Report: US Exploring Kurdish Role In Ground Operations Against Iran

Years back, I wrote a policy piece advocating for covert U.S. operations in Iran to leverage the country’s many ethnic divisions. I described numerous (often) armed Iranian ethnic groups opposed to the regime that would be happy to fight the Mullahs and help bring about the regime’s downfall.

Among them are the Kurds in northwestern Iran and their counterparts in northeastern Iraq.

The Kurds are a large ethnic group spread out among different nation-states without an official state of their own. The majority of an estimated 25-30 million Kurds live across parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia.

Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims.

Sadly, no one pursued this option until now. But President Trump appears to be looking at the Kurds to help topple the evil Islamist regime in Tehran.  

The Trump team is in talks with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about giving them U.S. military support. On Tuesday, Trump spoke with the president of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI).

KDPI has been frequently targeted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Before that, on Sunday, Trump called Iraqi Kurdish leaders to discuss the U.S. military operation in Iran and how the U.S. and Kurds could work together moving forward.

Arming Iranian Kurdish groups would need buy-in from the Iraqi Kurds to let the weapons cross the border and use Iraqi Kurdistan as a launching ground for operations.

Iraqi government officials insist that Kurdish forces in Iraq will not participate or support attacks on Iran. Still, the effort, led by the CIA, appears to be moving forward.

According to CNN:

…the idea would be for Kurdish armed forces to take on the Iranian security forces and pin them down to make it easier for unarmed Iranians in the major cities to turn out without getting massacred again as they were during unrest in January.

…the Kurds could help sow chaos in the region and stretch the Iranian regime’s military resources thin. Still other ideas have centered around whether the Kurds could take and hold territory in the northern part of Iran that would create a buffer zone for Israel.

Others claim an uprising by Iranian Kurdish opposition factions would seek to control western Iran, referred to by Kurds as “Rojhelat,” creating a base for further offensives against Iran.

U.S. and Israeli jets have reportedly conducted extensive strikes against the IRGC, as well as the Iranian army and intelligence facilities, in Kurdish-majority areas such as Banah, Kermanshah, Mariwan, and Sanandaj.

CNN quoted Alex Plitsas, a former senior Pentagon official under former President Barack Obama, as saying that the U.S. “is clearly trying to jump-start” the process of Iranians overthrowing the regime by arming the Kurds.

Plitsas added:

The Iranian people are generally unarmed as a whole and unless the security services collapse, it’ll be difficult for them to take over unless someone arms them,”. “I believe the US is hopeful that this will inspire others on the ground in Iran to do the same.”

President Trump has reportedly assured Turkey that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is outlawed as a “terrorist” group there, would not assume a dominant role in any prospective Kurdish entity in Iran.

American forces partnered with Kurdish Peshmerga forces fighting Saddam Hussein’s army and later ISIS terrorists near the Iranian border. The U.S. also has a consulate in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and U.S. and coalition troops are based there now as part of the anti-ISIS campaign.

Sadly, as part of America’s long, complex history working with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, we have made some dishonorable decisions. Among them was Team Trump’s unpopular decision in his first term to suddenly pull U.S. forces that were supporting the Kurds out of Syria.

I criticized this decision at the time. And Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis resigned in part because of what he viewed as an abandonment of our Kurdish allies there.

So, as Plitsas noted: “There is a concern that if an uprising is unsuccessful and the U.S. withdraws, it will add to the narrative of abandoning the Kurds.”

The senior Kurdistan Regional Government official said that part of the problem is that “one day Trump says we will overthrow the regime, the next day he says something different.”

Iranian Kurdish parties are reportedly asking for political assurances from the Trump administration before committing to joining any resistance effort.

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