Witnesses said they saw a plume of smoke rising from the area. A U.S.-led military base in the Erbil International Airport vicinity was hit by a barrage of rockets in February that killed a non-American contractor working with the U.S. military.

Shortly before the rocket attack in Erbil, at least two rockets landed on and near a base to the west of the city that hosts Turkish forces, Iraqi security officials said.

Sirens at the U.S. consulate in Erbil blared during the airport attack, witnesses said. Erbil is the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq.

Rocket attacks that the United States blames on Iran-backed militia groups regularly target bases hosting U.S. forces and the embassy in Baghdad.

Turkey also has troops in Iraq both as part of a NATO contingent and a force that has attacked Kurdish separatist militants in the north.

The Iran-backed militias oppose both the presence of the United States and Turkey and demand a full withdrawal of all foreign troops.

The United States has sometimes responded with air strikes against Iran-aligned militias including on the Iraqi-Syrian border.

An air strike ordered by former president Donald Trump that killed Iran’s top commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 sent the region to the brink of a full-scale conflict. (Reporting by Ali Sultan and Amina Ismail; additional reporting by Alaa Swilam in Cairo; writing by John Davison in Baghdad; Editing by Leslie Adler and Grant McCool)