DUBAI, January 17. /TASS/. Iraq’s armed forces are ready to respond to external attacks, the country’s Defense Minister Thabet Muhammad Saeed Al-Abbasi said.

"Our forces are ready to respond to external attacks," he pointed out in an interview with the Al-Hadath TV channel.

According to him, the Iraqi military prevented a number of attacks on the Kurdistan autonomous region in northern Iraq. However, Al-Abbasi did not specify who had planned to conduct those attacks.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) carried out ballistic missile strikes on several targets in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, in the early hours of January 16. According to an IRGC statement, the bombing targeted several terrorist sites in Erbil in response to recent attacks inside Iran. Tehran added that the attack had destroyed "the main headquarters" of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency Mossad in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.