Will America betray the Kurds again?
Washington has a history of using the Kurdish people as pawns in pursuit of foreign policy goals
Donald Trump wants to arm Iran’s Kurds and spur them on to fight the mullahs. His officials have already spoken to their senior leaders and the CIA is reportedly working with Kurdish forces to prepare a ground offensive from Iraq. Israel, too, has been working behind the scenes with Kurdish militias with a view to using them as proxy warriors. What could possibly go wrong?
The answer is – everything. A bloody civil war inside Iran would be bad enough. But if the insurgency spread to the large Kurdish populations of Turkey, Syria and Iraq, the turmoil would become regional.
The bright idea of using the Kurds as a local fifth column to attack regimes that Washington wants to overthrow is not a new one. Over the last 75 years the Kurds have risen, with US encouragement, at least eight times. Yet each time they have been betrayed, used as disposable pawns in pursuit of Washington’s broader foreign policy goals.
In 1991, US President George H W Bush pushed Saddam’s invading forces out of Kuwait but was reluctant to put American boots on the ground inside Iraq to topple his regime. Instead, Kurds in the north and Iraq’s Marsh Arabs in the south were encouraged to rise up – and were brutally slaughtered by Saddam’s forces.
During the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the Kurds were America’s closest local allies. In Syria and Iraq, Kurds were the backbone of the US-backed fight against Isis. Yet none of this had brought the Kurdish dream of an independent state of their own any closer. The Kurdish proverb that they have “no friends but the mountains” has been grimly and repeatedly validated.
On paper it’s obvious why an armchair Washington Beltway strategist would believe that Iran’s oppressed minorities are the Tehran regime’s Achilles heel. In addition to Kurds in the north-west which make up around 12 per cent of the population, there are also Turkic Azeris and Turkmen, in the south-east Arabs, in the south-west Baluchis, as well as a scattering of Christians and a small number of Jews. All in all around 40 per cent of Iran’s citizens are non-Persians.
There are two major armed Kurdish insurgent groups, which received US training during the battle against Islamic State, and they have a track record of attacks against Revolutionary Guard forces inside Iran. One is PJAK, affiliated to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK. The other is a recently-united collection of rebels led by the Kurdistan Freedom Party, or PAK.
Could this acronym-salad of rebel groups be mobilised as America’s proxy forces on the ground? Days after launching airstrikes against Tehran, Trump was reported to have personally spoken to Mustafa Hijri, president of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, whose camps in Iraq the Iranians had just struck with drones.
But Hijri’s forces are far outnumbered and outgunned by their rivals in the far more powerful PJAK. But Trump didn’t speak to them because PJAK has been designated a terrorist organisation by the US since 2009 because of its direct links with the PKK, which fought a 30-year insurgency against the Turkish state.
American backing for PJAK would immediately invite fury and perhaps even military intervention from Turkey, a powerful Nato member, which has in recent years occupied chunks of neighbouring Syria in order to shut down Kurdish ambitions.
Iran’s opposition, too, is none too keen on a Kurdish uprising. Exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi recently denounced a new Kurdish coalition as “separatists” who have “made baseless and contemptible claims against the territorial integrity and national unity of Iran”.
Pahlavi’s fears of a break-up of Iran are not mere fantasy. Unlike the fractured and mostly foreign-based Iranian opposition, the Kurdish resistance has an impressive underground network on the ground. In January they organised a general strike observed across 39 cities and towns in Iranian Kurdistan.
US government contractors have launched a major online recruitment drive seeking Kurdish-language specialists. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly arrived at a White House meeting earlier this year with Kurdish uprising numbers already mapped onto his war plans. Trump administration officials have told CNN that “the Kurds could help sow chaos in the region and stretch the Iranian regime’s military resources thin”.
The plan, it seems, is to have the Kurds lead the armed charge against the Iranian regime while non-armed Iranians rise up, seize the country and re-establish a new Persian-dominated government. As usual, that sounds like a terrible deal for the Kurds.
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
