Iran launched a new round of missile and drone strikes on Monday (November 14th) against Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan, killing at least one person and injuring eight.

The Iranian government accuses these groups, which have long been in its sights, of stoking unrest in Iran, which has been facing demonstrations since the death in custody on September 16 of the young Iranian Kurdish Mahsa Amini, arrested three days earlier by morality police in Tehran.

Iran has confirmed strikes against "terrorist groups" based in the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq (north), bordering Iranian territory.

“Five Iranian missiles targeted a building of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan of Iran (PDKI),” Tariq al-Haidari, mayor of Koysanjaq, a town east of Erbil, the capital of Iran, told AFP. Iraqi Kurdistan.

"There is one dead and eight wounded. They are Iranian Kurds," detailed the autonomous region's health ministry.

Videos circulating on social media showed plumes of black smoke rising into the sky after the strikes.

Baghdad condemns

At the same time, "four drone strikes" targeted bases of the Iranian Communist Party and the Iranian Kurdish nationalist group Komala in the Zrgoiz region, said Atta Seqzi, a leader of Komala, told by AFP.

According to him, the militants were "warned of the imminence of the strikes" and evacuated the installations.

"There is no death or injury."

At the end of the day, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry "condemned in the strongest terms" these strikes, which "encroach on Iraqi sovereignty", assuring that it would take "high-level diplomatic measures", without however detailing them. .

In Iran, an Iranian military source confirmed attacks with "missiles and drones" against "terrorist party headquarters" in Iraq.

The people targeted were "terrorists who have actively participated in the riots of the past two months, in particular by causing fires against banks and administrative buildings in several localities" in Iranian Kurdistan, said General Mohammad-Taghi Osanlou, commander of a base of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran's ideological army, on public television.

Iranian authorities call protests against Mahsa Amini's death "riots".

Iran has stepped up its attacks on these Iranian Kurdish opposition groups since the protests began.

At the end of September, at least 14 people were killed and 58 injured, "mostly civilians", in Iranian bombardments, according to the counter-terrorist forces of Kurdistan of Iraq.

"Violation of sovereignty"

Iran, said Monday the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran, will not remain "silent in the face of threats from separatist terrorist groups" in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The UN mission in Iraq has "condemned these new drone and missile attacks in Kurdistan which violate the sovereignty of Iraq".

Same disapproval from the United States, which called on Iran to "stop these attacks and refrain from any new threat against the territorial integrity of Iraq", by the voice of the spokesman of the department of State, Ned Price.

New Western sanctions

In addition, Tehran was targeted Monday by new Western sanctions for its repression of the demonstrations generated by the death of Mahsa Amini.

The United Kingdom has thus sanctioned about twenty "Iranian leaders responsible for heinous violations of human rights".

These measures were taken in coordination with the European Union, which also approved a new series of sanctions, targeting in particular the Minister of the Interior Ahmad Vahidi and the public channel Press TV, accused of having broadcast "the forced confessions "of detainees.

In Geneva, an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council is to be held on November 24 on the situation in Iran, during which the opening of an international investigation into the repression which has left more than 326 dead, according to the Oslo-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR).

With AFP

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