Washington pledges support to Baghdad and other partners following the Erbil attack

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that Washington will support Baghdad and other governments in the region following the Iranian missile attack on Erbil (northern Iraq) at dawn on Sunday, while Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kazemi warned against turning Iraq into an arena for settling "foreign accounts".

Sullivan expressed the United States' condemnation of the Iranian attack, and said - in a statement issued by the White House - "We will support the government of Iraq in holding Iran accountable, and we will support our partners throughout the Middle East in facing similar threats from Iran."

The US National Security Adviser stated that Washington is working to help Iraq obtain missile capabilities to defend itself.

Iran bombed a neighborhood near the American consulate in the city of Erbil with 12 ballistic missiles in an unprecedented attack on the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, but it did not result in casualties.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard later claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that it had targeted "the strategic center of Zionist conspiracy and evil."

For its part, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador to Baghdad, and informed him of its protest against the missile strikes. The government also requested an "explicit" explanation from Tehran through diplomatic channels.

The Iraqi prime minister discussed the Iranian attack in a phone conversation with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

And the Prime Minister's media office said - in a statement - that Al-Kazemi stressed, during the conversation, "not to allow Iraq to turn into an arena for settling foreign accounts," and stressed that "the government is continuing to take everything that would strengthen the sovereignty of the Iraqi state and fortify it against any attacks."

Reuters quoted analysts as saying that the Erbil attack came in response to an Israeli air strike in Syria last Monday that killed two members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and that it was not an action directed against the United States.

"We do not believe that our consulate was the target of this attack, and our facilities there are safe, and no one was injured or killed, but it was an attack on the sovereignty of Iraq and constitutes a source of great concern to all of us," US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said during a television interview.