President Donald Trump said this week that the air war currently being waged against Iran by the United States and Israel might eventually have to include a ground game.
Yet Mr. Trump faces considerable domestic political pressures against American boots on the ground, so his phone calls this week to Kurdish leaders in Iraq and Iran, exhorting them to play their part in the war, have led to speculation that Kurdish armed forces might fulfill that role.
But any fervor among the stateless Kurds to join the fight for regime change – and Iranian Kurds have been looking forward to that day – would be weighed against the risk of once again being used and then abandoned by the U.S., various sources say.
Why We Wrote This
Once again, a crisis in the Middle East has the U.S. appealing for military help from the stateless Kurds, this time as boots-on-the-ground proxies in Iran. Affecting any desire to contribute is the memory of letdowns after vital roles played in Iraq and Syria.
Indeed, for the Kurdish minority leaders in Iran and Iraq who received Mr. Trump’s calls, there was first the rush of hearing from the president of the United States.
Add to that the thrill of a presidential summons to “rise up” against the Iranian Kurds’ nemesis in Tehran, the rulers of the Islamic Republic, who have been severely weakened by the U.S.-Israeli war.
But then, the fall. The initial enthusiasm was tempered, Kurdish sources and other experts say, by memory of a long history of “use ’em and drop ’em” treatment by Washington.
“This puts the Kurds in a serious dilemma,” says Yerevan Saeed, a scholar in residence at American University’s School of International Service in Washington. “Of course, there is at first enthusiasm at being called by the president,” he adds, “but there is also a wariness and the memory of betrayal by the U.S. in very similar circumstances.”
Legacy of Iraq and Syria
The Kurds have not forgotten President George H.W. Bush’s entreaty to Iraqi Kurds to rise up against a villainous and weakened Saddam Hussein in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. Nor the subsequent American silence when Saddam unleashed his massacring forces on rebellious Kurdish communities, who had already been victimized by Iraq’s notorious Anfal campaign in the late 1980s.
Moreover, the sting is still fresh from hearing the Trump administration’s Syria envoy, Tom Barrack, declare in January that the utility of a decade-plus-long U.S.-Kurdish pact to fight a resurgent Islamic State group in Syria had “expired.” The U.S. interest now, Mr. Barrack said, was seeing the new central government in Damascus consolidate power over the whole country – and over independent militia groups.
Groups such as Washington’s erstwhile partners, the Syrian Kurds.
“Too often, the Kurds are remembered only when their strength or sacrifice is needed,” said Iraqi first lady Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed in a statement on Thursday. “Leave the Kurds alone. We are not guns for hire.”
Before the Kurds do anything to put themselves at greater risk of attack from Tehran, however, “they would want firm guarantees of support from Washington,” Dr. Saeed says. “But even such commitments wouldn’t erase the doubts about trusting the U.S. based on past experience.”
Mr. Trump reportedly offered air support among other incentives during his phone calls with Kurdish leaders. On Sunday, he contacted Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, and Bafel Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, leaders of the two major political parties governing Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. On Tuesday, the president called Mustafa Hijri, head of the Iraq-based Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), one of six Kurdish anti-regime political parties.
The six groups recently formed a coalition to take military action jointly, though representatives say no decisions have been made. They say serious signs of U.S. air cover would have to come first. Iran has already issued severe threats against the Kurdish groups, and on Thursday launched missile attacks against their Iraqi headquarters.
On Wednesday, the PDKI issued a statement calling on all Iranian soldiers and military personnel, “especially in Kurdistan,” to abandon their bases and sever all ties with “the regime’s armed and repressive forces.” The statement echoed Mr. Trump’s promise of immunity, declared during the early hours of the war, to all elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other security forces turning against the regime.
40 million Kurds, no state
Globally, the Kurds number about 40 million people spread from Turkey and Syria to Iran, and are considered the world’s largest ethnic group without its own state. The closest they come is the group’s semi-autonomous region in Iraq.
Ismael Adnan/SOPA/Reuters
Iranian Kurds, concentrated in Iran’s northwestern Kurdistan region, make up about 10 percent of the country’s population of 90 million.
Why Washington would turn to the Kurds in its war against the Islamic Republic is no mystery. The Iranian Kurdish militias based across the country’s northern border have been poised for decades to return to Iran to fight the hated central government when the time was ripe.
Recent reports claim the CIA, which has maintained relations with various Kurdish armed forces across the Middle East, has stepped up arms supplies to Iranian Kurdish forces.
With President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week cracking open the door to an eventual ground campaign in the war, some experts speculate the Iranian Kurdish forces could step in to play a role.
“The Iranian Kurds very much want to go home to topple the regime, and the administration understands this and sees working with and through their land forces as a way to obviate the need for U.S. forces on the ground,” says David Schenker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.
“But, for the Kurds, it’s a very risky endeavor,” he adds. “They might get some level of operational support, but on the whole, these folks will be on their own.”
Also holding them back is the lack of clarity on the mission being asked of them, says Dr. Saeed, himself an Iraqi Kurd. Is the U.S. offering a role in a fight whose ultimate goal is regime change, he and others wonder, or does the U.S. envision the Kurds creating a distraction in northern Iran, thereby forcing the IRGC to respond and thin out its forces and potentially weaken its hold on other parts of the country?
“One concern would be if the Kurds could expect to get some long-term benefit and to advance their own objectives by joining the war,” he says, “or if they would be just a temporary utility that becomes disposable when other U.S. objectives are achieved.”
Pros and cons of an ethnic role
The U.S. would have its own concerns to take into account before throwing its weight behind the Iranian Kurds or any other Iranian ethnic minority group, others underscore.
“The risk for the U.S. is that a regime collapse aided by armed opposition groups could very quickly devolve into chaos,” says Mr. Schenker, who is now director of Arab politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “That could potentially fuel a number of post-regime problems, including a division of the state along ethnic lines.”
Others have offered more hopeful takes on how Iran’s ethnic groups, including the Kurds, could be encouraged to translate their experience as minorities navigating a hard-line religious autocracy into the promotion of a post-regime multiethnic democracy.
They note that, along with Iran’s students, it has sometimes been the country’s minorities that have sparked significant anti-regime movements. One example is how the 2022 arrest and killing of a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, over her refusal to wear the obligatory head covering in public, touched off a wave of women-led protests nationwide.
How the Kurds’ long, complicated relationship with the U.S. influences their role in the Iran war remains to be seen, but in the end, the positive side of the ledger of U.S.-Kurdish relations will likely outweigh the disappointments, Dr. Saeed says.
“The bitter experiences won’t be forgotten, but overall it’s still a win for the Kurds given what they have gained from their alliance with the U.S.,” he says. He points to the Kurdish semi-autonomous region in Iraq, which got off the ground under the protective umbrella of a U.S. no-fly zone enforced over the final years of Saddam’s regime.
Still, he says, “It comes down to what [former Kurdistan Region President Masoud] Barzani has said: ‘We really don’t have anyone to rely on. We have to depend only on ourselves.’”
