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The blast from the drone was so powerful that it flung Goran Mahdi and Hamed Hakimpour across the room.
“It was like a dream, a flashing moment, there was no sound,” Mr Mahdi, 43, recalled.
“I thought that because the first drone didn’t kill me, another drone would strike. But another one didn’t come,” Mr Hakimpour, 37, added, now sitting in a squat cream house tucked down a side street of the Iraqi Kurdish capital, Erbil. “When I was running [out], all my clothes were on fire. I put out some of the flames with my hand that was still OK. I was bleeding,” he said, gesturing with a heavily bandaged hand.
Mr Mahdi, 43, and Mr Hakimpour, 37, survived the drone strike on a base belonging to Khabat, an armed Iranian Kurdish dissident group in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region on March 13. Two of their fellow fighters did not.
The two men were both born in western Iran, but fled their home country around seven years ago to join Khabat. It is one of an array of mostly left-leaning Iranian Kurdish armed groups who have for decades lived in exile in neighbouring Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region.
Kurds make up around 10 per cent of Iran’s population and, like the country’s other ethnic minorities, have long reported discrimination at the hands of the government in Tehran. Those in Iraq's Kurdistan region have scattered bases, families and residency permits; some of them are stateless, having been born in exile, and unable to obtain either Iranian or Iraqi passports.
In the initial days of the war, it suddenly seemed as though the US and Israel’s air campaign in Iran would be supplemented by boots on the ground – the armed Iranian Kurdish dissidents.
Reports flowed out of the CIA providing them with weapons; of imminent preparations for an armed offensive across the imposing Zagros Mountains, which form a natural border between Iran and Iraq. Heavy US and Israeli air strikes on Iranian military targets on the other side of the border appeared to pave the way. On March 5, US President Donald Trump said he would be, “all for it” if Iranian Kurds wanted to launch an offensive, without detailing the extent of a possible US role.
The groups in Iraqi Kurdistan saw an opportunity. With foreign backing, they might finally be able to return home to topple the regime in Tehran that forced them to flee in the first place. Earlier this year, as the drumbeat of a US conflict with Iran grew louder, most of them joined forces as the Alliance of Political Parties of Iranian Kurdistan, attempting to put aside years of internal disputes to form a better political front.
Trump’s U-turn
The head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service Mossad proposed plans for an Iranian Kurdish ground invasion to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Washington before the war, Israel’s Channel 12 reported this week.
The plan was rooted in the idea that the Islamic Republic would not fall by air power alone. An Iranian Kurdish ground offensive would keep Iranian regime security forces occupied, allowing unrest to spread, weakening and possibly toppling the Islamic Republic, the thinking went.
“My sense is that there were some plans to use Kurdish groups and encourage them to move from Iraq to Iran, to divert some of the capabilities and attention of Iran’s security forces” to the country’s north-west, Raz Zimmt, an Iran specialist at the Tel Aviv based Institute for National Security Studies, and long-time Iran watcher in the Israeli military told The National. “Perhaps it would give some encouragement to other sectors inside Iran to rise up.”
But widespread push-back from Iran, as well as US allies such as the Iraqi Kurds and Turkey, meant the idea did not stick.
By March 7, Mr Trump said Washington did not want “to make the war any more complex than it already is” and added that “I don’t want the Kurds going in”. When asked detailed questions about planning for a possible ground offensive, the White House referred The National back to Mr Trump's public comments. Centcom declined to comment and the CIA did not respond to a request for comment.
The Iranian Kurdish groups don’t deny that they have long-standing contact with western governments – some have offices in the US and Europe. Nor do they deny having readied themselves for a ground offensive. The groups collectively have an unknown number of fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan – somewhere in the thousands – but say they have many more waiting covertly inside Iran.
But three Iranian Kurdish commanders and two senior Iraqi Kurdish officials described preparations for an imminent US-backed ground offensive as exaggerated.
“Although our party has a broad social base and sufficient manpower in Iran, up to this point no foreign government has officially and seriously provided support to arm and strengthen us,” Omed Taheri, a central committee member of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, told The National. “Although we have connections with the United States government and maintain an official office in Washington, to my knowledge these cooperations have not extended to military matters.”
From the Khabat house in Erbil, the group’s leader Baba Sheikh said that “nothing happened”.
“We didn’t talk about anything,” he told The National, over large bags of nuts and saffron infused tea. “We didn’t have talks with America so that they would be able to say whether we go in or not. It was just in the news,” he said.
In Koya, a town in Iraqi Kurdistan home to bases of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), commander Karim Parvizi said he was not aware of the reasons why Mr Trump U-turned on his support for an offensive by his group and others.
Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan
The PDKI, the oldest and one of the better organised of the Iranian Kurdish groups, has been “waiting for our people to rise up” inside Iran, which would be a prompt for the armed groups to “rebel against the regime,” Mr Parvizi said.
“We see it that if the circumstances are such that it’s necessary, we will enter a phase where we go in with weapons against this regime,” he added. “Up until now we haven’t made that assessment.”
Inside Iran, as the regime holds on to power, the idea of a popular uprising is remote for now. Despite heavy US and Israeli strikes on military and security bases, the regime has doubled down on efforts to prevent unrest, not least in the Kurdish-majority areas on which a ground offensive would focus. It has deployed paramilitaries in the streets and threatened and arrested people accused of working for the US or Israel, according to Iranian state media, human rights organisations based outside the country and accounts provided to The National in recent weeks.
The state has encouraged nightly pro-government rallies in the streets of Iranian cities, dominating public spaces. The nightly air strikes notwithstanding, for most Iranians, the cost of protesting against their government at the moment outweighs the potential gain.
The Iranian Kurds know well that the Islamic Republic is willing to put down any sort of popular uprising with force. In January, the largest anti-government protests in the country’s modern history were met with a brutal crackdown that killed at least 7,000 people, according to human rights organisations outside Iran, and maybe tens of thousands more, media reports said.
“The cleric-led government of Iran will spare no effort to remain in power,” Mardin Zahidi, Khabat’s diplomatic relations officer told The National. “When you see it is under stress, it's like a hamster that feels threatened and eats its own babies.”
Regional pushback
In the initial days of the war, President Trump spoke with two senior Iraqi Kurdish politicians, Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani, to scout out their views on the how the conflict might proceed, news reports from the time and Iraqi Kurdish officials confirmed.
But as reports aired, the idea of an immediate Iranian Kurdish offensive, Iraqi Kurds quickly pushed back. Iran and aligned militias had already been launching drones towards territory under Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, prompting fear, an airspace closure and the shut-in of key oil and gasfields that supply the backbone of government revenue and power supplies. Iranian Kurdish bases had already come under drone and missile attack, like the one that injured Goran Mahdi and Hamed Hakimpour from the Khabat group.
Iraqi Kurdish leaders knew that the idea of Iranian dissidents crossing the border from territory under their control would prompt an even more forceful response from Tehran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s most powerful military force, expressly said so in threats posted on social media.
There were “no preparations,” and the Kurdistan Region was not going to act as a “gate to enter Iran,” Darbaz Rasool, a senior official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two main political parties in the Kurdistan Region’s coalition government, told The National.
senior Iraqi Kurdish official
An armed uprising by Iranian Kurds would “not work,” he added. “It’s going to backfire on the Kurds. That's my own assumption.”
It was not just the idea of being on the receiving end of a violent blowback that put Iraqi Kurds off the idea. Knowing the huge human cost of being the boots on the ground, they rejected what they widely saw as being used by Washington, which has a history of arming Kurdish groups in Iraq and Syria. In the latter, a decade of co-operation essentially expired when Washington decided to shift its co-operation with Syrian Kurdish groups and instead back Ahmad Al Shara’s nascent government in Damascus.
“Leave the Kurds alone. We are not guns for hire,” Iraqi First Lady Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed, a Kurd, said in a statement rejecting the idea of US backing for an Iranian Kurdish ground offensive.
That push-back prompted a rethink of Iranian Kurdish willingness to go in.
“We have of course planned for a ground invasion, but we didn’t do anything because of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq,” Jwansher Rifaati, Suleimaniyah province representative for the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), another of the Iranian Kurdish groups, told The National, from a base comprising breezeblocks and sandwich panel buildings in a curve of a rushing river. “If we make a move, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq will come under severe attack; that’s the main reason we haven’t gone in.”
Other key players were also unhappy about the idea. The day before Trump publicly shelved his support for an Iranian Kurdish ground offensive, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said he had spoken to his US counterpart Marco Rubio and shared Ankara’s disquiet.
As Turkey has done so throughout the war, he blamed Israel for egging the US on into a more complex conflict.
“Israel has been using Kurdish groups in the region as proxies for many years,” Mr Fidan added. “There is no making up for such a mistake.”
Neighbouring Turkey has long opposed the idea of arming Kurdish groups because of its own four-decade struggle with insurgents from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) at home, and concerns over any move that could encourage Kurdish separatism. The involvement in a possible ground offensive of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), which is widely seen as the PKK’s Iranian branch, would also be a blow to a continuing dissolution and disarmament of the group in Turkey. Giving them weapons would directly counter those efforts, and undermine what Ankara is presenting as a major step towards ending a 40-year conflict.
“The transformation of Iraqi Kurdistan into an ‘operational platform’ would not be seen by Ankara as merely a tactical development, but rather as a strategic rupture capable of disrupting regional balances,” Bilgay Duman, a Turkish political analyst focusing on Iraq, told The National.
Many Iranians are also opposed to the idea. Iranian Kurdish dissident groups do not represent all Kurds in the country. Even among themselves, their ideas about what should replace the Islamic Republic vary from a fully independent Kurdistan, to an autonomous region, to devolved regional powers within a federal system.
In their eyes, both Iran’s former monarchy and the current Islamic Republic promoted the idea that ethnic minorities necessarily have separatist ideals to justify oppressing on them.
There are also very diverse views among Iran's wider 93-million strong, ethnically diverse population about how their country should be governed.
While regime change is not imminent, the differing views point to the fractured nature of ideas among Iranians about what might replace the Islamic Republic.
Many Iranians who oppose both the Islamic Republic and the monarchy are also wary about the sort of federalism promoted by Iranian Kurdish groups.
“Many Iranians will see any backing of the Kurdish militias as a threat to their territorial integrity and as potentially fanning the flames of a civil war in Iran, and are thus extremely wary of it,” Arash Azizi, a New York-based historian and writer, told The National. “Even some diehard opponents of the regime told me they might even back the regime against the militias if they see it as leading to the break-up of Iran.”
It is democratic conditions that would lead to better governance of Iran, rather than a federal system, he said. He pointed to the examples of Ethiopia and Russia, where federalism has bred disintegration and allowed authoritarianism to thrive.
Democratic conditions would allow Iran’s ethnic minorities to push for increased power at the centre. “Conversely, an undemocratic federal system, like Russia for instance, won’t allow genuine representation,” he added. “So it’s democracy that matters, not federalism.”
Iraqi Kurdish leaders are also aware that the sort of autonomous region they carved out, initially with the help of a US no-fly zone in the early 1990s, and later formalised following the 2003 US-led invasion, might not work in Iran.
“You can't pretext [and] say what we have in Kurdistan region applies to Rojava, to Turkey, to Rojhalat – Iran – because it’s totally different,” Darbaz Rasool of the PUK said, using Kurdish names for various Kurdish-majority parts of surrounding countries. “The system is different, the culture is different, the state is different. So you need to respect that.”
Long-standing grievances and risky plans
Even without crossing the border, Iranian Kurdish guerrilla fighters are under fire, as the strike that injured Goran Mahdi and Hamed Hakimpour shows. Five members of the groups have been killed in Iran-backed drone and missile attacks since the war started.
But the military powers of the IRGC and other Iranian military groups has not put them off wanting to join a ground offensive, if it ever were to take place.
“With the way we want to achieve freedom, of course there will be martyrs, and people will be injured,” Mr Mahdi told The National. “That’s not a reason for us to be scared and say, ‘OK, let’s pull back’. On the contrary, our will becomes even stronger, because they took martyrs from us, so we have to continue their path. If we don’t, their blood will have been spilt in vain, and it will weigh on my conscience.”
One new Khabat recruit, who is just 20 years old, crossed the border from Sanandaj in western Iran just five days before the countrywide protests in January. Motivated by a desire to fight for his people’s rights, he also described dire economic circumstances in Iran as a major reason for widespread unhappiness. His income working in shops was just enough to cover essentials. “I couldn’t think about the future,” the man said, without giving his name.
He described a mixture of joy, fear and worry about the war having started so soon after he left his country.
“But I’m not that worried, my worry has almost gone,” he said. “There is a worry that people die or that there is mass killing.” An internet blackout inside Iran means that dissidents in Iraqi Kurdistan have largely been unable contact their relatives since the war began. For the strawberry blond-haired 20 year old, that was not such an issue. “We had issues before anyway so we didn’t speak much,” he said. “So this is normal.”
Some are confident about their ability to take on the Islamic Republic, partly because, they claim, they would be joined by many members working covertly with them from inside Iran.
“We will be successful. They [Iran] cannot defeat us in a ground invasion,” Mr Rifaati of the Kurdistan Freedom Party said. “We are doing our best not to cause threats to the KRG, that’s why we haven’t launched a ground invasion so far.”
But other leaders ultimately say that an insufficient weakening of the regime over nearly five weeks of US and Israeli military operations inside Iran also means that the timing is not right.
“So far, the force of internal repression has not suffered a severe blow, the people of Kurdistan and Iran are waiting for the right opportunity,” Mr Taheri of the Komala party said.
Global attention has shifted to a possible US marine operation on Iran’s oil export hub at Kharg Island in the country’s south. But Israeli officials have also renewed the idea that they would like to put Iranian boots on the ground.
“I think that we need boots on the ground but they’ve got to be Iranian boots, and I think they’re coming,” Israeli ambassador to Washington Yechiel Leiter told CNN earlier this month, without detailing specifics.
The Israeli Mossad did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr Parvizi of the PDKI said he “had not heard” of any plans for Israel stepping in to arm Iranian Kurdish groups in the place of the US.
For now, the Iranian Kurdish groups are waiting. They may not be going back to Iran any time soon. But nor are they likely to leave Iraqi Kurdistan for a more far-flung exile elsewhere.
Tehran has long placed pressure on both the Kurdistan Regional Government and Baghdad to eject them, so far to little avail. For now that is unlikely to happen, not least because some of the groups have been in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq long before its regional government took on its current form.
“We are not going do that [tell them to leave] because they are our people,” Mr Rasool of the PUK said.
A ground offensive might not be around the corner. But the idea of taking up arms against the Islamic Republic is never far from the Iranian Kurdish groups’ minds.
“Obviously, we have weapons,” Baba Sheikh of Khabat said. “If you want to farm, you clearly have to have farming equipment. If you want to wage war, you absolutely must have the necessary gear.”
