The following article was originally published in Middle East Eye on December 20, 2016.
Seven people were killed in a double bomb attack on Tuesday near the headquarters of an Iranian Kurdish opposition party, in a rare assault in Iraq’s relatively secure autonomous Kurdish region, a senior security official said.
The blasts hit the town of Koysinjaq about 10:00 pm local time, killing five members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iran, a member of the security forces and a child, according to Jalal Karim, the Kurdish region’s deputy interior minister.
The attack also left people wounded, said Karim, who did not provide a specific figure.
Iraq’s Kurdistan region has its own government, security forces and flag, but it is still part of Iraq. It has largely been spared the horrific violence that has plagued other regions of the country in the years after 2003.
The Islamic State group, which Kurdish forces have been battling in the north, is the usual culprit for attacks in the Kurdistan region. But the fact that the bombings apparently targeted the Iranian party headquarters raises the possibility that another organisation or country may be responsible.
The Kurds are spread across four nearby countries including Iran, where the military crushed a fledgling Kurdish republic in which Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani was born in 1946.
There are about five million Kurds in Iran, and various Kurdish opposition groups oppose the government in Tehran.
Iraqi Kurdistan houses a range of Kurdish groups, including armed organisations such as Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and Iran’s Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), which those countries periodically target in air and artillery strikes inside Iraqi territory.
Read the article above in Middle East Eye.
