As international concern over the Tehran regime’s bloody crackdown on domestic protests mounts, Iran launched a new airstrike late Sunday night on targets of exiled Iranian Kurdish organizations in Iraq’s neighboring Kurdistan autonomous region. announced by local authorities.

The “Revolutionary Guard” (ie, an elite body of the Iranian armed forces) again bombed Iranian Kurdish units, the Iraqi Kurdistan Counter-Terrorism Agency said, without giving details of casualties.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI) and the Iranian Kurdish separatist organization Komala have confirmed that their facilities in northern Iraq were bombed.

The explosions took place around midnight. Early this morning, the Iraqi state news agency INA reported “missile launches and Iranian UAV strikes” against “three Iranian opposition forces in Kurdistan” in Iraq.

PDKI confirmed that its facilities in Koya and Zeznikan, near Erbil, the capital of the autonomous region of Kurdistan, were hit by “kamikaze missiles and drones.”

He shared videos on Twitter showing explosions and burning buildings in the middle of the night.

“These indiscriminate attacks came at a time when the Iranian terrorist regime is unable to stop the ongoing protests in Kurdistan,” the DPKI, Iran’s oldest Kurdish party founded in 1945, said in a press release.

Tehran accuses these opposition groups, which have long been on its radar, of fueling unrest in Iran. Massive protests erupted across the country following the September 16 death of Mahshi Amini, a young Iranian-Kurdish woman, after she was arrested by the vice police in Tehran.

“terrorists”

In the past, senior Iranian officials have demanded that the authorities in Baghdad and Erbil intervene to neutralize the Iranian Kurdish opposition.

Established in Iraq since the 1980s, Iranian Kurdish organizations are classified as “terrorist” by the Iranian authorities, who attribute attacks on the territory of the Islamic Republic to them.

However, despite the fact that they waged guerrilla warfare for decades, these groups, mostly left-wing, have effectively ceased their military activities, experts say.

The Komala movement, in turn, confirmed via Twitter that its facilities had been attacked, but assured that they had not suffered any casualties.

The United States Joint Command responsible for the Middle East, CENTCOM (“central command”), in a statement, condemned “Iranian cross-border strikes” using “missiles and drones.”

“Such indiscriminate and illegal attacks endanger civilians, violate Iraqi national sovereignty, and call into question security and stability (…) in Iraq and the Middle East,” he added.

The Iranian strikes came just a day after Turkish airstrikes in Iraqi Kurdistan targeted PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) bases.

The organization, labeled a terrorist organization by Ankara and its partners in the West, took up arms against the Turkish government in the 1980s and has maintained bases in northern Iraq for decades.

“Whatever Tehran’s intentions regarding Iraqi Kurdistan, neither Baghdad nor Erbil is in a position to allow their territories to be vulnerable to attack from abroad,” Hamza, an Iraqi-Canadian political scientist, tweeted Hadad.

Source: RES-IPE