Two explosive-laden drones attacked Iranian Kurdish opposition sites in Iraq's Sulaymaniyah province and east of Erbil on Wednesday, November 4, security sources told Reuters — the latest strike on the Iranian Kurdish groups based across the border in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region. Reuters named no perpetrator, and no casualties were reported in either incident.

Source: Reuters

Local reporting added the detail. Rudaw, the Kurdish outlet reporting from Erbil, said the Komala party — an Iranian Kurdish opposition group — announced that one of its bases in the Alana valley of Balisan, about 90 kilometres (56 miles) northeast of Erbil, was hit at around 8:45 am. Komala said the strike caused material damage but no casualties among its Peshmerga fighters.

Source: Rudaw via Crisis.Zone

A house wrecked in Halabja province

Hours earlier, a security source told Rudaw, an airstrike hit a house in Tawella, in Halabja province, shortly after 2:00 am on Wednesday, badly damaging the building — its glass, doors and windows broken. The owner, Alwan Abdullah, told Rudaw: "We don't know what happened. We haven't seen any debris." A resident, Fakhir Nasradin, described a loud noise at about 1:10 am and said the family was away at their orchard, not at home. Rudaw's security source described the Tawella strike as an airstrike but did not say who carried it out.

Source: Rudaw via Crisis.Zone

Komala blames Iran's Revolutionary Guards — an allegation

Komala said its Balisan base was targeted by "two explosive Shahed drones", in its words. Ali Ranjbari, head of Komala's relations, told Rudaw it was an "Islamic Republic's drone attack on Komala Peshmerga" and accused Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of continuing its attacks on the group. That is Komala's allegation: Reuters named no perpetrator, and the accusation has not been independently established.

Source: Rudaw via Crisis.Zone

A pattern of cross-border strikes

Iran has repeatedly struck the bases of Iranian Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, accusing the groups of carrying out attacks in Iran, Reuters noted. The groups, Komala among them, have been based in the Kurdistan region for years, and their camps around Erbil and Sulaymaniyah have been hit in repeated waves of Iranian missile and drone strikes. According to Rudaw, the Kurdistan Region has faced nearly 1,000 drone and missile attacks since February 28 — the date the wider US-Israeli war with Iran began — although Wednesday's reports do not directly link these two strikes to that confrontation.

Source: Reuters

Why it matters beyond Kurdistan

Northern Iraq sits on the seam of the region's wars: Iranian Kurdish camps, Turkish operations against the PKK, US forces in Erbil, and the fallout of the Iran war all overlap in the same mountains. Strikes that wreck a family's house in Halabja without any side claiming them leave Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government to protest attacks they cannot attribute — and leave residents, as Abdullah's words show, not even knowing who hit them.

Source: Rudaw via Crisis.Zone

What happens next

No Iraqi, Kurdish regional or Iranian official statement on Wednesday's strikes had been reported by the time these accounts were published, and it remained unknown whether more strikes would follow. Whether Baghdad, Erbil or Tehran moves to change the pattern — strikes arriving at hours when people are away or asleep, with no confirmed author — is a question for the coming days, the local reporting noted.

Source: Rudaw via Crisis.Zone