Last week, President Donald Trump spoke with Kurdish leaders of Iraq and Iranis reported to provide “US cover” and logistical support for armed groups crossing the border from Iraq to Iran to push out government forces. As one of these leaders said, his message was that “the Kurds must choose a side in this war – either with America and Israel or with Iran.”
Turning to the Kurdish minority, which is spread across many countries in the region, as America’s frontline fighters is a formula that has worked before, most recently in the fight against the Islamic State. But the plan seemed to fade this time, and at the end of the weekTrump changed his tone, telling reporters, “We don’t want to make the war any more difficult than it already is. I’ve removed that, I don’t want the Kurds to come in.”
The Kurds have not yet been able to launch an offensive, according to Abdullah Mohtadi, the leader of the Iranian Kurds in an undisclosed location abroad, with whom I spoke over the weekend. Mohtadi, secretary general of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, said there were “several thousand” fighters or peshmergas under their command in Iraq, and “tens of thousands” of young people in Iranian Kurdistan who would be ready to take up arms if given protection. But the Iranian regime was still too strong, even with the support of the United States, to take that position.
“For us to take any action, we need to have the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian government’s repressive forces weakened enough – weakened enough that the people in the cities rise up and the Peshmerga forces come in,” he said. “Before then, we’ll avoid it.”
Despite conflicting reports last week, Mohtadi said Kurdish fighters had not yet crossed the border into Iran, but were maintaining a “defensive position” in their bases in Iraq where they are under constant fire from Iranian drones and missiles.
The talks between Trump and the Kurds speak to one of the core tensions of the war. The US and Israeli airstrikes has been surprisingly successful in killing senior Iranian leaders and destroying critical infrastructure, but the air campaign is there historically it doesn’t fit well actually remove the government or force it to surrender. For that you need troops on the ground – and in Iran, the internal opposition is not well armed.
This left Washington focused on supporting Kurdish armed groups, as it had done many times in the past. Often called the largest tribe in the world without its own state, there is an estimated 25 million to 30 million Kurdsliving mainly in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
They have historically been marginalized and discriminated against – often worse – in all of those countries, including Iran, home to 10 million to 15 million Kurds who live in the country’s northwest, bordering Iraq and Turkey. In 2022, when an Iranian Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini passed away under suspicious conditions in detention after being arrested by Iran’s moral police, sparked nationwide protests and the Kurdish slogan “woman, life, freedom” was adopted by the Iranian opposition.
Across the Iraqi border, the Kurdish region in the north of the country has enjoyed the greatest degree of autonomy since the US imposed a no-fly zone after the first Gulf War in 1991. This part of Iraq is also home to several groups of exiled Kurds, who have recently formed a coalition to take over if the opportunity arises.
There have been media reports that Iraq Kurdish leaders they are reluctant to get involved in the current war between the US and Iran. “They have welcomed us for a long time, but they are tired of Iran’s threats,” Mohtadi said, noting that the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government, Erbil, which has a US military base, has been. under constant Iranian missile attacks since the war began.
Iran’s Kurdish forces, even with the full backing of the United States, are in no position to march on Tehran and topple the regime of the Islamic Republic. The goal in any military attack, instead, will be to restore safety and security in their own territory. Mohtadi denied, however, that the goal was to establish an independent nation.
“We see some reports that show us as separatists,” he said. “That is not true. We are for a democratic, non-religious, united Iran where the rights of the Kurds and other ethnic minorities are respected. What we want is a democratic Iran that is united, but at the same time decentralized in a federal system.”
Mohtadi also pushed back against the notion that supporting armed militias inside Iran could lead to civil war or regional devastation, saying it was the regime itself that was causing unrest at home and abroad.
“Who is firing missiles at neighboring countries? Who is killing their own people? Not us, not the Iranian opposition, not Iranian civil organizations, but the Revolutionary Guards,” he said.
There is an old saying that the Kurds, with a long history of guerrilla warfare in many countries, “have no friends but the mountains.” The United States has often had a warm relationship with the Kurds, but that friendship has limits. In the 1970s, the United States, working with the then-US-allied Iranian government, supported Kurdish groups fighting the Soviet-backed Iraqi government, then later withdrew that support, leading to massacres. “Secret action should not be confused with missionary work,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said. reflecting on what many saw as betrayal. A similar force was played during the The US urged the Iraqi Kurds to wake up during the first Gulf War.
Recently in Syria, Kurdish rebels worked closely with the US military to fight ISIS, establishing a semi-independent region in the northeast of the country in the process. In January, Syrian government forces, under US-backed President Ahmed al-Sharaa, overran much of the area. Instead of coming to their aid, the US asked their Kurdish allies to join the Syrian security forces. This briefly ended the Syrian Kurdish state known as Rojava. On Sunday Reuters articleSyrian Kurds have been quoted as warning their Iranian brethren against joining the US, only to be left when the geopolitical winds change.
Mohtadi interpreted this history in a different way, showing that it was US air support that allowed the establishment of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq (after the killing of thousands of Saddam Hussein’s airmen) and that protected Kurdish areas from the ISIS genocide in 2014.
“I have personally witnessed many events since 1991 that the United States helped the Kurds and saved them,” he said.
Although formed as a left-wing militant group before the Iranian revolution, Mohtadi’s Komala Party has remained moderate and pro-American throughout its decades in exile. Mohtadi expressed gratitude to the Trump administration, saying, “they fulfilled their promises and came to the aid of the Iranian people by attacking the Iranian regime and defeating them on the battlefield.”
It is still unclear what exactly prompted Trump’s change in aligning with the Kurds. It may be doubts about their military capabilities, concerns about unrest inside Iran, or repercussions from regional allies. (Turkey is persistent concern over the rise of Kurdish nationalism and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is an influential Trump ally.)
Mohtadi, who at the age of 76 has been a witness to many eras of Kurdish politics in many countries, says that this time of weakness for the Iranian regime is “a unique opportunity … not only for the Kurds but for all the Iranian people, and to change the face of the entire Middle East.”
How Trump will approach this moment in the coming days and weeks remains a mystery, as will what it will mean for Iranians of all ethnicities. At present, the plans do not appear to include any extravagant promises to support the Kurds. That leaves them in a familiar place: in the regional war they did not start, looking for a better way to cross the danger.
