Eurasia Press & News
A dozen ballistic missiles struck Iraq’s northern city of Erbil on Sunday, with some reports suggesting that several landed near the U.S. consulate building in the city. The missile attack left residents of the city terrified, with many posting videos online showing several large explosions and some saying that the blasts shook their homes. Amid speculation of Iranian involvement, the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps quickly claimed responsibility for the missile strike.
This latest round of what some observers describe as Iran’s “messaging by missile” marks a dangerous escalation in the Middle East. Iran has built up a long track record of aerial attacks, either directly by its military forces or via regional proxies, that appear to be tied to Tehran’s strategic aims in the region. Sunday morning’s attack, for example, occurred just as negotiations between Tehran, Washington and its European allies over reviving the Iran nuclear agreement appear to have hit a dead end, apparently due to Russian demands that would soften the blow of Western sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine invasion.
In the aftermath of the missile attacks, much analysis has focused on the message or signal that Iran might be communicating through this strike. But this sort of “negotiation through military strikes,” as embodied by Sunday’s attacks, further raises the risk of a wider war in the Persian Gulf. It has become all too common in the Middle East to see regional and outside powers conducting lethal, remote strikes on other countries’ sovereign territory. And while not all of these attacks are equivalent, it’s nonetheless important to place Iran’s potentially escalatory missile strikes in Erbil on Sunday in a broader regional and historical context.
Israel’s air force routinely violates Lebanon’s airspace, for instance, and similarly carries out aerial attacks in Syria against a range of targets, including Iranian forces, Iraqi militias and Hezbollah operatives, among others. The United States, meanwhile, has likewise carried out bombings and drone strikes of its own in Syria and Iraq. Inside Iraq, U.S. forces have for the most part operated with the consent and cooperation of the Iraqi government, as in the fight against the Islamic State—but not always. A turning point in the Middle East’s “rocket diplomacy,” for instance, came with the United States’ assassination of Iran’s top military leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in January 2020. In addition to Soleimani, U.S. forces also killed a senior Iraqi official in that attack, which Washington carried on Iraqi territory without notifying Baghdad. Meanwhile, the U.S., like Israel, conducts strikes in Syria on a dubious legal basis.
For its part, Iran has repeatedly attacked its Gulf Arab adversaries from the air, including two recent missile attacks on Emirati soil launched from Yemen by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and a 2019 attack on two Saudi oil facilities that, though claimed by the Houthis, were widely believed to have been Iran’s handiwork. Iran’s recent aerial attacks in the Gulf, whether by drones or missiles, occurred even as Tehran was simultaneously pursuing a tentative diplomatic engagement with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Iran’s latest missile attack on Erbil comes at a moment when simmering regional tensions could come to a boil in a way that could quickly escalate into outright war, which would be a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe. Tehran says it was attacking an Israeli target in Erbil in retaliation for an airstrike in Syria on Feb. 24 that killed four people, including at least two members of the Revolutionary Guards. Whatever the intended message behind the missile attack was, though, the actual target was in fact not Israeli at all. Rather, it was the villa of a well-known Kurdish businessman, Baz Karim, who is close to the Barzani clan, whose Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, is the dominant force in Iraqi Kurdistan.
This connection points to another possible explanation of what Tehran was trying to accomplish with the missile attacks—namely, to put pressure on Iraqi factions that have been defying its wishes in negotiations over Iraq’s government formation. Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani has been trying to make a deal with Moqtada al-Sadr, whose party emerged as the top vote-getter in last year’s elections, and Mohamed Halbousi, the speaker of Iraq’s parliament, to form a government that, in Sadr’s formulation, would be “neither Eastern nor Western”—meaning not too closely allied with either Tehran or Washington. But Iran is insisting that no Iraqi national government be formed until the Shiite parties come to an internal agreement that stipulates the terms of a political power-sharing agreement and the spoils accorded to the various factions close to Iran.
Finally, the fact that Iran’s rocket attack on Erbil hit near the U.S. consulate demonstrates that it is not deterred by the threat of an escalation. Evidently, Iran’s political leaders don’t mind risking more conflict in Iraq, nor do they seem to mind if a consequence of their “rocket diplomacy” is the collapse of diplomatic negotiations with their regional and international adversaries.
Many parties have contributed to the unstable situation where the sending of messages and signals with bomb blasts and aerial attacks is now considered par for the course in the Middle East. But Iran’s Sunday attack raises the stakes, once again, for the missile attacks to snowball into a bigger regional conflict. The big danger in Tehran’s messaging by missile is that it raises the odds of that escalation.
Rights Roundup
Executions in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia announced a mass execution of 81 people Saturday, roughly half of whom were Shiite, sending an unmistakable message of its own to international observers that the kingdom is not considering a change in its approach to human rights. The mass execution comes at a moment when the United States and other Western governments are putting pressure on Saudi Arabia to ramp up its oil production in order to bring down global oil prices. The state-sanctioned murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 fueled longstanding criticisms of Saudi policies that punish political dissent, restrict the rights of women and impose capital punishment with questionable due process for a wide range of offenses. Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler known as MBS, was emphatic and provocative in a recent interview with The Atlantic, saying that Riyadh and Washington cannot “lecture” each other about domestic policies and that Khashoggi’s murder “hurt [MBS] a lot.”
Like the execution of Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr along with 46 others in January 2016, at a similar moment of tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States over the just-signed Iran nuclear deal, this weekend’s announcement makes clear that Riyadh’s view of reform does not extend to basic human rights, and that it intends to sidestep criticism by Washington on its human rights record.
