The Quandil mountains mark the border between Asia and the Middle East. This strategic boundary that has always been in Kurdish territory is unlikely to see peace.
For Iran, the border with Iraq is it’s gate onto the Middle East. It runs for 1458 kilometres along the most peripheral stretches of the Islamic Republic, but it is increasingly central to its geopolitical strategies. To the South, on the banks of the Shatt al-‘Arab River where the war between Iran and Iraq was first played out in 1980, and to the North, where the border cuts right across the plateau which is mostly populated by Kurdish communities. Here, straddling and beyond the border with the semi-independent region of Iraqi Kurdistan, Tehran in recent months has intensified its conflict with the Kurdish armed groups and opposition parties, in an attempt not to lose its grip over Iraq and so keep the powers that are intent on curbing Iranian influence from the Qandil Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea at bay. Primarily the United States.
Tehran’s anti-Kurd offensive culminated in September 2018 with the launch of seven Fateh-110 missiles aimed at the bases of the Iranian Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDPI) located in Koya, on the Iraqi border. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard admitted responsibility for the attack the likes of which had not been seen in recent years: a message from Tehran both to internal dissenters, at a time when the ayatollahs are feeling the pinch of the new American sanctions, and the US. In June, the State Department had received the KDPI leader, Mustafa Hijri in Washington, in a summit that included the highest ranking officers of the Iranian Affair’s office as well as its director, Steven Fagin. A month later Fagin was appointed United States consul general to Iraqi Kurdistan. The fear in Tehran is that Washington might lend support to the Kurdish rebels as a way of destabilizing the Islamic Republic, as it did at the turn of the millennium under the George W. Bush administration, according to revelations made by the former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and his successor, John Bolton, seems to be heading down the same path. In a paper published in 2017 entitled Abrogating the Iran Deal: The Way Forward, Bolton, then American Ambassador to the UN, suggested that “the US should announce their support for Kurdish nationalist aspirations”, in Iran and “provide assistance to the minorities as well as to the ‘internal resistance’.
Yet a similar strategy will always end up clashing with the internal fragmentation within the multifaceted Kurdish Iranian camp. Hijri’s KDPI, a federalist close to Iraq’s Kurdistan Democratic Party led by Masoud Barzani, is flanked and occasionally opposed by entities with different ideologies and regional leaders, which they often depend on even economically: the Party for a the free life of Kurdistan (PJAK), affiliated with the PKK in Turkey, sides with the armed struggle and, according to Scowcroft, is the main beneficiary of support from the Bush administration; the Party for the freedom of Kurdistan (PAK), also linked to Barzani; the Khabat Organisation of Iranian Kurdistan; the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). To top this, between the 80’s and 90’s a series of splits on the left of Kurdish movement gave rise to three other factions, which now all vie for the paternity of the party name, “Komala”: the Iranian Kurdish Revolutionary Worker’s Society, the Worker’s Party and the Kurdish Organisation of Iran’s Communist Party, siding with the KDPI in favour of a federalist approach, yet aligned with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the Iraqi group that opposes Barzani and is in good stead with Tehran.
The Kurdish fragmentation is not just a matter of political divisions, but is also affected by territorial distribution and the varying degree of social integration. The approximately 7 million Kurds who live in the Islamic Republic represent less than 10% of the entire population (in Iraq and Turkey they are more than 20%) and are divided between the provinces of Illam, Kermanshah, Western Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, on the cusp of the border with Iraq, and those in Northern Khorasan and Razavi Khorasan, close the border with Turkmenistan. Overall, three quarters of the Kurds in the country are Sunnis, which, in the cradle of Shi’ism, affects their level of “Iranianness” and their chances of accessing the upper echelons of the state administration, as Walter Posch, an expert on the Islamic Republic, has pointed out. However, one should not underestimate the sense of belonging that even these communities, akin to the more integrated Shiite Kurds, feel towards Iran. This sense of belonging is rooted not just in the Kurdish territories, but in general among all the minorities that live in the outlying stretches of ancient Persia, including the Sunni Baloch people in the South East, the Shiite Azeris and the Sunni Turkmen in the North-West, and is typical of states that retain a strong imperial identity. A pan-Iranian ideology that over the years has helped the Islamic Republic hold the pieces of its ethnic and religious puzzle together, despite the demonstrations of discontent which are cyclically vented in the poorer areas and the tormented relationship between the minorities and the central powers.
The Iranian Kurds, the only ones in history that have had their own state, the very fleeting Mahabad Republic which came to life and perished in 1946, have been opposed by both the Shah and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who despite receiving their support during the first weeks of the Revolution in 1979, has always refused to consider their requests for greater independence. The political leaders that have led the country over the last four decades have neglected, or openly opposed – in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s case -, the development and integration of the Kurdish provinces, with the sole exception of the reformist Muhammad Khatami, who for a while trained a spotlight on these lands and opened the gates of power to its inhabitants. Even Hassan Rouhani, who during the 2013 and 2017 elections received overwhelming support from the Kurds, has so far not kept any of the promises related to the reconstruction of the economic fabric of the poorer provinces. Overlooked by the central powers, the Iranian Kurds often don’t even feel fully represented by the plethora of parties that claim to be fighting on their behalf: a number of groups, starting with the KDPI, have been outlawed by Tehran and have their bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. An exile that creates a breach with their people and plays into the hands of the Islamic Republic.
In recent years, Iran has exploited its hold over Iraqi national parties such as Da’wa, led by Tehran’s ally Nuri al Maliki, to limit the scope of the KDPI, and has also relied on its influence on the PUK to contain Komala. This political bulwark, along with the specificity of the Iranian situation previously described, has ensured that while Syria witnessed the rise of the Rojava Federation and a referendum on independence was held in Iraq, though subsequently scuppered, in the Islamic Republic the Kurdish provinces have remained for the most part quiescent. They are monitored by Tehran mostly to keep track of the increasing flow of its inhabitants towards Islamic State rather than due to any threat they may pose to the central power. And though it may be true that this threat is still minimal, the revival of tensions with the United States does enhance the strategic clout of Iranian Kurds. As well as the border that separates the Islamic Republic with Iraq.
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The Quandil mountains mark the border between Asia and the Middle East. This strategic boundary that has always been in Kurdish territory is unlikely to see peace.
