Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Photo: Wikipedia.

A Kurdish commander revealed to the London-based Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat on Monday an Iranian plan to take over the oil-rich Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Mosul.

The plan, said Hussein Yazdan Bana, the commander of the military wing of the Iranian Kurdish Freedom Party, would have begun with either Iran or its Shia militia proxies operating in Iraq seizing the town of Tuz Khormato, a town in the center of the Tooz District in the country’s Saladin Province. However, Bana said, the Kurdish Peshmerga’s liberation of Sinjar a few days earlier had cut off Iran’s path.

He noted that officers from the Iranian Revoutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force were directly overseeing operations in Tuz Khormato by its Shia militia proxies against Kurdish civilians. He said the IRGC-QF had deployed approximately 23 Iranian snipers on rooftops in the town, which has witnessed severe tensions between the Kurds and the Iranian-proxy Shia militias that make up the so-called “Popular Mobilization Forces.”

Bana also revealed that an IRGC-QF commander, Aghai Iqbali, had arrived in the area on Friday, accompanied by two high-ranking IRGC-QF’s officers, via Baghdad airport. According to Bana, they were immediately taken to Tuz Khormato to oversee operations there.