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A drone attack targeted a military camp belonging to an Iranian Kurdish opposition party in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq early on July 2.
Karim Brozi, a leader in the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), told Shafaq News that a single drone struck the party’s Dikla camp, located in a strategic location on the administrative border between Erbil and Sulaymaniyah provinces in Kurdistan.
“A drone targeted the Dikla camp north of Erbil,” Barouzi told the Iraqi news website, adding that “drone crashed inside the camp, causing no casualties but resulting in material damage.”
Other sources, however, told the news website that the attack was carried out by five Iranian-made “Hadid” drones, noting that all the drones fell outside the headquarters and warehouses within the camp.
The Hadid, more known as the Hadid-110, which features a stealthy faceted design. It is considered the Islamic Republic’s fastest one-way attack drone, with a speed of over 510 kilometers per hour. The drone is said to have a range of 350 kilometers, and carries a warhead weighing 30 kg. Not much is known about how the drone is guided, but it is believed to be equipped with a satellite-aided inertial navigation system.
Iranian media reported later in the day that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) carried out attacks with “missiles and drones” targeting bases of “Iranian Kurdish separatists” in Kurdistan.
The IRGC didn’t official claim responsibility, but it announced that it had killed five members of the PDKI in Iran northwest in a separate attack.
In a statement, the guards said that the group was ambushed after entering Iranian territory in mountainous border areas near Piranshahr in West Azerbaijan province, without specifying when exactly the operation took place.
These attacks came just five days after another Iranian opposition party, the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), announced that one of its members was found dead in a hotel in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan.
The deceased, Soran Mohammad, told other PAK members on several occasions that he had received threats from the Iranian authorities, an official from the party told Shafaq News at the time.
Iran began targeting Kurdish opposition parties based in Kurdistan soon after the start of the American-Israel war last February. The attacks continued even after a ceasefire was announced in June. The latest escalation began right after the memorandum of understanding to end the war was signed by the Islamic Republic and Iran.
The PDKI and PAK were reportedly among several Iranian Kurdish opposition parties that received arms and money from both the U.S. and Israel prior to the start of the war as a part of an ill-fated plot to launch a ground offensive from Kurdistan into Iraq.
U.S. President Donald Trump ultimately vetoed the plot, reportedly at the request of Turkey, leaving these parties largely abandoned to face Iran alone.
Now, the Islamic Republic is viewing these parties as a bigger threat than before, and attacks on their camps in Kurdistan are unlikely to stop anytime soon.
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we must stop this iranian genocide of the kurds!