New Country Joins Escalating Mideast Conflict with its First Missile Strikes

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards launched missiles at what it called Israel’s “spy headquarters” close to the U.S. Consulate in a northern Iraqi city, state media reported, with the force also claiming to have struck targets associated with ISIS in Syria.

Four civilians were killed and six others injured in Erbil, in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, according to the Kurdish regional government’s security council. The strikes come amid fears across the Middle East of Israel’s war against Hamas turning into a wider international conflagration. It is the first time Iran has launched attacks directly, after relying on proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis—known collectively as the Axis of Resistance—to fire missiles at Israeli or U.S. targets.

“In response to the recent atrocities of the Zionist regime, causing the killing of commanders of the Guards and the Axis of Resistance... one of the main Mossad espionage headquarters in Iraq’s Kurdistan region was destroyed with ballistic missiles,” the Guards said in a statement referring to the Israeli intelligence agency, Reuters reports.

Read more at The Daily Beast.