According to the British daily in Arabic Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, the Israeli air forces are said to have twice carried out raids against warehouses used by Iranian forces deployed in Iraq, used, according to Jerusalem, to store ballistic missiles and rockets coming from Tehran.
The first attack would have been carried out by an F35 on July 19, the second on the 31st, and would have targeted installations at Camp Ashraf, in the province of Salah-Din, northeast of Baghdad. The attacks reportedly killed several Iranian Revolutionary Guards, as well as several members of Lebanese Hezbollah, according to the Al-Arabia news channel.
The Israeli air forces are increasingly active in the face of Iranian force deployments on its borders and to the repeated attacks they carry out on its ground. But until now, its strikes had been limited to Iranian bases and those of Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon. The strikes in Iraq therefore represent an evolution in the tensions surrounding this area, and also highlight Iran's use of Iraq as a logistical platform to support its forces in Syria and Lebanon. The Israeli attacks were obviously carried out with the consent of Washington, whose forces still control the Iraqi skies.
Although it was little covered by the media, the Israeli F15, F16 and F35 carried out, in 2018, no less than 200 strikes in Syria, against Iranian targets or targets affiliated with Hezbollah, but also, sometimes, against regime targets, without ever triggering a response from Russia. It must be admitted that with the deployment of Iranian forces on the northern borders in Syria, on the southern borders in Lebanon, and to the east in Iraq, the Jewish state is beginning to identify a potentially very problematic and dangerous pattern.
Because these concentrations of troops, often equipped with short-range ballistic missiles of Iranian origin and rockets, could serve as a response force to Iran if Jerusalem carried out an air operation aimed at destroying Iranian nuclear installations, a mission for which the IAF appears to be actively training.