Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed on Tuesday that it launched missile attacks on the 'spy headquarters' of Israel in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. The elite force said they had also struck Islamic State targets in Syria, Iran's state media claimed.
"In response to the recent atrocities of the Zionist regime, causing the killing of commanders of the Guards and the Axis of Resistance ... one of the main Mossad espionage headquarters in Iraq's Kurdistan region was destroyed with ballistic missiles," the Guards said in a statement.
"We assure our nation that the Guards' offensive operations will continue until avenging the last drops of martyrs' blood," the Guards' statement said.
The actions have stoked fears of the Israel-Hamas conflict spreading across the region. Tehran had promised revenge for the killing of three members of the IRGC, including senior commander Sayyed Reza Mousavi, in a missile strike in Lebanon.
Besides the strikes on Kurdistan's capital Erbil, the IRGC also "fired a number of ballistic missiles in Syria and destroyed the perpetrators of terrorist operations" in Iran, including the Islamic State.
The targeted area in Erbil was reportedly a residential area near the U.S. consulate. However, no US facilities were affected by the missile strikes, Reuters quoted two US officials as saying.
However, four civilians were killed and six injured in the strikes on Erbil, the Kurdistan government’s security council said in a statement, describing the attack as a “crime”. The slain included multimillionaire Kurdish businessman Peshraw Dizayee and several members of his family.
The deaths occurred when the missiles landed on their home, Iraqi security and medical sources said.
One rocket had fallen on the house of a senior Kurdish intelligence official and another on a Kurdish intelligence centre.
The US State Department condemned the attacks near Erbil, calling them reckless. "We tracked the missiles, which impacted Northern Iraq
and Northern Syria. No U.S. personnel or facilities were targeted," Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said in a statement. "We will continue to assess the situation, but initial indications are that this was a reckless and imprecise set of strikes," she said.
Meanwhile, Iraq condemned on Tuesday "aggression" on Erbil that led to civilian casualties in residential areas, according to a statement by the country's foreign ministry. The Iraqi government will take all legal measures against these actions that are considered a violation of Iraq's sovereignty and the security of its people, including filing a complaint at the United Nations Security Council, the statement said.