Jabar Yawar, a deputy minister in the Kurdistan regional government, said four days of intermittent shelling by Iranian forces had hit mountain villages high up on the Iraqi side of the border, wounding two women, destroying livestock and property, and displacing about 1,000 people from their homes.
Mr Yawer said there had also been intense fighting on the Iraqi border between Iranian forces and guerrillas of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), an armed Iranian Kurdish group that is stepping up its campaign for Kurdish rights against the theocratic regime in Tehran.
On Saturday, the Iranian news agency Mehr said an Iranian army helicopter which crashed killing six Republican Guard members had been engaged in a military operation against PJAK. Iranian officials said the helicopter had crashed into the side of a mountain during bad weather in northern Iraq. PJAK sources said the helicopter had been destroyed after it attempted to land in a clearing mined by guerrillas. The PJAK sources claimed its guerrillas had also killed at least five other Iranian soldiers, and a local pro-regime chief, Hussein Bapir.
Killed
An Iraqi provincial governor was blown up by a roadside bomb on Monday in what appeared to be an escalation of a power struggle between rival Shi’ite factions that threatens to destabilise the country’s oil-producing south.
Mohammed Ali al-Hassani, governor of Muthanna province, was on his way from the city of Rumaitha to Samawa, the provincial capital, when his convoy of nine cars was targeted by a powerful roadside bomb.