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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran | |
| Keep the Kurds Out of the Iran War | |
| 2026-04-22 | |
| [JOHNKASSNEWS] In early March 2026, mere days into the United States and Israel's latest war against Iran, various news outlets reported that President Donald Trump had engaged directly with Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish leaders to promote an uprising spearheaded by Iran's Kurdish minority against the Iranian regime. The White House denied these assertions. On March 6, a Reuters exclusive reported that Israel, which has its own contacts with Iranian Kurds, was backing their plans to seize Iranian territory. The next day, however, Trump declared that he had "ruled out" Kurdish participation in the war. "I don't want to see the Kurds going in…we don't want to make the war any more complex than it already is," he said. Naturally, the picture of who is doing what to whom, the tactical options, and questions as to whether and to what extent the U.S. and Israel actually have the same strategic objectives in this war, including with respect to Kurds, are murky and subject to change. But why the concern about complexity when it comes to the Kurds? After all, along with some skeptical reporting and analysis highlighting the dangers of supporting a Kurdish rebellion in Iran‐in marked contrast to media cheerleading for the U.S. partnership, launched under President Barack Obama, with the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)‐there is a narrative in Western and Israeli outlets that Kurdish participation in the war would be crucial to success not only against the Iranian regime but for long-term Israeli security, and that Kurds can be deployed for precise war aims. From this perspective, it is almost as if "the Kurds" constitute an object of uniform density with immutable attributes and capabilities, to be manipulated at will. Under the circumstances, it is perhaps a good time to look at some of those underlying complexities of the regional Kurdish issue, particularly characteristics that by and large have been only superficially covered or even ignored in Western media. What happens in the Iranian provinces of Kordestan, Kermanshah, and other Kurd-populated regions of northwestern Iran, known in Kurdish as Rojhelat, or the East‐just as the predominantly Kurdish areas in northern Syria are known as Rojava, or the West, among Kurds everywhere‐is unlikely to stay there. These dynamics could potentially have a profound effect on stability in Iran and across a vast swath of western Asia and the Middle East, with major implications for U.S. strategic interests in the region for decades to come. First, some relatively recent history. For centuries, Kurds were a vital element of the neighboring Ottoman and Safavid empires. These two great Islamic, multiethnic states achieved stable bilateral relations in the 17th century following an era of geopolitical conflict and shrewd Ottoman diplomacy, ultimately establishing a border that delineates the territories of predominantly Sunni Turkey and Shia Iran even today. From then until the 20th century the great majority of Kurds lived under the Ottoman aegis. But with the defeat and division of the Empire by the victorious Western powers at the end of the First World War‐often referred to in shorthand, derisively, as the "Sykes-Picot" process‐Ottoman Kurdish homelands were given over to what after the end of the postwar Mandate period became the new states of present day Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, the new, modernized Turkish state, founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in successful resistance to postwar foreign encroachments, retained most of the Kurdish areas. These states, and Iran, to one degree or another attempted with only limited success to terraform their societies along Western-influenced, rigidly secularist and nationalist lines. The "Kemalists" of Turkey were perhaps the most enthusiastic in pursuit of wholesale ideological, revolutionary change, fearful that any recognition of Kurdish interests posed an existential threat to the Kemalist state-building project. For their part, Kurds never fully accommodated to the postwar order. They began almost immediately to rebel against the new authorities, whose suppression of Kurdish institutions and identity persisted at varying levels of intensity and ruthlessness throughout the 20th century. While recently there has been considerable change and improvement in the situation of the Kurds‐notably the de facto end of the Kemalist ideological regime at the hands of the current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the emergence of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) as a significant regional actor, and most recently in Syria with the agreements between Kurdish groups and interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa formally establishing Kurdish rights for the first time in that country‐profound challenges remain, particularly in present-day Iran. Today, of all the subplots of the Iran war, the Kurds and their political, cultural, and religious aspirations present among the most far-reaching implications not only for Iran but also for Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, a NATO ally and an increasingly important regional power. These countries have sizable Kurdish populations‐often connected by tribes, conscious of their shared Kurdishness but highly competitive and fractious‐that extend across the modern borders of these states. Today, most of the world's 30 to 40 million Kurds live in and are citizens of Turkey, with roughly 8 million and 10 million in Iraq and Iran, respectively. There are another 2 million Kurds in Syria, mostly in the areas along the Turkish border. Since the 1990–91 Gulf War, which brought new attention to the region, Kurds of various backgrounds have become more open and ardent in expressing their long-suppressed sense of Kurdish identity and nationalist sentiment, even when disagreeing among themselves as to what, precisely, some of the pillars of that identity are. Certainly, as reflected in Western media, there is a Western tutelary preference for what "the Kurds" ought to be, the legacy of a deeply-rooted and institutionalized interest among elites in spreading "democracy" and American influence in the Middle East. While reportage occasionally notes that there are different Kurdish organizations and entities across the region, far more frequently it leaves an impression of the Kurds as a sociocultural monolith, often represented by one or another variety of secular modernist organizations, conversant with Western languages, ways, and interests. For example, during the decade before the second Trump Administration took office in 2025, the SDF was America's principal Syrian avatar in the counterterrorism war against ISIS. In fact, as I've written previously in these pages, the SDF is a cover name for the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), a cultish, U.S.-designated terrorist group of Marxist origin. The PKK's command and sub-elements extend throughout the Kurdish regions, including a group in Iran known as Kurdistan Free Life Party (Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistanê, or PJAK). The PKK has fought a separatist war principally but not exclusively against Turkish security forces and political organizations‐including Kurdish groups there and across the region‐for over 40 years, in clashes that have generated some 40,000 deaths. Despite the fact that the SDF oppressed its Kurdish political rivals and committed violence against deep-seated cultural values, including through kidnappings and the forcible induction of children into the PKK's ranks, it is still often identified in the media as "the Kurds," pure and simple, and retains its supporters in the U.S., the government-NGO industrial complex, the U.S. military, and in the Congress. The media's routine, persistent elision of the true nature of the PKK/SDF and its preference for using romanticized terms to describe the organization have contributed to major, negative, and persistent consequences for American and Western policies in the region. By obfuscating unpleasant realities that, if more fully understood, probably would have served as a brake on the aspirations of SDF/PKK proponents, the media‐as is often the case in Washington‐willingly helped insulate opinion-shapers and policymakers from the implications of their decisions. American leadership thus often failed to think seriously about how U.S. support for a Marxist-origin terrorist group in a region of relatively conservative religious sensibilities risked alienating the locals, aiding militant recruitment efforts, complicating strategic relations with Ankara, and destabilizing the KRI. The first Trump administration tried but failed to end Washington's partnership with the SDF, but has succeeded this time around, dashing the PKK's aspirations for a neo-Marxist statelet that, if unchecked, was very likely to have generated a regional conflict. Even so, SDF supporters on the Hill continue to fight a rear-guard action in the hope that, eventually, pressures emanating from the Iran war will shift the ground yet again in their favor.
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| Posted by:Mullah Richard |
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| Posted by: mossomo 2026-04-22 14:26 |
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| Posted by: Lord Garth 2026-04-22 12:42 |
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| Posted by: Chantry 2026-04-22 10:10 |
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| Posted by: Frank G 2026-04-22 07:34 |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-04-22 07:32 |
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| Posted by: trailing wife 2026-04-22 02:28 |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-04-22 00:33 |
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| Posted by: chris 2026-04-22 00:17 |