ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – An alleged drone attack targeted a car belonging to a senior Iranian Kurdish opposition official in Sulaimani on Wednesday, killing at least two occupants, a member of the Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan said, with the Kurdistan Region Security Agency (Asayish) denying the claim and insisting the incident was an accident.

Footage received by The New Region on Wednesday showed a car overturned and on fire on the Dukan road in Sulaimani around 8:00 pm. 

"On the Sulaimani-Doukan road, an attack was carried out on the vehicle of Omar Ilkhanizadeh, Deputy Secretary of the Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan,” Mukhtar Ahmadi, the Iranian opposition group member, told The New Region on Wednesday. 

Ahmadi said that “one Komala peshmerga named Hersh Ranjbari was martyred, and three other peshmerga were wounded.”

Iraqi state media later updated the death toll from the incident to two, with The New Region having learned that the second deceased individual was named Aram Bahrami.

He added that Omar Ilkhanizadeh was not in the targeted vehicle but was in a separate car and survived the incident.

A car belonging to a senior official of the Iranian opposition Kurdish group Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan was targeted by a suspected drone attack on Wednesday near Sulaimani, killing one person and injuring three others, a member of the group told The New Region pic.twitter.com/DChZFOt7pN

— The New Region (@thenewregion) February 18, 2026

“The rumors circulating about an explosion involving a car at the Kulawanan roundabout are far from the truth. The incident occurred due to a vehicle rollover, after which the car caught fire and exploded, causing one of the passengers to be burned and lose their life,” Karzan Sherko, spokesperson for the Asayish, told The New Region.

An investigation into the incident has now begun, he continued. 

Several Iranian opposition groups are based in the Kurdistan Region, with Iran having frequently carried out cross-border attacks into the Kurdistan Region to target the groups, which seek greater rights for Iran’s marginalized Kurdish population and have fought an on-and-off conflict with the Islamic Republic for decades.

In Janauary, an alleged Iranian drone attack on a Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) base in Erbil killed at least one of its members and injured several others. 

Iran considers the Kurdish groups threats to its national security, repeatedly calling on the Kurdistan Regional Government to stop them from using the border areas as a launchpad for attacks; however, the Kurdish parties in question have time and again claimed that they are in a state of self-defense and have not provoked Tehran.

In 2023, Iraq and Iran signed a security agreement under which Baghdad pledged to disarm and relocate these Iranian Kurdish opposition groups from border areas, following repeated warnings from Tehran.

Updated at 23:06 with new death toll