TEHRAN —
Iran warned Monday that it won’t tolerate “threats” coming from Iraq, a day
after firing ballistic missiles at what it said was an Israeli site in the
neighboring country.
اضافة اعلان
“It is not at all
acceptable that one of our neighbors that has deep relations with us ...
becomes a center for creating threats against the Islamic republic,” said
foreign ministry spokesman
Saeed Khatibzadeh.
“Iran will not
tolerate that a center near its borders becomes the center for sabotage,
conspiracy and sending terrorist groups to Iran,” he said at his weekly press
conference in Tehran.
Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards, the ideological arm of the armed forces, said Sunday they
had targeted a “strategic center” belonging to Israel, the Islamic republic’s
arch enemy, in the northern Iraqi city of
Erbil, using “powerful precision
missiles”.
Kurdish
authorities, however, insisted that Israel has no sites in or near Erbil, the
capital of their autonomous region in Iraq’s north.
The authorities
said a dozen ballistic missiles had targeted Erbil, including some US
facilities, in the pre-dawn cross-border attack that lightly wounded two
civilians.
Baghdad summoned
the Iranian ambassador, Iraj Masjidi, to protest the strikes as Iraq’s foreign
ministry condemned the attack as a “flagrant violation of (Iraqi) sovereignty”.
Khatibzadeh said
that the federal government of Iraq “has been notified several times ... not to
allow Iraq’s borders with Iran to become insecure”.
“Iran expects the
central government of Iraq to end this situation once and for all and not allow
its borders to be abused,” he added.
Sunday’s attack
came nearly a week after two officers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were
killed in Syria in a strike attributed to Israel, a key
US ally.
Iraq, including
the
Kurdistan region, is home to a now reduced deployment of US troops who led
a coalition fighting Daesh.
Washington has blamed a
series of rocket and drone attacks against its military and diplomatic
interests in Iraq on pro-Iran groups who demand the departure of the remaining
US troops, but cross-border missile fire has been rare.
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