Iran claims missile strike on IS base in Syria was reprisal
The New York Times
BEIRUT — Iran fired six medium-range ballistic missiles across Iraq and into Syria early Monday at what it said was an Islamic State base, according to Iranian news agencies, its allies and spokesmen for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The Revolutionary Guards described the strike as retaliation for an attack in Ahvaz, Iran, on Sept. 22 against a military parade by its soldiers in which at least 25 people were killed, including 12 members of the elite unit plus civilian spectators and at least one young child.
Iran initially attributed the attack to an Arab separatist group backed by the United States, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. But the missile strike was on what it said was the headquarters of the IS terrorist group in the eastern Euphrates River valley, close to Syria’s border with Iraq. The area is one of the last strongholds of IS, also called ISIS and Daesh, after its Arabic acronym, and has also been the site of recent American military activity.
It was not immediately clear whether Iran was now blaming IS exclusively for the attack, a combination of ISIS and the Arab separatist group or, implausibly, those groups and the foreign powers it named previously.
A spokesman for the United States military in Syria and Iraq, Col. Sean Ryan, confirmed that a missile strike had taken place. “At this time, the coalition is still assessing if any damage occurred, and no coalition forces were in danger,” he said.
The missile launch, at least the second time Iran has fired ballistic missiles into Syria, was bound to be seen by the United States as a provocative action, especially with the Trump administration’s pulling out of a nuclear deal with Iran, in part because it does not place severe enough limits on Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities.
European countries have refused to break off the deal, and Iran has said it will still abide by it. Part of the agreement, under which Iran disavows a nuclear weapons program, puts some limits on new ballistic missile technology.
The Revolutionary Guards released video of a missile being launched and said in a statement that “many takfiris and Daesh leaders who were behind the Ahvaz attack were killed and wounded by the missiles,” according to a report by the Lebanese news agency Al Manar, which is run by Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. Takfiri is an epithet that refers to the extremist, anti-Shiite views of IS and other hard-line Sunni groups.
While Iranian sources described multiple missiles being fired, they did not specify how many. Some news accounts said there were six. A report in the semiofficial Fars news agency in Iran said the missiles were of the Zulfikar and Qiam classes, which have ranges of 468 to 500 miles.
Iranian news agencies said the missiles had been fired from Kermanshah Province, which at its nearest point to Syria is at least 280 miles. Neither missile has sufficient range if fired from Iran to reach Israel.