Iran is conducting so-called counterterrorism operations in neighboring countries in a sudden attempt to fortify its hold on power, a senior Iraqi official suggested amid a widening dispute over Iranian strikes in three countries.
“Our language with the Iranian [side] was and is to keep this friendly relationship, but it will be impossible for us to accept aggression,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. “Leaders of security organizations inside Iran, they feel like they cannot manage or control their security. Therefore, they are trying to export the problem to outside the country. One of the areas which they are talking about, they are attacking, is Iraqi Kurdistan.”
That rebuke underscores Baghdad’s displeasure with the Iranian strike in Erbil, the regional capital of the Iraqi Kurdish region. The bombardment is part of a flurry of Iranian attacks around the region that have heightened international anxiety about Tehran’s potential interest in an escalation of the manifold crises that have erupted since Hamas, an Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist organization, rampaged across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“I think Iran is, very dangerously, raising the stakes with these strikes,” United States Institute of Peace Vice President Mona Yacoubian, an expert in Middle East and North Africa security matters, told the Washington Examiner. “Rather than seeking, as many analysts have believed [they would], to de-escalate tensions and avoid direct confrontation, they appear to be raising the ante here and going after, specifically, you know, certainly targets associated with Israel, the West.”
Iranian officials have brushed off Iraqi complaints about the attack, which they claim targeted Israeli Mossad assets. “We targeted Israel — that remains to be a common enemy of both of us,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria during a conversation in Davos, per an interpreter. “We had the intelligence from our security forces about the place and this spot that was targeted in Kurdistan of Iraq … the intelligence is indisputable.”
The Iranian foreign minister’s justification flew in the face of the Iraqi government’s insistence that Iran hit “a family residence belonging to an Iraqi businessman” — killing the man and three other people, “including his 11-month daughter,” according to local media — and not a Mossad outpost. The attack on Monday was paired with another strike in Syria, followed by a third strike on Tuesday, this time in Pakistan, that Iranian officials likewise portrayed as a counterterrorism message.
“We’ve seen Iran violate the sovereign borders of three of its neighbors in just the past couple days,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday. “It is a little rich for, on one hand, Iran to be the leading funder of terrorism in the region, the leading funder of instability in the region, and, on the other hand, claim that it needs to take these actions to counter terrorism.”
Iran defended the strike at the United Nations Security Council by characterizing the Israeli government as part of a series of terrorist threats that includes ISIS, which claimed responsibility for a recent bombing in Kerman, Iran, and the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria.
“The simultaneous anti-terrorism operations were carried out by the firing of several ballistic missiles,” the Iranian mission to the U.N. wrote in a Wednesday letter to the Security Council. “Additionally, an intelligence unit used by anti-Iranian terrorist groups associated with the Israeli regime in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan Region, was targeted. The facility has served as a base for intelligence and sabotage operations in Iran.”
Even the strike in Syria, where Iranian forces have fought in support of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad’s regime, seemed to send an implicit message to Israel, according to another analyst.
“It’s the first time ever they fired this [new medium-range] ballistic missile from southern Iran to Syria,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Behnam Ben Taleblu told the Washington Examiner. “That is, point to point, the distance from Iran to Israel.”
Iranian officials underscored their expansive military capacities. “We see no limitations in protecting our national interests and the people, and will certainly do this authoritatively,” Iranian Defense Minister Mohammad Reza Ashtiani said Wednesday, per Fars News. “No matter where threats against the Islamic Republic come from, we will react, and the response will surely be proportionate, decisive, and strong.”
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Iran faces a legitimate threat from ISIS, Yacoubian acknowledged, but Iranian officials seem to evince a troubling enthusiasm for disputes with Israel.
“This sort of bluster and probing and, indeed, kinetic action, on their part, raises the risk of direct confrontation with Iran, depending on where this goes,” Yacoubian said. “It’d be, potentially, direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, depending on what happens, or Israel and Iran. … This kind of enhanced boldness on the part of the Iranians and kind of risk-taking behavior, that’s concerning.”
