ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq will be the first country affected by any escalation between Israel and Iran, a former Iraqi representative to the United Nations warned on Thursday as the world waits to see how Tehran will retaliate for a deadly airstrike on its embassy in Damascus.
“Any escalation at this time is not in the interest of any country in the region, including Israel,” Ambassador Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi told Rudaw, adding that “Iraq will definitely be the first to be harmed.”
Istrabadi represented Iraq at the UN from 2004 to 2007.
Seven members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF), including two generals, were killed on April 1 after the consular section of Iran’s embassy in Damascus was hit in an airstrike that Iran and Syria have blamed on Israel.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Monday visited the destroyed building and the injured. He also inaugurated a new consulate building located near the targeted one.
“I am saying loudly from Damascus that the Zionist regime will be punished and that America is responsible for the regime's attack on the Iranian embassy and must be held accountable,” he was quoted saying by Iranian state media.
The Pentagon has said it had nothing to do with the attack.
Israel, which has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on regime-controlled areas of Syria throughout its nearly 13-year civil war, often claiming to strike pro-Iran militias such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah that supports the Syrian army, has not commented.
While it rarely comments on strikes attributed to it in Syria, Israel has repeatedly warned that it would not tolerate its arch-rival Iran gaining a foothold there.
When Iran has sought to retaliate in the past, it has targeted sites in the Kurdistan Region that it claims are linked to Israel’s Mossad spy agency. Most recently, in January, a baby was one of four people killed in an Iranian missile attack on the Erbil home of a businessman who officials said had no ties to Israel.
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