The Kurds have no friends but the mountains. This sentiment is often attributed to Mustafa Barzani, the towering Kurdish nationalist leader who led multiple uprisings in Iraq, and reflects a long history of shifting alliances and abrupt abandonment. The Kurds are the world’s largest stateless nation, spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Across all four states, they have been subjected to oppression and cultural erasure under successive authoritarian regimes, leading them to seek support from powerful—and often unreliable—foreign patrons.
Over the past half century, Washington has repeatedly armed Kurdish groups in Middle Eastern conflicts, only to leave them exposed or outright abandon them in the next. In 1975, the U.S. abruptly pulled its support from Iraqi Kurdish forces, leaving them to face severe reprisals from the Saddam Hussein regime. During the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. encouraged but then failed to support another Kurdish uprising in Iraq, leaving them to be again crushed by Iraqi forces. In 2019, U.S. forces withdrew from northern Syria, exposing Kurdish allies to a Turkish offensive. Yet the relationship endures because Kurdish groups believe they can exploit Washington in return. The U.S. gains a proxy force and the Kurds gain a conditional patron to advance their own ambitions.
The latest iteration of this relationship is unfolding in the mountains of northern Iraq, where exiled Iranian Kurdish militant groups have been strengthened by Washington and Tel Aviv to fight against the Islamic Republic of Iran. On February 22, five of these groups formed a coalition, pledging to coordinate efforts to overthrow the Islamic Republic and advance Kurdish autonomy inside Iranian Kurdistan, what they call Rojhelat, meaning “where the sun rises” or “east” in Kurdish.
Three weeks before Israel and the U.S. launched the war against Iran, I visited a training camp for one of the most radical groups in this coalition, the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), just outside Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq. While some Iranian Kurdish groups advocate for a federal system in Iran or greater Kurdish autonomy, the PAK has outright separatist ambitions. The PAK was the only Kurdish militant group to admit to launching attacks against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces during the nationwide uprising in January, in which thousands of Iranians were slaughtered by the regime.
“I want to thank America for its position against the Islamic Republic. To bring down this regime after 47 years will require outside support,” said Adila Jaff, a commander in PAK’s all-female unit. “When America launches its attack, our fighters will enter Rojhelat and pursue our goal of an independent Kurdish state,” she said. Female fighters have become a much publicized feature of many Kurdish militant groups, reflecting a political tradition that links women’s participation in combat to Kurdish self-determination—and a symbol of alignment with Western liberal values, likely with the aim of attracting Western support.
But more than four weeks since the beginning of the war, the Kurds remain apprehensive about launching a ground offensive, as Washington equivocates on its support and Tehran heavily bombards the Kurds along its western border. On March 4, Iran fired a ballistic missile at the same PAK base I visited weeks earlier, killing one and injuring three. Since the start of the war, Iran has launched dozens of ballistic missile and drone attacks against Kurdish coalition forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, but the Kurds are yet to launch any meaningful retaliation.
“The Kurds see uncertainty ahead in the war; whether that means U.S. long term commitment or whether the regime is sufficiently weakened. They would likely want guarantees of more long term support,” said Seth J. Frantzman, a Middle East analyst. “They’ve seen how Kurdish groups in Syria or the KRG in Iraq have had mixed results regarding long-term Western commitments. They are naturally cautious about putting it all on the line,” he said.
But the Kurds have deeply exposed themselves to Iranian attacks by signaling to Iran that an offensive was imminent without having a viable plan to launch one. Iran now has the initiative and, absent far more substantial support from the U.S. and Israel, an overwhelming battlefield advantage. They are already absorbing substantial losses by having walked down this path to begin with.
The Trump administration’s decision in late January to abandon its Syrian Kurdish allies in favor of the central government in Damascus is the latest example of American support for the Kurds expiring as strategic calculations shift. In their final week of autonomous rule, on the frontlines and in their receding strongholds, the Syrian Kurds I met with spoke bitterly—some even vengefully—about Washington’s betrayal.
“We fought ISIS for not only ourselves, but for America and the entire world. Now the [U.S.-led] coalition won’t even answer our calls,” said Avin Khalil, an administrator at a detainment facility for ISIS-linked families in northeast Syria. Since the Syrian government took control of the region, the U.S. estimates that tens of thousands of ISIS-linked detainees have escaped similar facilities, and are now unaccounted for. “When these men commit terrorist attacks in the west, the blood will be on America’s hands. I hope it happens,” Khalil said.
The Kurds of Iran are merely on the other side of that patronage life cycle. On March 3, a CNN report claimed that the CIA had been working for the past several months to arm Kurdish forces along the Iran-Iraq border, with the goal of fomenting a popular uprising inside Iran. The U.S. has been heavily arming Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria for more than a decade as part of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, and also provided some limited support to Iranian Kurdish groups which have strong historical ties to Israel’s national intelligence agency Mossad.
In its report, CNN cited an anonymous Iranian Kurdish official who said that “Kurdish opposition forces are expected to take part in a ground operation in western Iran, in the coming days.” The next day, Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani was asked whether Israeli strikes in western Iran were being carried out to support a Kurdish offensive, to which he said that Israel had been “operating very heavily in western Iran to degrade the Iranian regime’s capabilities and to open up the way to Tehran, and to create freedom of operations.”
On March 5, Trump said in an interview with Reuters that a Kurdish offensive would be a “wonderful idea.” On March 6, Reuters reported that Iranian Kurdish militias had consulted with the United States about how and whether to attack Iran, and that the prospect of a cross-border offensive was gaining traction.
However Trump quickly backed off, telling reporters on March 7 that “I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran… They’re willing to go in, but I’ve told them I don’t want them to go in… The war is complicated enough as it is… We don’t want to see the Kurds get hurt or killed.”
Turkey appears to have been instrumental in pressuring the United States against supporting a Kurdish offensive. On March 7, Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan said he had received assurances from Marco Rubio that Washington had “no intention of arming Kurdish groups in Iran.” “I have no doubt that [Turkey] applied maximum pressure across the board to prevent any sort of offensive by the Kurds taking place,” said Chris Kilford, Canada’s former ambassador to Turkey.
Turkey is wary that heavily armed Kurdish groups could emerge as a cross-border threat similar to the PKK, said Sangar Khaleel, an expert on Kurdish affairs. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and has close ties to the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), one of the groups in the Iranian Kurdish coalition.
The coalition is estimated to have a combined force in the high thousands. Despite their newly established coordination via the coalition, their fighters are believed to be spread thin across the Iran-Iraq border and are lightly equipped. While airstrikes have significantly degraded IRGC infrastructure and capabilities, its ground forces remain largely intact. A U.S. ground offensive would be costly and difficult; for the Kurds to go it alone would be suicidal.
The coalition is aware of such risks and fears mass reprisals if it were to launch an attack without backup. Frantzman says, “Even if the IRGC appears to have weakened in their region, many fear the IRGC is only hiding in civilian clothes, waiting to carry out reprisals. Four and a half decades of suffering under such reprisals make the Kurds keenly aware of the cost.”
Fomenting broad internal unrest across Iran appears to have been a central component of Israel and the United States’ plan to trigger regime collapse. According to a report in The New York Times, the countries believed that sustained internal pressure—like what was seen during Iran’s nationwide uprising in January—combined with a Kurdish offensive and American and Israeli airpower, could tip the balance towards regime collapse. Israeli Mossad chief David Barnea reportedly said that within days of the conflict starting, Israeli intelligence services would be able to trigger civil unrest that would destabilize or even collapse the regime. Barnea sold this idea to Netanyahu, who sold it to Trump, and so it was set in motion.
Twenty-year-old Glara Ilami spent a week in January protesting in the streets of Ilam, a Kurdish-majority city in Iran, before contacting the PAK and fleeing to Iraq to join them. She’s one of many Iranian Kurds that are now based with the coalition in Iraqi Kurdistan, hoping to cross back over soon with a rifle in hand. “When the U.S. strikes, Kurdistan’s Free Army will move in to establish our own state,” Ilami told me in early February.
The death toll of the uprising is difficult to verify. But even the lower-bound, confirmed toll is staggering—more than 7,000 killed. The Kurds, just like the rest of the opposition to the Islamic Republic, have been wary about returning to the streets ever since and facing more brutal repression.
But the opposition was never a unified movement to begin with. Kurdish separatist ambitions put them at odds with the broader, Persian-majority opposition, which insists on maintaining a unified state in the event of regime collapse. “The protests in Persian areas were mainly focused on inflation and the currency. The people of Kurdistan, however, want our own independent state. We want U.S. and international support to liberate our land from the occupation of Iran,” Ilami said.
Ethnic separatism in Iran is one of the regime’s main justifications for repression in minority areas. “By framing ethnic dissent as a threat to national unity, the state delegitimizes opposition in those areas,” said Flora Khani, an Iranian-Canadian lawyer and activist from Tabriz. Iran’s leading opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi, came out strongly against Kurdish separatism shortly after the Iranian Kurdish coalition was established in late February, saying that “Iran’s territorial integrity is non-negotiable.”
On March 20, I attended Netanyahu’s first press conference since the start of the war from a bunker in Jerusalem. When asked about the possibility of a ground component to the war, Netanyahu responded “You can’t do revolutions from the air… it’s up to the Iranian people… to choose the moment, and to rise to the moment. We can create the conditions, but they have to, you know, they have to exploit those conditions at a certain point.”
However a renewed uprising appears unlikely at this point, as Iranians would have to take to the streets amid a devastating U.S. and Israeli air campaign, knowing their compatriots were killed in January by a regime now locked in an existential fight.
Netanyahu didn’t exude much confidence in the prospect when he said that, “it is too early to tell if the Iranian people will exploit the conditions we are creating for them to take to the streets. I hope that will be the case. We are working toward that end, but ultimately, it will depend only on them.”
According to the New York Times report, Netanyahu has expressed frustration with the Mossad that its “promises to foment a revolt have not materialized… Mr. Trump might decide to end the war any day and that Mossad’s operations had yet to bear fruit,” the report says. The official position of the Kurdish coalition is that they remain poised to join the fight against the regime under the right conditions, like the U.S. and Israel enforcing a no-fly zone over western Iran. But for now, they’re sitting ducks, absorbing the Iranian strikes with little means or incentive to retaliate.