Iran has retaliated for the Christmas killing of Sayyed Razi Mousavi. This was the Israeli airstrike that hit an apartment in Syria. His role was apparently to co-ordinate between Iran and Syria - so we're going pretty far afield from "Israel has a right to defend itself". Still, the blob will say that this escalation in the regional hostilities is entirely the fault of Iran and Hamas.
Anyways, I found Iran's missile strike quite interesting. Most of the coverage is about the strike on Erbil, the main city of the Kurdish region of Iraq. I'll get to that second because it's much more confusing. The other missile strike was supposedly targeting an ISIS base in Idlib in Syria. The interesting part of this is how far away the target was from Iran. This strike hit a target over 1,200 km away. IOW, the message that Iran is sending with this is "Tel Aviv is within the range of our missiles." Which is a pretty interesting message.
About Erbil. Iran claims that the target they hit was a Mossad base. The Iraqi Foreign Minister has denied that there was any Israeli presence here. This is actually the second time that Iran has attacked Erbil with missiles, the previous time being March, 2022. This is the one I can't unravel. If this was a Mossad base, it's entirely reasonable that Iraq would not know about it. That's the point of the Mossad - they just go wherever they want and do whatever they want, almost as if they were the covert operations arm of a rogue state that has zero respect for international law. OTOH, why would Iran hit the same region twice? If this was a Mossad base, it seems wildly unlikely that they would continue operations in the same city after they had been found out the first time.
One piece of speculation I've seen about it is that this strike hit very close to the US consulate. The Iran backers are citing this as evidence that it was Mossad - as it makes sense for Mossad to locate near the US consulate. Which is a pretty spurious argument. Anyways, they claim that the strike was also a message - that their missiles are accurate enough at this range that hiding next to US facilities will not deter missile attacks. It's a message to both Israel and the US - that they aren't afraid to risk hitting US facilities either because they have enough confidence in their accuracy or they are just ballsy enough not to care. This second part seems more believable - this is a message that Iran would want to send. But it's still weird that they hit the same area they hit two years ago.
Is any of this speculation important? Yes and no. No, because obviously I don't have anywhere near enough information to make good guesses and even if I did, it's extremely unlikely that we'll ever know the actual reasoning. It's just pointless guessing. But also yes - because that's how the human brain works. When we're facing really dangerous shit, we just don't want to think about it at all and will cling to any distraction that comes along. And this is a serious escalation. Iran launched missiles at two targets - one showing that they have the range to hit anywhere in Israel and the other showing that they can accurately drop a missile where they want. And the US-Israel have done absolutely nothing to slow down the escalation and in fact have been constantly piling more fuel on the fire. So yeah, this post is really to say that I'm quite anxious about the way things are headed.
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