(Adnkronos) – A “real risk of conflict escalation” exists in the Middle East amid the daily air strikes on Iran begun by United States and Israel last weekend and Tehran’s reprisal attacks on US allies in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region, Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani said on Thursday.
“There is a real risk of conflict escalation” in the Middle East following the Israeli-American operation against Iran and Iran’s subsequent retaliation,” Tajani told Italy’s lower house of parliament on Thursday.
“In the last few hours, there has been a negative development in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, with Iran carrying out indiscriminate attacks in retaliation, this morning also against Azerbaijan,” Tajani added.
Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry lodged an official protest with Iran’s embassy on Thursday after two Iranian drones flew across the border and injured two people at an airport in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, a landlocked exclave of Azerbaijan.
Amid speculation that US president Donald Trump wants Kurdish opposition groups to fight in Iran, Iran’s military said it targeted the headquarters of Iranian Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, stepping up strikes on Kurdish region in Iran and Iraq.
A day earlier, a US submarine sank an Iranian warship off Sri Lanka’s coast, killing at least 87 members of the ships’ crew.
