Iran’s ballistic missile strike targeting the Islamic State group in Syria served both as revenge for attacks on Tehran earlier this month and a warning that Iran could strike Saudi Arabia and US interests in the Mideast, an Iranian general said Monday.
The launch, which hit Syria’s eastern city of Deir el-Zour on Sunday night, appeared to be Iran’s first missile attack abroad in over 15 years and its first in the Syrian conflict amid its support of embattled President Bashar Assad.
It adds new tensions in a region already unsettled by a long-running feud between Shia power Iran and the Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as well as a campaign by Arab nations against Qatar.
It also raises questions about how US President Donald Trump’s administration, which already said it put Iran “on notice” for its ballistic missile tests, will respond.
Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary force in charge of the country’s missile program, said it launched six Zolfaghar ballistic missiles from the western provinces of Kermanshah and Kurdistan. State television footage showed the missiles on truck missile launchers in the daylight before being launched at night.
The missiles flew over Iraq before striking what the Guard called an Islamic State command center and suicide car bomb operation in Deir el-Zour, over 600km away. The extremists have been trying to fortify their positions in the Syrian city in the face of a US-led coalition onslaught on Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital.
Activists in Syria said they had no immediate information on damage or casualties from the strikes, nor did the Islamic State group immediately acknowledge it. The Guard released black-and-white footage it said came from a drone showing the strikes, a column of thick black smoke rising into the sky after the attack.
The Guard described the missile strike as revenge for attacks on Tehran earlier this month. Five Islamic State-linked attackers stormed Iran’s parliament and a shrine to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on June 7, killing at least 18 people and wounding more than 50. That Islamic State assault, the first to hit Iran, shook residents who believed the chaos engulfing the rest of the Middle East would not find them.
But the missiles sent a message to more than just the extremists in Iraq and Syria, Gen Ramazan Sharif of the Guard told state television in a telephone interview.
“The Saudis and Americans are especially receivers of this message,” he said. “Obviously and clearly, some reactionary countries of the region, especially Saudi Arabia, had announced that they are trying to bring insecurity into Iran.”
The Zolfaghar missile, unveiled in September 2016, was described at the time as carrying a cluster warhead and being able to strike as far as 700km away.
