Al-Sulaymaniyah, Asharq al-Awsat - A high-level official in the Kurdish Peshmerga Affairs Ministry, has denied US reports about opening Kurdistan airspace for Israeli warplanes to attack the Iranian nuclear reactor.

The US Strategic Research and Studies Center in Washington recently published a 114-page report which included analyses and expectations by military analysts which concluded that "Israel intends to use the Kurdistan region's air space to launch lethal raids on the Iranian nuclear reactor."

Major General Jabbar Yawir, the Peshmerga Affairs Ministry's undersecretary and official spokesman of the region's protection forces, told Asharq Al-Awsat that "the federal authorities in Iraq are in charge of protecting the safety of all of Iraq's air space, including that of the region, under the Iraqi constitution. Moreover, Iraq has a strategic security agreement with the United States under which it undertakes to protect Iraqi airspace." He added that the "region's government does not have the technical resources for protecting the region's air space, such as antiaircraft weapons or radars that detect the identity of aircraft crossing its air space. Therefore the above report's contents are invalid and baseless."

Yawir also denied that there is any kind of relationship between the region and Israel and said "the region's relations with other countries are done through the federal authorities in Baghdad. Since Iraq has not established any organic relationship with the Hebrew State, then the region too does not have any kind of relations with it."