What do the Kurds want?
Everyone loves the Kurds, and everyone ends up betraying them. What do Iran's Kurds, the largest Kurdish community, hope for at the end of the war in that country?
Shortly before the commencement of the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, the Hebrew podcast “One a Day” aired an interview with the intrepid Israeli journalist Itai Anghel, who had recently returned from a brief sojourn in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the border with Iran. Sent there by the TV news show “Uvda” (a production of the podcast’s sister station Channel 12), for which he has been reporting on Kurdish exiles for years, Anghel met and interviewed Peyman Viyan, the 36-year-old leader of the Kurdish Free Life Party (PJAK) guerrilla organization. At the time, at least, she was said to be the most wanted person in Iran.
PJAK is one of five Iranian-Kurdish groups that on Feb. 22, on the eve of the war, issued a joint statement announcing the formation of a new political alliance. In careful wording, the leaders declared their intention “to struggle for the toppling of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to realize the right of Kurdish self-determination, and to build a national and democratic institution based on the political will of the Kurdish nation in Eastern Kurdistan.”
That and subsequent developments have led to much speculation regarding just what sort of future Iranian Kurds imagine for themselves, and for Iran in general, if and when the theocratic regime falls. Do they see themselves as part of a united, democratic, federated state, or are they seeking to break away from Iran? And if the latter, would that not presage a chaotic future for a state that, unlike some of its neighbors, has long benefited from a cohesive national identity, despite its being home to more than two dozen different national groups?
Most of us probably have some confusion about just who the Kurds are, and how to make sense of all their national, geographic and political distinctions. What probably applies to all Kurds is that while they are admired by much of the world, they have also been betrayed time and time again by the nations of the world. This is because the Kurds -- an indigenous people, who today number some 30 million, most of them Sunni Muslims -- were left, following a short-lived promise from the Allies of self-rule in the wake of World War I, are split geographically between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Each of those states has seen them as either ally or threat at various times, and all have used the Kurds as pawns in their own mutual rivalries. The Kurds, in turn, over the past century, have been involved in a variety of struggles in their respective host countries for self-determination, or at least cultural autonomy.
Turkey has long considered its Kurds, who make up as much as 20 percent of the country’s population, and longed aspired to political self-rule, a threat. It in turn attempted, for most of the past century, to “Turkify” them, a process that included outlawing use of the Kurdish language in many realms of life. (The Kurdish language is actually comprised of a number of related dialects, all of them from the Indo-Iranian family of languages.)
In 1984, Abdullah Öcalan established the underground PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) to fight a violent insurgency against the state, which responded in kind. There have been various attempts at cease-fires and reconciliation in recent decades, none of them ultimately successful, and in recent years, Turkey pursued PKK fighters into both Syria and Iraq, where they were based. The military pressure wore down the underground, which allowed Turkey to initiate a parallel diplomatic offensive, and finally a year ago, Öcalan, who had been imprisoned by Turkey in 1999, called on the PKK to lay down its arms. During Öcalan’s long, solitary imprisonment, he developed his own eclectic political philosophy, which was strongly influenced by the “communalism” of American political thinker Murray Bookchin. It is centered around direct democracy, feminism and environmentalism.
PJAK is sometimes described as being under the umbrella of PKK, although it denies this. What is undoubtedly true is that is under many of the same ideological influences as the Turkish group, but that it most certainly has not disarmed.
During Syria’s long civil war (2011-2024), that country’s Kurds succeeded in establishing an autonomous region in the northeast, which it calls Rojava. Though not recognized by most of the world as a state, Rojava’s area and authority grew to take in other ethnic groups as well, operating in a decentralized federation that emphasized self-rule at the local level, complete gender equality, and recognition of other minority groups. These included the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking group with their own religion, who suffered persecution by the Islamic State in Iraq. Rojava’s SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) militia served as a principal ally to the American coalition in the fight against the Islamic State. More recently, however, after the fall of the Assad government and rise to power of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the territory and authority of Rojava have been greatly reduced, in part because the U.S. transferred its support from the Kurdish-led SDF to al-Sharaa’s government.
In Iraq, Kurds make up nearly 20 percent of the population, most of them living along the country’s northern border area. They too were in a state of on-again, off-again civil war with successive Iraqi governments going back to the 1960s. (Most notoriously, under the reign of Saddam Hussein, they were subjected to severe oppression and even chemical-weapon attacks.) Today, although it is not politically independent, the Kurdistan Regional Government (RGI) enjoys substantial autonomy, which is recognized by the Baghdad government, although issues of dispute remain.
Iran is estimated to have some 9 million Kurdish citizens, amounting to about 10 percent of the population, most of them in the country’s northwest. They too have been subjected to suppression, both under the rule of the Shah and under the Islamic regime that overthrew him in 1979. At the same time, because of the strong cultural links between Persians and Kurds, the struggle has been principally a political one, and only one of the country’s six Kurdish parties has been openly separatist in its declared goals.
The fates of the Kurdish populations of these Middle Eastern states have risen and fallen with the civil wars and national conflicts of those states. So has the support they have received from outside countries. (I have a strong memory of the adolescent disillusionment I felt in 1975 when I learned about Israel’s abrupt end of support for the Kurds, after Israel’s ally the Shah of Iran signed an agreement with Iraq that required him – and in turn Israel, too -- to end his material assistance for Kurdish separatists in Iraq.)
The current upheaval in Iran has confronted the region’s various Kurdish communities with some dilemmas. Iraq has allowed Kurdish rebels, including PJAK, to operate within its borders with the understanding that they would not use their host country as a staging ground for attacks into Iran. But with the start of the war, President Trump called upon these opposition groups to join the American and Israeli forces in overthrowing the Islamic regime.
More recently, however, Trump said explicitly that, “I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran,” as he was reluctant to see any of them “get hurt or killed.” As of the time these lines were written, it is unclear whether any of the Kurdish rebels are fighting together with the Americans.
After his descent into, and long walk through, the complex of tunnels under the mountains along Iraq’s border with Iran, Itai Enghel met with and interviewed Peyman Vihan.
The PJAK militia itself, Enghel is told, comprises some 3,000 fighters, but they are backed up by about 10,000 members within Iran who have been waiting for the uprising to begin to come to life, and who organized many of the mass protests that took place in January. The particular underground base visited by Enghel goes on for many hundreds of meters, and offers many of the comforts of life aboveground, including a library (especially strong in books about women’s rights and ecology, he observes, and including, he notices, a title by Yuval Noah Harari), a secure communications system that allows the group to remain apprised of what’s happening aboveground across the border, and a well-equipped kitchen, where commander Vihan pitches in as a complete equal with her soldiers, who address her as “comrade.”
On the walls of the caves are photos of many young comrades who have already died in the war. For her part, Vihan seems untroubled by the fact that she is a wanted woman in Iran, telling her guest that she accepts that she is “in a struggle, and if I die, I die.” PJAK fighters, it should be noted, are expected to remain single and celibate.
Several days into the war, I spoke with Prof. Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli expert on Iranian history at Penn State University, about the question of Iranian-Kurdish political aspirations. He says that “very few ethnic minorities are looking for autonomy or separatism,” as the “vast majority of minorities and other Iranians really see themselves as part of the Iranian nation.” Similarly, in his interviews, Enghel is told that in PJAK, they aspire to “Kurdish autonomy in a democratic Iran.”
Arash Azizi, an Iranian-born lecturer in history at Yale University, acknowledges that the agreement signed in February by the five groups making up what they call the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan says they aspire to “federalism rather than independence.” In an article published in The Atlantic last week, Azizi, author of the 2024 book “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom,” also quotes a Kurdish Iranian analyst who told him that the parties see “their future in a democratic Iran, not separation from Iran.”
But Azizi, who also is involved from his American exile in the Iran democracy movement, is not completely convinced. On the one hand, he noted, in a phone conversation last week, both that “the relationship of the Iranian Kurdish parties to the central government has traditionally been much less hostile” that that of the Kurdish parties in Iraq, Turkey and Syria, and also that Iranians too “see Kurds as Iranian in their origins.” Even the traditionally separatist Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), also based in Iraq, suspended that part of its agenda to sign on to the February 22 letter.
Nonetheless, explains Azizi, if you read PAK’s platform, “you see that at the very least that they reserve the right to a classic nationalist future. They believe they are a nation, and that’s the word they use; in fact, they often say that they are largest nation in the world without a state.” If they have dropped their demand for independence for the moment, believes Azizi, it’s for “pragmatic” reasons.
Nonetheless, Azizi acknowledged that an independent Iranian Kurdistan would be a “strange state – small, landlocked, without an industrial basis. And its borders would be forever contested.” In any event, as interesting as the question is, it’s difficult to see beyond the reign of the ayatollahs in Iran, or perhaps of a nominally Islamic regime that is in fact under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Azizi is in touch with family in Iran on a daily basis, and says that his civil-society activism includes his membership on the board member of the Nonviolent Initiative for Democracy, which helps citizens in non-democratic environments globally to advance nonviolent collective action. Although State Department funding for the NID was suspended when the Trump administration took office last year, Azizi says it was subsequently restored, “for which Iranian civil society should be grateful.” Nonetheless, he notes, a “democratic transition is… a pretty hard scenario to envisage” in his homeland.
More likely than the Islamic regime collapsing, he believes, is for the solution to what comes next to emerge “from within the regime, so that, even it were to collapse, remnants of the regime would get into power.” After all, observes Azizi, “President Trump doesn’t seem to be interested in a democratic transition.,,, All his favorite leaders are dictators, tough guys.” And if people like Trump’s friend, Turkey’s President Erdogan, end up bringing the war to its resolution, “their greatest interest probably wouldn’t be in a democratic transition either. Democratic transition means potential instability.” More likely, he envisions, is for the allies to say, “We know a couple of guys in the Revolutionary Guard, let’s cut a deal with them, and they will lead the post- Khamenei Iran.” For them, that would be “a much more reliable scenario.”
Penn State’s Sternfeld is “careful not to be prophetic,” but asked, during the war’s first week, to lay out likely possibilities for a post-war Iran, he also believes that “the next leader will embody continuity.” And indeed, when the Assembly of Experts met to choose a new Supreme Leader, they turned to Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei.
If that doesn’t work out – and the day after Mojtaba’s anointment, Pres. Trump predicted to Israel’s TV Channel 13 that “he’s going to have a hard time surviving” – Sternberg too suggests that members of the IRGC could “undertake a coup, and turn the regime into a military dictatorship.” The least likely scenario, in Sternberg’s view, is “a democratic revolution.”
Thank you for this, AlphaBravoCharlie. My impression has been -- and you can correct me if I'm wrong -- that the demand for formation of a single state of Kurdistan hasn't been on the table for a while. And more recently, on the individual-state level, and certainly in Iran, independence hasn't been the demand as much as cultural autonomy and more. Similarly, reporting from the past few days makes it pretty clear that none of the various militias and parties have responded positively to Trump's invitation to join the fighting. There seems to be an inherent realism and reasonableness connected to Kurds on the political level. Do you think I'm idealizing the Kurds here?
Creating an independent Kurdish state would require redrawing the borders of four sovereign countries: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Such an undertaking would likely destabilize an already fragile region because it would involve dismantling internationally recognized borders and transferring territory from multiple states at the same time. Any attempt to implement such a project would probably provoke strong resistance, since each of these countries would oppose losing sovereign land.
It is also important to note that the term “Kurdistan” already exists within the political geography of Iran as a recognized province. This shows that cultural and regional identity can be acknowledged within existing national frameworks without necessarily requiring the creation of a new state through conflict.
More broadly, many ethnic and religious minorities around the world live peacefully within larger national populations. If armed groups were granted the right to claim territory from established states, it would create a powerful precedent. Other minority groups could use the same logic to justify taking up arms in order to demand territorial separation, potentially opening a Pandora’s box of fragmentation and prolonged instability.
The situation in Palestine is structurally different. The Palestinian issue centers on questions of statehood and sovereignty primarily involving Israel and the Palestinian territories. Resolving that conflict does not require dividing the sovereign territory of four separate states, which makes the geopolitical implications fundamentally different.