DUBAI: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Wednesday they fired missiles and drones at militant targets in the Kurdish region of neighbouring northern Iraq, and warned of more attacks to come.
Nine people were killed and 24 wounded in the attacks near Arbil and Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan, its health minister Saman Barazanchi said in a statement.
The strikes were reported after Iranian authorities accused armed Iranian Kurdish dissidents of involvement in a spate of unrest now shaking Iran, especially in the northwest where most of the country’s population of over 10 million Kurds live.
Iraqi Kurdish sources said drone strikes targeted at least 10 bases of Iranian Kurds near Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan on Wednesday morning, without elaborating about possible casualties.
A senior member of Komala, an exiled Iranian Kurdish opposition party, told Reuters that several of their offices were struck as well.
Tariq Haidari, mayor of the Iraqi Kurdish city of Koye, told Reuters that two people including a pregnant woman were killed and 12 others wounded there. Some of the wounded were rushed in critical condition to a hospital in Erbil, he said.
The Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s elite military and security force, said after the attacks that they would continue targeting what it called terrorists in the region.
“This operation will continue with our full determination until the threat is effectively repelled, terrorist group bases are dismantled, and the authorities of the Kurdish region assume their obligations and responsibilities,” the Guards said in a statement read on state television.
Iraq’s foreign ministry condemned the Iranian attacks on areas of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Protests erupted in Iran this month over the death of a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody.
Amini, 22, from the northwestern Kurdish city of Saqez, was arrested on Sept. 13 in the capital Tehran for “unsuitable attire” by the morality police, who enforce the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code.
She died three days later in hospital after falling into a coma, sparking the first big show of opposition on Iran’s streets since authorities crushed protests against a rise in gasoline prices in 2019.
