If the US encourages the Kurds to attack Iran, history offers a stark warning history

“Covert action is not to be confused with missionary work,” declared former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975 after the sudden defection of the Iraqi Kurds against the Iraqi government.

Half a century later, this doctrine of geopolitical intent reverberates throughout the Middle East. As the US and Israel encourage Kurdish militias to act as ground troops against Iran’s central government, knowing their aspirations for “regime change”, history offers a stark warning.

From the mountains of Iraq in 1991 to the plains of Syria just a few weeks ago, Washington’s record of using Kurdish fighters as disposable proxies suggests that Iran’s current push for a Kurdish insurgency is fraught with danger.

Amid a military conflict in which US-Israeli airstrikes have killed Iran’s top leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Washington is trying to open a new front.

Some US media reports said thousands of Iranian Kurds had crossed from Iraq to begin ground operations in northwestern Iran. Not verified. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reportedly supplied these forces with light weapons as part of a covert program to destabilize the country.

To facilitate this, US President Donald Trump reportedly held calls with Iraqi Kurdish leaders Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani and Iranian Kurdish leader Mustafa Hijri. While the White House and Kurdish officials in Erbil denied the reports, regional analysts were cautious.

The government of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq denied on Thursday that it was involved in any plans to mobilize Kurdish groups and send them to Iran.

Its president Nechirvan Barzani said, “We must not be part of any conflict or military escalation that harms the lives and security of our fellow citizens.”

“Protecting the territorial integrity of the Kurdistan region and our constitutional achievements can only be achieved through the unity, solidarity and shared national responsibility of all political forces and entities in Kurdistan,” he said.

Mahmoud Allouch, a regional affairs expert, told Al Jazeera that the current strategy does not aim to topple the immediate government but to “dismember Iran” by fomenting separatist movements as a prelude to its collapse. “The US and Israel want to produce a separatist armed Kurdish case in Iran similar to the US-imposed Kurdish case in Syria,” warned Allouch.

Added to this volatile mix is ​​Turkey and how it will respond to any Kurdish uprising in the region. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began steps toward disarmament last summer, closing a chapter in a four-decade armed campaign against the Turkish state in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people. Any armed advances by the Iranian Kurds could rankle Ankara.

A legacy of betrayal and ill-gotten gains

For the Kurds, acting as the tip of the American spear has historically ended in disaster. In the 1970s, the US and Iran heavily armed Iraqi Kurdish rebels to bleed the government in Baghdad. Yet, after the Shah of Iran secured territorial concessions from Iraq in 1975, he cut off the Kurds overnight, with Washington’s approval. Four years later he was overthrown in a revolution.

This scenario was repeated in 1991 with devastating consequences. Then-US President George HW Bush encouraged Iraqis – both Kurdish and Shia communities persecuted under Saddam Hussein – to rise up, while the US military regrouped loyalist forces and used helicopter gunships to kill thousands of civilians.

However, David Romano, a Middle East politics expert at Missouri State University, countered in a statement on his Facebook page that the US was forced to launch Operation Provide Comfort and the No-Fly Zone after the 1991 disaster, which laid the foundation for an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. “At key points, the Kurds have done well as a result of cooperation with the US,” Romano wrote, but he noted that in 1975 the opposite was true.

The Syrian quagmire

The dark irony of Washington asking Iranian Kurds to take up arms today is compounded by the recent collapse of Kurdish autonomy in neighboring Syria. For years, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) served as the primary US proxy against ISIL (ISIS), paving the way for the armed group’s defeat in 2019 after years of fighting and suffering.

In January, a year after the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, the Trump administration backed Syria’s new central government in Damascus, essentially ending support for the SDF and Kurdish autonomy.

The US ambassador to Syria, Thomas Barak, declared that the SDF’s original mission was largely over. Within weeks, the SDF lost 80 percent of the territory it had bled. For Kurds across the region watching these events unfold, the implications are profound: The US is no longer perceived as a reliable partner or supporter of the minority.

Allouch highlighted this as the primary reason for Kurdish reluctance regarding Iran today, noting that Kurdish leaders are “bleeding from yesterday’s stab” in Syria.

Calculated denials and Iranian gambling

The US and Israel are looking for “boots on the ground” to avoid deploying their own troops. But in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, the leadership understands the blow. Barzani recently stressed to Iran’s foreign minister that the region “will not be a party to conflicts.”

Analysts have suggested Barzani is angered by the US’s dismissal of a 2017 independence referendum for the region. Romano noted that Erbil was perfectly justified in rejecting Washington’s requests decades later from the US to remain unified within Iraq, as Baghdad resoundingly rejected invading Iran.

The calculus is different for the Iranian Kurds known as Rogelati. Betrayed by the Soviet Union in 1946, they have suffered severely under successive Iranian governments and may consider this their “first and only chance” to change their status.

However, Allouch warned that without a solid US military commitment, which Trump has shown no desire to provide, the move could be “suicide” against a severe Iranian military response.

Territorial veto

Pushing the Iranian Kurds into open conflict remains a highly volatile endeavor, prompting an immediate reaction from Turkey. Allouch told Al Jazeera that Ankara would coordinate with the Iranian government to suppress any uprising.

“The US and international powers will finally realize that they cannot impose a reality against the interests of the ‘regional quartet’ – Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq,” Alloch said. He argued that this regional bloc applied more pressure on the Kurdish issue than on changes in international policies.

Finally, the Kurds have consistently paid the price of changing geopolitics. As Washington seeks a cost-free coup in Iran with no ground deployment or loss of its own troops, the Kurds weigh American promises against the blood-soaked lessons of 1975, 1991 and 2026.