Iranian soldiers crossed into Iraq on Thursday and attacked several small villages in the northeastern Kurdish region, local officials said.
U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said he couldn't confirm the attacks, but five Kurdish officials said that troops had infiltrated Iraqi territory and fired on villages.
The Iranian military regularly exchanges artillery and rocket fire with Kurdish rebels who've taken refuge across the border, but Iraqi Kurdish officials worried that Iran's willingness to cross the border raises the possibility of a broader confrontation that would draw the Iraqi government and U.S. forces into an unwanted showdown.
One Kurdish legislator said that if reports of the attacks were true, then Iraq must "stand firmly" against future Iranian encroachments.
Details of the incursion were sparse. Abdul Wahid Gwany, the mayor of Choman, a village 250 miles north of Baghdad, said Iranian troops crossed the border in 10 places and traveled approximately three miles into the mountainous Iraqi region, bombing rural villages in the process. He didn't say how many Iranian troops were involved.
Jamal Ahmed, the police chief of Benjawin, a village a little more than 200 miles north of Baghdad, said the attacks killed some residents.
"We don't know the amount of casualties as the bombing was continuous and so severe," Ahmed said. Gwany said the attacks also killed many cattle and left villages and farms burned to the ground.
Gen. Jabbar Yawr, a spokesman for the Kurdish militia, said Iranian troops have been lobbing artillery at Iraq from across the border since Aug. 16, though Thursday was the first time that Iranian troops crossed the border.
He said that a statement issued by the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, a branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party, which is also known as the PKK, claimed credit for the recent assassination of an Iranian intelligence official. Yawr said the Iranian raid was in retaliation ...
Bookmarks