Monday, January 22, 2024

While Iran’s recent strikes show weakness, its threat of escalation is working

After months of watching its proxies wage war across the region, Iran drastically stepped up its own attacks over the last week, carrying out deadly strikes in three neighboring countries.

The first two took place last Monday, when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired ballistic missiles at Erbil in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region and attacked targets in Syria.

The Syria strike, said the IRGC, hit Islamic State positions and “destroyed the perpetrators of terrorist operations” in Iran, a seeming allusion to a January 3 attack when at least 84 people were killed in two explosions near the grave of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq four years earlier.

The Islamic State took responsibility for that attack.

Iran claimed the Erbil attack destroyed “one of the main Mossad espionage headquarters” in Iraqi Kurdistan, an assertion that was promptly dismissed by Iraq. A Kurdish businessman and his daughter were killed in the strikes, which landed near the US consulate in Erbil. Iran claimed the man was involved in selling oil to Israel. READ MORE