Iran claims missile attack on Israeli spy center in Iraq | International

As Ukraine commands the world’s attention, arch-enemies in the Middle East continue to trade blows. The Guardians of the Revolution of Iran have claimed responsibility this Sunday for the firing of a dozen ballistic missiles that fell the night before in the vicinity of the future headquarters of the United States Consulate in Erbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. . A statement from the Iranian regime’s ideological elite force assured that the objective reached was “a strategic center of conspiracy and diabolical Zionist acts”, alluding to a Mossad base, Israel’s foreign espionage service. The note justified the attack as a response “to recent crimes by the Zionist regime.”

The missile strike in Erbil comes a week after the death of two guardians of the revolution in a missile strike launched by Israel against pro-Iranian military installations in the vicinity of Damascus. Israeli aviation has been carrying out attacks in Syria against Tehran-affiliated forces for almost a decade, in order to prevent them from gaining a territorial foothold in the neighboring Arab country and transferring advanced weapons, such as precision-guided rockets, to Hezbollah, the Shiite militia party against which Israel waged open war in 2006 in Lebanon.

Ballistic missiles from Iran hit near the new headquarters of the US Consulate in Erbil, sources from the Administration of President Joe Biden confirmed. The State Department reported that the bombing had caused no casualties at its facilities. “We condemn this intolerable attack and this display of violence,” a State Department spokesman said in a statement. Washington is trying in recent weeks to close a deal to revive the 2015 nuclear pact with Tehran, put on hold by Republican Donald Trump in 2018.

Iranian media cited by Efe published a list of alleged victims in the missile attack. The Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government reported that one civilian had been injured in the explosions and that some material damage had been reported in the future diplomatic mission and in a nearby residential area, without affecting the nearby Erbil airport, where the a base of the international coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS, in its acronym in English). The local television channel Kurdistan24, whose studios are near the new consular headquarters, published images of damaged offices on its social networks, with parts of the roof collapsed and broken glass.

Iraq suffers frequent attacks with rockets or armed drones, mainly against US interests and troops from the international anti-jihadist coalition, which Washington attributes to pro-Iranian Iraqi factions. The last ballistic rocket attack on a US base, however, came in January 2020 following the death of the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Al-Quds force, General Qassem Soleimani, in a US strike at the airport. of Baghdad.

The Israeli Army, which maintains a policy of not commenting on armed actions abroad, has put its forces in the north of the country on alert in the face of the threat of retaliatory attacks with rockets or drones launched from Lebanon and Syria. . “We warn the criminal Zionist regime that the repetition of any evil act will have decisive and devastating consequences,” warned the statement released by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

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