The Trump administration, bracing for more U.S. casualties and considering whether to put troops on the ground in Iran, has begun reaching out to Tehran’s domestic opposition as potential allies to foment an uprising against the regime.
In calls this week to Kurdish minority leaders in Iran and neighboring Iraq, President Donald Trump offered “extensive U.S. aircover” and other backing for anti-regime Iranian Kurds to take over portions of western Iran, according to multiple people familiar with the effort.
“The American request to the Iraqi Kurds is to open the way and not obstruct” Iranian Kurdish groups mobilizing in Iraq, “while also providing logistical support,” said a senior official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two major political parties that govern Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region.
“Trump was clear in his call” Sunday to PUK leader Bafel Talabani. “He told us the Kurds must choose a side in this battle — either with America and Israel or with Iran,” said the official, one of several Kurdish and U.S. officials who discussed sensitive matters on the condition of anonymity.
A senior official of the Kurdish Democratic Party, the other major Iraqi party whose leader, Masoud Barzani, was also called by Trump, confirmed that account, but said that “it’s not about who has more active armed militias” ready to move into Iran, “it’s about who has more support from inside.”
Trump also spoke Tuesday with Mustafa Hijri, head of the oldest Iranian Kurdish opposition party, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), whose organization declined requests for comment. PDKI is part of a coalition of six anti-regime Iranian Kurdish parties that last week announced its formation in a declaration from Iraqi Kurdistan. In a statement Wednesday, the party urged “all [Iranian] soldiers and personnel … especially in Kurdistan” to abandon their bases and withdraw their support from “the regime’s armed and repressive forces.”
The Iraqi Kurds, who have long provided refuge for their Iranian brethren on the condition they do not plot against Tehran, risk destroying a tenuous peace they have maintained with the Iranian regime if the U.S. and Israeli war efforts do not succeed.
Far more organized and powerful than the Kurds in Iran, they now have control over their own region and its economy despite long-standing internal conflicts and difficulties with the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad.
Like their Iraqi brethren, the Iranian Kurds have in the past focused on regional autonomy rather than secession or regime change.
Representatives of several parties in the Iranian Kurdish coalition denied rapidly spreading rumors late Wednesday that they had begun an invasion from Iraq. Those reports sparked what Iranian state media said was a “preemptive” strike that had destroyed targets in Iraq’s Kurdish region. On Thursday, Peshawa Hawramani, spokesman for Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, said the KRG “are not part of any campaign to expand the war and tensions in the region.”
In a statement later Thursday, the Iraq-based Iranian Kurdish coalition reported ongoing attacks on its political “bases and headquarters” and a number of deaths. Calling the regime’s missile and drone strikes “a sign of the weakness and deep fear,” the statement said the coalition “will strengthen our resolve to continue the fight for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and the liberation of Kurdistan.”
Trump has publicly called for anti-regime Iranians to rise up and take over their government, but has also suggested the possibility that cooperative elements of the existing regime could stay in place once its leadership is wiped out, a resolution similar to that the U.S. imposed on Venezuela after capturing its leader, Nicolás Maduro.
Asked about reports that the CIA would provide weapons to Iranian Kurdish groups, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that Trump “did speak to Kurdish leaders with respect to our base that we have in northern Iraq. But … any report suggesting that the president has agreed to any such plan is false and should not be written.”
The CIA declined to comment. The White House did not respond to questions about contacts with other Iranian opposition groups, including the Baluchi minority or the exiled group Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK).
A U.S. official cautioned that the extent of Kurdish cooperation with the U.S. remains to be seen, given Washington’s long history of enlisting their aid in various conflicts and then abandoning them.
“Could there be some opportunities to work together and our interests to be aligned, and do some things? Absolutely,” the U.S. official said. But the Kurds on both sides of the Iraq-Iran border are likely to wait to see “which way the wind is blowing” in the ongoing war, he said, adding that U.S. cooperation with them is “not totally cut and dry.”
The Kurds, in Iran numbering about 10 million across five western provinces, are also among the largest minorities in Iraq, Syria, and parts of Turkey. In each of those countries, they have fought politically and sometimes physically — often with U.S. support when it coincided with American objectives — against systematic marginalization and for the right to self-determination.
But they have just as often felt abandoned by Washington. Most recently, the U.S. lifted its support from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish group that had been America’s long-standing partner in countering the Islamic State in Syria as the Trump administration moved to partner instead with the new regime in Damascus.
Despite now joining political forces in coalition, the main Iranian Kurdish opposition groups have often been at odds among themselves — and with other opponents of the ruling regime in Tehran — raising questions about whether they would cooperate in forming a new government.
Only one in the alphabet soup of Iranian Kurdish groups — the PJAK, the Kurdistan Free Life Party — is believed to be significantly armed, largely through a relationship with the militant Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) based in Kurdish-majority regions of southeastern Turkey and northern Syria and Iraq.
“The challenge here is that the Iranian Kurdish fighters are limited in number and unlikely to receive broader support in non-Kurdish areas” of Iran, said Victoria Taylor, director at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East program and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran. “It seems like a recipe for ethnic discord.”
“The Iranian Kurds face a sort of entrapment,” said Gareth Stansfield, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of Exeter in Britain. “Just intimating that the Iranian Kurdish parties have received American support and are thinking about being the foot soldiers in Iran brings the attention of the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] onto western Kurdistan … a…sets them up to be a massive target of the regime.”
A U.S. decision to arm the Iranian Kurdish groups may not sit well with Turkey. After four decades of conflict with the Turkish government, the outlawed PKK agreed last year to disarm and is in the midst of a peace process with Ankara.
During the first five days of the conflict, it is Israel that has done most to prepare the ground inside Iran for a Kurdish uprising. In addition to killing leadership targets in Tehran, Israeli airstrikes have extensively targeted regime police and IRGC facilities in the western part of the country, while U.S. strikes have concentrated on missile launchers, airfields, warships, and other targets primarily in the south.
The Israelis have been “very systematically bombing military positions in Iranian Kurdistan … where they have done enormous damage to Iranian military capability,” said Henri Barkey, a Kurdish expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, who added that “this is clearly a very deliberate strategy” on the part of Israel.
“It’s also true that in the latest demonstrations” when anti-regime protests broke out across Iran in January, “the regime was very, very brutal in Kurdish areas,” Barkey said. “There is also that part of it — people really wanting to take revenge.”
In its Wednesday statement, the PJAK urged Kurds inside Iran to “be ready to face the consequences of the war and the policies of the Islamic Republic” and to “stay away from the regime’s military and security centers.”
For their part, Iraqi Kurds who have had their own up-and-down relationship with Washington, may question “the strength of U.S. support” for their Iranian brethren and be reluctant to provide support to an offensive that would risk Iranian retaliation, Taylor said.
Iraqi Kurdish leaders last year signed an agreement with Tehran promising to safeguard their part of the Iran-Iraq border against outside incursions. In a statement issued last week after the Iraq-based Iranian Kurdish groups announced their coalition, the KRG in semiautonomous northeastern Iraq said it would not allow its territory to be used as a “base for aggression against a neighbor.”
Both Talabani and KRG President Nechirvan Barzani also received calls Wednesday from Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Talabani “emphasized the importance of finding peaceful solutions to the issues and returning to dialogue to maintain stability in the Middle East, stating that all PUK efforts are within this framework,” a statement from his office said.
Araghchi, the statement said, thanked Talabani “for his role and influence in maintaining stability in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region” and “expressed respect for the PUK’s peaceful position in the region.”
Barzani’s office said both he and Araghchi “emphasized the protection of border security, in a manner that prevents any attempt to undermine the stability of the region and further complicate the situation.”
As the Iraqi Kurds struggle with whether to become directly involved in the expanding Iran war, their choices may become more limited. Strikes launched from both Iran and its proxy militias inside Iraq have targeted their capital city, Irbil, apparently to discourage support for the Iranian opposition.
“We are in a very delicate position,” the PUK official said. “If this [Iranian Kurd] ground offensive fails, we do not know what Iran’s reaction against the Kurdistan region of Iraq would be. At the same time, we cannot simply reject Trump’s request — especially when he personally calls and asks for it.”
