Kurds May Help Bring Down Iran’s Regime

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

There are some 40-45 million Kurds worldwide, mostly clustered as minorities in geographically contiguous border areas of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria; of these, some 10-12 million live in Iran, bordering Iraq and Turkey. They comprise some 20 per cent of Iran’s population. They are the largest people in the Middle East without a state of their own.

For decades the Islamic republic has warned that the Kurds seek to break Iran apart, and those accusations have seeped into the national consciousness. The founder of the Islamic State, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called the Kurds secessionists. They had become his most indomitable opposition. Being Sunni Muslims, they also undermined the uniformly Shi’ite universe he envisioned for Iran.

By the 1980s, the regime had arrested, imprisoned, or executed most of the leadership of Iran’s political movements. Yet the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI), despite the blows it had suffered, survived as a clandestine but intact political organization.

Its leader, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, was a charismatic polyglot with a doctorate in economics and political science from the University of Prague. At the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, a weakened Tehran feared for its survival. Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his murder. He was assassinated in Vienna in 1989.

Over the decades, ordinary Kurds have suffered disproportionately high numbers of imprisonments and executions in Iran. Now the Kurds once again face the prospect of leading the fight against the regime. Many have already begun readying themselves for that possibility.

Since the 2003 Gulf war, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime was destroyed, Iraqi Kurds have governed their own de facto state in northern Iraq. As the American-Israeli attack on Iran began in late February, President Donald Trump on March 1 phoned the two leaders of the Iraqi Kurdish autonomous government, longtime rivals Bafel Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani.

Talabani has traditionally been aligned with Tehran, while Barzani has long been considered a CIA asset. Observers believe that Trump offered them arms and funds if they initiated attacks on Iran’s Kurdish-populated border provinces, with American or perhaps Israeli air cover.

Iranian ballistic missiles and drones have landed in or near the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, targeting American or Israeli military assets as well as in the Peshmerga (Kurdish Iraqi military) camps. But neither Talabani nor even Barzani is likely to want to send Iraqi Kurdish troops to fight in Iran unless the Islamist regime is clearly on the verge of collapse. Last year, the Iraqi Kurds had signed an agreement with Tehran to protect the border with Iran against the entry of hostile elements into the Islamic Republic.

But on Feb. 22, nearly a week before the U.S. and Israel launched their joint military strikes, five Iranian Kurdish opposition parties announced they’d formed a unified front against Tehran. The press conference in Erbil generated little attention at the time. But as the war has continued, and the regime’s military forces grew depleted, the Kurdish regions of the country are voicing their intent to be the first to formally break from Tehran.

Mohammad Nazif Qadri, a member of the executive committee of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), stated that the alliance was established under the name Alliance of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan. The PDKI has fought an intermittent insurgency against Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They supported the nationwide protests across Iran in January and organized a general strike across 39 cities and towns in Iranian Kurdistan.

The other four members are the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), the Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan, and the Organization of Iranian Kurdistan Struggle (Sazmani Khabat). PJAK, the coalition's most formidable military component, accounted for an estimated 70 per cent of all Kurdish attacks on Iranian forces between 2014 and 2025. PAK claimed strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) positions in January.

They have been using their safe haven in Northern Iraq to enter Iran and expand into regions no longer under Iranian military or IRGC control. They think the scale of the American and Israeli strikes on Iranian government targets in these outer provinces, including Iranian Kurdistan, will eventually force Tehran to pull back.

“We believe there will be a vacuum of power in Iran and Kurdistan. So the Kurdish forces are preparing to enter Kurdistan, to fill the vacuum of power there,” declared Taimoor Aliassi, Executive Director and UN Representative of Kurdistan Human Rights-Geneva (KMMK-G) and President of the Impact Iran Coalition. But, as Baba Sheikh Hosseini, the secretary general of Sazmani Khabat, explained, “It’s not possible for one minority to remove the Iranian regime.”