Months before the start of the war in Iran, the US established contact with Iranian Kurdish groups. CNN, for example, reports that the CIA began arming these groups - both in Iran and in Iraqi Kurdistan. But on Wednesday, Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, said that reports that President Trump had approved some plan for an uprising involving the Kurds in Iran were “completely false“.
It seems that the goal is for Kurdish forces in Iran to lead an armed resistance against the regime. Kurdish groups have thousands of fighters along the Iran-Iraq border, and several of the armed groups have already made official statements hinting that military action will begin soon and even calling on Iranian military personnel to leave the ranks of the army. At the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is shelling Kurdish positions.
What the US hopes to achieve
A CNN source said the idea is for the Kurds to confront and hold Iranian security forces in order to facilitate protests by unarmed Iranians in major cities without resorting to violence against them, as happened during the large protests in January.
Alex Plitzas, a CNN analyst and former senior Pentagon official under former President Barack Obama, said the US is “quite clearly trying to start the process of overthrowing the regime by arming the Kurds, who are a historic US ally in the region“.
A US official says the Kurds could cause unrest and chaos in the region, forcing US forces to the Iranian regime to fight on several fronts and exhaust their military resources. Other ideas focus on whether the Kurds could seize and hold territory in northern Iran that would create a buffer zone for Israel. In recent days, the Israeli army has been striking Iranian military and police posts along the border with Iraq, in part to prepare the ground for a possible influx of armed Kurdish forces into northwestern Iran, one of the sources told the American media.
What problems could this plan cause
At first, Iraq had already said that it would not allow armed groups to cross the country's border into Iran to carry out "terrorist acts". This could become a serious problem for the operation. According to Middle East expert Jen Gavito, who worked at the US State Department under Joe Biden, arming the Kurds creates the conditions for a dangerous situation. She commented to CNN that these actions could undermine Iraq's sovereignty and empower armed militias who bear no responsibility and do not fully understand what processes their actions can trigger.
The Kurdish opposition groups in Iran are far from being armed enough to lead a real rebellion against the regime's security system. In addition, they are fragmented and have internal conflicts among themselves. “It is not so simple for the Americans to arm proxy groups to fight on their behalf. This is a group of people who also think about their own interests, and the question is do we want to interfere in this,” a representative of Donald Trump’s administration told CNN.
In front of the “New York Times”, representatives of the US cabinet stated that Washington has not yet made a final decision on whether to continue with this strategy, also because the final decision may not depend on the US or Israel at all, but on the hands of the Kurdish leadership. According to the sources of the American newspaper, there is another problem - the Persian population of Iran, in particular, is unlikely to welcome an armed Kurdish uprising. The Kurds in the country number between six and nine million out of a total of 90.
The long history of the US and the Kurds
The Kurds are an ethnic minority scattered across several countries - Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia. They do not have their own state - something they have been fighting for for years, but which all of these countries strongly resist. In recent years, the US has relied on Kurdish forces as part of its campaign to fight the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria. This has included taking responsibility for guarding thousands of detainees held by the terrorist group in makeshift camps in the north of the country.
But the US also has a reputation for having abandoned the Kurds. After the 1991 Gulf War, the United States encouraged a Kurdish uprising in Iraq, but then stood by as the Iraqi army massacred Kurdish forces. More recently, in Syria, after the fall of the Assad regime, the US has not supported the demands of the Kurdish minority and sided with Damascus' new leader, al-Sharaa, in his desire to integrate Kurdish forces into the country's army.
Author: Mina Kirkova