TEHRAN -- Iran on Sunday stuck a “strategic center” of the occupying regime of Israel in the Iraqi Kurdistan region with a barrage of precision missiles, killing several Zionist agents.
In a statement, the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) indicated that the operation was in response to an Israeli airstrike on the Syrian capital of Damascus last Monday, in which two IRGC officers were martyred.
“Following the recent crimes of the fake Zionist regime and the previous announcement that the crimes and mischiefs of this infamous regime will not go unanswered, the strategic center for conspiracy and mischief of the Zionists was targeted by powerful and pinpoint missiles of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps,” it said.
Authorities in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region had earlier said 12 ballistic missiles rained down on Arbil in a pre-dawn attack.
Citing security sources, Iraq’s Sabereen News reported that two Mossad training centers were targeted by ballistic missiles in the early hours of Sunday.
Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen television said said a Mossad base on the Masif-Saladin street in Arbil was “fully razed to the ground and a number of Israeli mercenaries were killed or injured”.
Alarm sirens were activated at U.S. bases in Arbil and its embassy inside the highly secured Green Zone of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
The local Kurdish interior ministry said the U.S. consulate’s new building sustained material damage in the missile attacks. No Americans were hurt, it added.
It is not the first time that secret Mossad bases come under attack in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
In April last year, three Mossad officers were killed in a raid by “unknown resistance forces” against a facility run by the spy agency.
Last September, The Cradle which describes itself as a journalist-driven publication covering West Asia, also reported that the resistance axis had killed two high-ranking American and Israeli commanders in a military operation in Arbil, in retaliation for the U.S. assassination of top anti-terror commanders, General Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
Last week, IRGC identified the two slain officers as colonels Ehsan Karbalaipour and Morteza Saeidnejad, warning that the occupying regime of Israel would “pay for this crime”.
On Thursday, Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations had written to the UN secretary general and the Security Council, saying Tehran “reserves its inherent right to self-defense, under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, to respond to such criminal act whenever it deems appropriate”.
Iran “recognizes that the Israeli regime is fully responsible for all the consequences of these criminal acts, and seriously warns the regime about taking further adventuristic