Iran’s IRGC says will strike Israeli bases again if Iraqi Kurdistan officials fail to get rid of them

The spokesman for Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says the elite military force will not hesitate to strike other Israeli bases in Iraqi Kurdistan region if its officials do not dismantle them.

“It is our natural right to destroy any base from which any attack is carried out against the security of Iran and this is a red line” for us, Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif told Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah television network on Thursday.

According to Sharif, Iran’s ambassador in Iraq Iraj Masjedi had on several occasions warned the Iraqi Kurdistan region about the presence of the Mossad base, which was recently attacked by the IRGC, and two other similar bases.

“If Iraqi officials do not take action to remove other bases of Zionists in this country while our security continues to be threatened from this region, we will respond without hesitation,” the IRGC's spokesman added.

In the early hours of Sunday, a dozen ballistic missiles hit a secret Mossad base on the Masif-Saladin Street in Erbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.

The attack, which was claimed by the IRGC, reportedly killed and injured several Israeli operatives.

“Zionists had admitted themselves that their drones, which flew over a [military] base in [Iran’s] Kermanshah [province] had taken off from their bases in Erbil [capital city of the Iraqi Kurdistan region],” the IRGC official said.

Ballistic missiles hit Mossad bases in Iraq’s Erbil, kill Israeli officers: Iraqi media

Iraqi media and military sources say scores of ballistic missiles have hit bases belonging to Israel’s Mossad spy agency in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, killing a number of Mossad officers, according to reports.

Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations has written to the UN secretary-general and the head of 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.”

‘Iraq will not allow threats against neighbors’

Separately, the first deputy speaker of the Iraqi parliament said on Thursday that Baghdad will not accept any foreign country to use Iraqi soil to threaten the Arab country’s neighbors.

“We will not accept any intelligence agency or a foreign country working in Iraq to threaten neighboring countries,” Hakim Al-Zamili warned.

Al-Zamili also said that a parliamentary fact-finding committee is investigating the incident.

The attack on the Mossad base has been hailed for having occurred at a “symbolic hour,” referring to the time the US assassinated Iran’s top anti-terror commander, Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy chief of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in early January 2020.

Soleimani’s successor, Brigadier General Esmail Qa’ani, lauded the “decisive” strike against the Israeli base, saying the operation carried a lesson for the Israeli regime.

The criminal Israeli rulers are “now so disgraced that they sleep in fear at nights, worried that they wake up to losing parts of the occupied territories,” said Qa’ani, the commander of the IRGC's Quds Force.

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