As Washington eschews “escalation” in the Middle East, Iran is veering from a policy of relying solely on proxies to achieve its military goals, attacking Iraqi and Syrian targets from its own soil. 

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said it launched 24 ballistic missiles at the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq, Erbil, and at ISIS camps in northern Syria. A Kurdish real estate tycoon, Peshraw Dizayee, and at least three family members were killed as his Erbil home was directly hit. 

The Iranian attack barely avoided hitting the recently minted American consulate at Erbil. While the Department of State condemned “Iran’s reckless missile strikes,” a spokeswoman for the national security council, Adrienne Watson, clarified that “no U.S. personnel or facilities” were targeted.   

“We will continue to assess the situation, but initial indications are that this was a reckless and imprecise set of strikes,” Ms. Watson added. Her statement was largely seen in the region as a signal that Washington would not react, even as by its “imprecise” nature the attack could have easily hit American personnel.

The Erbil attack was meant as “an Iranian warning for the Kurds: you’re getting too close to the Americans and the Israelis,” the president of American Friends of Kurdistan, Diliman Abdulkader, tells the Sun. He referred to the IRGC’s statement, claiming it successfully destroyed an Israeli espionage outpost at Erbil.

“To respond to the claim that there is a Mossad headquarters, we visited the place and toured every corner of this house, and everything indicates that it is a family house belonging to an Iraqi businessman from Erbil,” the Iraqi national security adviser, Qasim al-Araji, told reporters. In a rare move, Baghdad recalled its ambassador to Tehran in protest of Iran’s violation of Iraqi territory. 

The attack’s victim, Dizayee, was a real estate and security tycoon with business interests in Iraq, Dubai, and elsewhere in the region. His holdings are estimated at up to $2.2 billion. His killing was “a crime against the Kurdish people,” his ally, the Kurdish prime minister, Masrour Barzani, said. 

Competing Kursdish clans maintain ties with rival players in the region, deepening their divisions. Yet, most Kurds seek ties to America. A Kurdish faction known as the YPG is the top ally of U.S. forces fighting ISIS in Syria. The Brzani clan hosts the American consulate in northern Iraq. 

The U.S. decision to avoid responding just because its facilities were not hit signals to the Iranians that America doesn’t have the Kurds’ back, Mr. Abdulkader says. “That’s the message that the Iranians are sending as well,” he adds. “America is proving the point of the Iranians.” 

Claiming the target was a Mossad facility “fits well with the Iranian narrative,” a researcher of Iraq and Kurdistan at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center, Ofra Bengio, tells the Sun. “The Iranians are disinterested in a direct confrontation with America. This is convenient for both sides.”

In the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war, Senator Biden advocated a plan to divide the country into three entities, creating an independent Kurdistan in the north. Yet, as vice president, and now as president, “the Iraqi Kurds are much worse off,” Ms. Bengio says. 

The separate missile launch at Syria was meant to avenge a bombing, claimed by ISIS, of mourners at the gravesite of the IRGC commander, Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in 2019 by an American drone.

The IRGC attack against two neighboring countries came as America and allies are attempting to end the threat by an Iranian proxy, the Houthis, against Red Sea shipping, where 15 percent of world commerce sails. The U.S. launched a fresh attack on targets in Yemen Tuesday. 

“We assure our nation that the Guards’ offensive operations will continue until avenging the last drops of martyrs’ blood,” the IRGC said in a statement. It has long vowed to retaliate against America for the Soleimani hit and, more recently, against Israel for last month’s killing of its top commander in Syria, Brigadier General Razi Mousavi.

The Biden administration will at best launch limited attacks against the Houthis, or Iraqi and Syrian militias. After hitting Houthi launching sites last week, Mr. Biden said he sent a “private message” to Iran to avoid escalation.  

It may have been the wrong message. The time has come to target IRGC “drones and missile capabilities, since Iranian arms end up in the hands of its proxies,” an Iran researcher at Misgav, Yossi Mensharof, writes, calling to hit the “head of the octopus.”