Iran’s revolutionary guard ridiculed recent Western reports, which claimed that some of the Iranian missiles that were fired last week at Islamic State targets in Syria, fell short from reaching their destination, as they fell in the Iraqi desert. The airspace division chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said that the projectiles launched were two-stage missiles and that Iran coordinated the fall of their engines in the Iraqi desert in advance. The Iranian general further noted that the United States may have been informed beforehand about the Iranian attack, as Tehran informed the Russian military of its intension to launch the six missiles, which may have relayed the information to their American counterparts.
Iran said the strikes were in retaliation for the attack by five terrorists linked to the Islamic State that stormed Iran’s parliament and a shrine of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini earlier this month, killing at least 18 Iranians and wounding more than 50. Iranian officials also declared the ‘successful ballistic missile attack’ in Syria as a ‘deterrent message to the enemies of the Islamic Republic’, “not to test Tehran’s resolve,” including the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel, among others.