on their sovereignty,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.
Other Iranian strikes on Wednesday destroyed buildings around Zargwez, where several exiled let-wing Iranian Kurdish parties maintain offices.
“The area where we are has been hit by 10 drone strikes,” Ata Nasser, an official from Komala, one exiled Iranian group, said, blaming Iran for the strikes.
“The headquarters of the Kurdistan Freedom Party has been hit by Iranian strikes,” Hussein Yazdan, an official from the party, said, about the site in the Sherawa region, south of Arbil.
Another group, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, said its bases and headquarters in Koysinjaq, east of Arbil, were struck by “missiles and drones.”
“These cowardly atacks are occurring at a time when the terrorist regime of Iran is unable to crack down on ongoing protests inside and silence the Kurdish and Iranian peoples’ civil resistance,” it tweeted. Amini, 22, died in Tehran on Sept.16, three days ater being arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women that demands they wear hijab headscarves and modest clothes.
Her death sparked Iran’s biggest protests in almost three years and a crackdown that has killed at least 76 people, according to the Oslobased group Iran Human Rights, or “around 60,” according to Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency.
Protests have rocked especially kurdish communities in western Iran that share strong connections with Kurdish-inhabited areas of Iraq.
Many Iranian Kurds cross the border into Iraq to find work, due to a biting economic crisis in Iran driven in large part by US sanctions.
Iranian state television had said on Sunday about earlier a tacks that the“revolutionary guards targeted the headquarters of several separatist terrorist groups in northern Iraq with missiles and precision-guided atack drones.”
Two days later the Guards’ General Abbas Nilforoushan, deputy for operations, said “the establishment of a base by the enemies of the Islamic Revolution in this region is not acceptable,” Tasnim news agency reported.
“For some time now, counter-revolutionary elements have been atacking and infiltrating Iran from the northwest of the country to sow insecurity and riots and spread unrest.”
He added that several of “these anti-revolutionary elements were arrested during some riots in the northwest (of Iran), so we had to defend ourselves, react and bomb the surroundings of the border strip.”