Iraq summoned Iran’s ambassador to condemn Iranian shelling of villages in its northern Kurdistan region, the Iraqi government said on Tuesday, warning of “negative consequences” if attacks continued.
Iran shelled a Kurdish village in a remote area of northern Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdistan region on Monday, causing damage to buildings but no casualties, border police said.
That followed Iranian shelling on Saturday of Kurdish rebel positions in another part of Iraqi Kurdistan. Helicopters were also used to fire from the Iranian side of the border.
The national media center said the Iraqi foreign ministry had “handed over an official condemnation letter to Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi for the shelling of the border villages inside Iraqi territory by Iranian forces.”
It said that Iraq’s office for neighboring state affairs had summoned the Iranian ambassador late on Monday to deliver the letter to him.
“The Iraqi Foreign Ministry demanded an immediate end to those violations which could lead to negative consequences for bilateral relations,” the media center said in a statement.
Villagers were wounded in the attacks, the statement said, in contrast to the border police who said no one was hurt in either attack.
Renewed shelling from Iran was reported on Tuesday.
Brigadier General Ahmed Gharib, a border guard official in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, said the shelling took place in mountain areas. No one was hurt but one home was damaged.
Iranian forces often clash with guerrillas from the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which took up arms in 1984 for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey.
PJAK and PKK fighters are also present in Iraq.
“The Iraqi side understands Iran’s objectives to discipline its borders but that should not be done unilaterally,” the national media center statement said.
The two countries fought a war in the 1980s, but since the ouster of Sunni Arab Saddam Hussein as Iraqi president in 2003, relations between majority Shiite Muslim Iraq and Iran, another mainly Shiite nation, have improved.
In related news, a car bomb exploded yesterday at the entrance to a fruit and vegetable market in south Baghdad, killing 11 people and wounding about 30, police and hospital officials said.
The explosion, which occurred at about 7am at the Rasheed market in the city’s southern Dora area, follows a sharp rise in attacks in Iraq last month, raising concern that militants have regrouped after suffering sharp setbacks in fighting over the last two years.
Most of the recent bombings have taken place in Shiite areas, suggesting Sunni militants such as al-Qaeda in Iraq are responsible.
The Rasheed market is in a mainly Sunni area, but the farmers who bring their crops there are predominantly Shiites.
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