Who is striking Iraqi Kurdistan? New drones deepen an unanswered question
Shafaq News
For the fourth time in three days, US-led Coalition air defenses shot down a swarm of explosive-laden drones over Erbil, destroying 16 of them on July 17 as residents heard explosions and watched interceptors light the sky. No one was hurt, and no one claimed the attack. And no Iraqi authority has said who launched it, the same void that followed an identical eight-drone salvo on July 15.
That void is now the story. Four attacks on the same US-facing target inside 48 hours, both timed to the immediate aftermath of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's first White House visit, have turned a single security incident into something closer to a campaign. Yet the most basic question —who is striking Iraq's Kurdistan Region, and to what end— remains formally unanswered by the state on whose territory the drones are falling. For an autonomous region that declared itself neutral in the war raging around it, the accumulating silence is a governance failure with a body count.
Read more: Between war and neutrality: Kurdistan navigates escalating US-Iran confrontation
The stakes are set by geography and the tally of past attacks. Erbil hosts the US consulate and an air base that has become, by default, the most exposed American military position in the country. As US-led Coalition forces prepare to complete their withdrawal from Iraq by September 30 and consolidate what remains in Kurdistan, Erbil Air Base becomes the single most obvious US target left in the country. The drones now arriving over the city, in other words, may be the leading edge of a problem that the coalition's departure will sharpen rather than resolve.
This is not the Kurdistan Region's first exposure, which is what gives the current wave its weight. Between February 28, the day a US-Israeli war on Iran erupted, and April 20, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) documented 809 drone and missile attacks on its territory, killing 20 civilians and wounding 123. Erbil Province absorbed 477 of them. The KRG's own tally noted, pointedly, that Iraqi Kurdistan ranked first among non-combatant areas for human and material losses in a war it had refused to join. Iran-aligned Iraqi factions claimed a large share of those strikes at the time. The federal government in Baghdad, then as now, was asked to identify and prosecute those responsible.
Untangling the current attacks requires separating threads that are easily, and sometimes deliberately, confused. One strand is unmistakably Tehran's. Through early July, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck camps belonging to Iranian-Kurdish opposition party Komala on the outskirts of Erbil and al-Sulaymaniyah. But what happened on July 17 seems to be the starkest, when violence arrived over Iraqi Kurdistan in at least six separate attacks within hours of each other, three in al-Sulaymaniyah province against Iranian opposition Kurdish parties, and three over Erbil, one against Komala, and two on the US Consulate.
The deadliest struck the Komala party's positions, killing at least nine fighters as bodies remained trapped in caves in the rugged terrain; Kurdistan security authorities counted at least seven strikes on the group's sites, without naming Iran. Two further strikes elsewhere in the province caused no casualties.
These attacks, despite Iran not claiming responsibility in some incidents, have a known logic: Tehran striking its own exiled dissidents on Iraqi soil. They should not be folded into the mystery of the July 15 and 17 swarms over Erbil, which flew toward the American presence in the city, were intercepted mid-air, and were claimed by no one at all.
It is that second category where attribution collapses into competing readings. The US Mission in Iraq has been the most direct, warning citizens after July 15 of "Iran-enabled drone attacks on Erbil," an on-record American characterization pointing at Tehran's hand. Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief Ali Al-Zaidi condemned the assault as “a malicious attempt” to destabilize Iraq and ordered federal agencies to coordinate with the Kurdistan Region’s authorities to identify those responsible and prevent further incidents. Al-Zaidi’s statement did not hold any party directly responsible.
Read more: 650 Strikes in Iraqi Kurdistan: How deniability became a weapon
The Kurdistan Region presidency condemned the attacks as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty, and “a betrayal of Iraq,” without naming Tehran. But the Kurdistan Regional Government explicitly rejected “the unjustified attacks carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran against the Kurdistan Region,” calling on the Iraqi government and the international community “to put an end to these violations.” KRG did not specify if the condemnation related to attacks on Komala or US interests.
Security analyst Sarmad al-Bayati situates the attacks in the US-Iran confrontation, arguing that a strike aimed at the vicinity of the American consulate carries a political message directed first at President Donald Trump, a response, in his account, to Trump's recent sharp remarks on Iran and on the slain commanders Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. The timing supports him: the US was actively striking Iranian targets around the Strait of Hormuz on the very days the drones flew over Erbil, after a Pakistan-mediated ceasefire collapsed into open exchanges of fire.
Politician Mithal al-Alusi cast the strikes as a "declaration of war by the militias" against the Kurdistan Region, “a region that had backed al-Zaidi's reform agenda and as a calculated affront to the disarmament pledges the prime minister carried to Washington.” His reading has teeth because the September 30 deadline has split the Iran-aligned camp. Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Imam Ali have agreed to hand their brigades to the state; Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada have refused, with Kataib Hezbollah vowing not to surrender "a single bullet." An attack that embarrasses al-Zaidi days after his White House reception would serve the rejectionists' interest precisely.
Al-Alusi, a longtime hawkish critic of Iran's role in Iraq, insists the perpetrators are "known" and urges Baghdad toward legal and diplomatic redress, a pointed contrast with a state that has named no one.
And yet the faction most plausibly placed in that frame denies involvement. A spokesperson for Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada (KSS), Kazem al-Fartousi, told Shafaq News that no operations were launched from Iraq toward Erbil and that the resistance factions had carried out no such action. His denial cannot be dismissed, but neither can it be taken as closing the matter: KSS is among the groups rejecting disarmament, and its spokesman has separately maintained that US forces in Iraq remain legitimate targets.
Read more: Iraq's September 30 weapons deadline leaves terms of disarmament unresolved
The structural reason attribution stays murky is itself worth naming because the "Islamic Resistance in Iraq" is not a single group but an umbrella of interchangeable front names, staffed largely by Kataib Hezbollah personnel, under which the harder-line factions operate. Attacks surface under disposable labels while the parent organizations issue denials, distributing deniability by design. In that framework, the absence of a claim is not evidence of an outside hand; it is the system working as intended.
Which leaves open a possibility that neither the proxy-signal nor the internal-defiance reading captures: that the strikes serve simply to manufacture instability in a region whose neutrality makes it a soft and symbolically useful target. When drones are intercepted over the cities, their debris cleared and their intended target never confirmed, even the object of the attack becomes a matter of inference.
What can be stated is narrow. Multiple drone attacks, 48 hours apart, near the American footprint in Erbil, all intercepted, neither claimed, both landing on the al-Zaidi government at its moment of maximum exposure to Washington. Everything past that, Tehran, its Iraqi proxies, rejectionist factions acting against their own government, or actors content merely to keep Kurdistan unsettled, remains a reading rather than a finding.
The trajectory suggests the question will not stay abstract. With the Global Coalition's withdrawal set for September 30 and Erbil poised to become the last significant US military address in Iraq, the incentives to strike the city are converging rather than easing. The KRG has spent five months asking Baghdad to name and prosecute the perpetrators of 809 attacks. It has received condemnations and no accountability. Until that changes, each new swarm over Erbil and al-Sulaymaniyah will arrive with the same signature these carried: real damage, real danger, and no name attached.
Read more: Al-Zaidi's Washington visit links US investment to factions’ disarmament
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
