Iran's Revolutionary Guards announced early Tuesday (January 16th) that they had launched several ballistic missile salvos at "terrorist" targets in Iraq and Syria, killing at least "four civilians" in Iraqi Kurdistan according to local authorities in the autonomous region.

The strikes carried out by Iran on Monday night come in an already tense regional context, against the backdrop of the war in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas that has raised fears of a regional conflagration between the allies of the two sides.

On the outskirts of Erbil, the capital of autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq, Iran's Revolutionary Guards said they had targeted and destroyed "a spy headquarters" that they attributed to Israel, as well as "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 had "destroyed them by firing a number of ballistic missiles". He explained that the attack in Syria was carried out "in response to the recent crimes of terrorist groups that have unjustly martyred a number of our dear compatriots in Kerman and Rask".

On January 3, assailants carried out a suicide bombing attack on a crowd gathered in Kerman, southern Iran, during a memorial ceremony near the grave of General Qassem Soleimani, the former architect of Iran's military operations in the Middle East, who was killed in January 2020 by a U.S. strike in Iraq. The attack, claimed by IS, left around 90 people dead and many wounded.

Read alsoThe attack in Kerman is a reminder of the "blood debt between the Islamic State group and Iran"

In Iraqi Kurdistan, at least "four civilians" were killed and six others wounded in Iranian missile strikes, the authorities of the autonomous region announced in a statement, specifying that some of the wounded were in a "critical condition". 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.

'Violation of sovereignty'

In a statement, the Kurdistan Security Council accused Tehran of resorting to "baseless justifications" for its repeated bombings of the region. "What happened is a flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the region and Iraq. The federal government and the international community must not remain silent in the face of these crimes," the statement said.

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 after their homes were hit.

A year ago, Tehran repeatedly bombed the positions of the various Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, accused in particular of being involved in the protest movement triggered after the death in custody in September 2022 of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish arrested by the morality police.

'Espionage operations'

Early Tuesday, the Revolutionary Guards claimed to have targeted and destroyed an Israeli target in Iraqi Kurdistan - "the headquarters of the Zionist regime's spies (Mossad)", according to IRNA. The targeted site was allegedly used to "develop espionage operations and plan terrorist actions in the region," according to the same source.

While Iraq criminalises any contact with Israel, politicians in autonomous Kurdistan have been complacent on the subject in the past. But Kurdistan's official line remains cautious and denies any connection or desire for normalization with Israel.

According to IRNA, the attack in Erbil comes in retaliation for the recent assassinations of several Revolutionary Guards commanders but also leaders of the "axis of resistance" - the 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' second-in-command, Saleh al-Arouri, and six other leaders and cadres of the Palestinian Islamist movement. In mid-January, Wissam Tawil, a senior military official in Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah, was killed in southern Lebanon in a strike also attributed to Israel.

With AFP

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