Banners cheering victory were put up across the capital Tehran on Tuesday after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired a barrage of missiles on a building in Erbil, the capital of the neighboring, semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region.
In a chain of statements published on its official website early Tuesday, the IRGC said the target was an "espionage base" run by Israel's foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. The operation involved 11 ballistic missiles launched from two sites in Iran's western and north-western areas, it added.
The IRGC described the strikes as a response to "recent terrorists attacks" in Iran and, most notably, the Jan. 3 twin bombings in the city of Kerman, where at least 94 people were killed as they were gathering to mark the fourth anniversary of the death of top general commander Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated in a US airstrike outside Baghdad in 2020. The Kerman twin bombings have been claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS).
Authorities in Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), however, dismissed the Iranian version, saying the missiles hit the residence of influential Kurdish business tycoon Peshraw Dezayee, who was killed along with three others, among them his one-year-old daughter.
