Baghdad - Iranian authorities have asked residents of Kurdish villages which lie near the borders with Iran to evacuate their homes, according to pamphlets distributed across the villages on Tuesday. Local sources said that the said flyers, written in Kurdish, instructed the Kurds to relocate in order to avoid damage that either ground or airborne military operations could cause to them during attacks against anti-Iranian fighters.
Sources in Hajj Omran town in the northern Arbil province had said Sunday that Iranian troops were massing along the north-eastern stretch of the Iran-Iraq border near Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.
The unnamed Kurdish source had said that Iranian forces looked about to launch a large-scale offensive targeting members of the Kurdish Workers' Party and the Party for Freedom and Life known as PJAK.
Members of the "rebel" groups, who fiercely oppose the governments of Iran and Turkey, are said to be based near mountains that stretch along the borders with Iran.
"Our enemies, mainly the Americans, are trying to plant security hurdles in our country (Iran)," Tuesday's flyers said. "They achieve this through using agents in the areas of Qandeel and Khaneera inside the Kurdish region."
"The authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran will work on cleansing this area," the flyers said.
Unconfirmed Iranian reports said that they succeeded in shooting down a helicopter involved in military manoeuvres in north-eastern Iran.
Military attacks targeting the two Kurdish groups are not uncommon. Only last Thursday, Iranian and Turkish forces shelled two northern Iraqi border cities in the autonomous region.
On the same day, a group of Kurdish villages were bombed while an intense Iranian strike on the province of Sulaymanyah was also reported.
Meanwhile, Jamal Abdullah, spokesman for the government of the Kurdish region, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur
