Iran launches deadly missile, drone strikes on exiled Kurds in Iraq

IRBIL, Iraq (AFP): Iran launched cross-border missile and drone strikes Monday against Kurdish opposition groups based in northern Iraq, where local authorities reported one death and eight wounded.

An Iranian military source confirmed that “Iran has carried out attacks with drones and missiles targeting the headquarters of terrorist parties in the northern region of Iraq,” Iran’s Fars news agency reported.

Tariq Al-Haidari, mayor of Koysanjaq in Kurdish Iraq, told AFP that “five Iranian missiles targeted a building used by the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran.”

“One person is dead and eight wounded,” said the health ministry in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Other strikes hit elsewhere in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, authorities there said, without immediately providing a toll for those attacks.

Iran previously launched cross-border missile and drone strikes that killed more than a dozen people in Iraq’s Kurdistan region in late September, after accusing Kurdish armed groups based there of stoking a wave of unrest that has rocked the Islamic republic.

Iran has been hit by almost two months of protests since the death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsi Amini, 22, after she was arrested by the country’s feared morality police for allegedly failing to observe the strict dress code for women.