President Donald Trump said this week that the air war currently being waged by the United States and Israel against Iran may eventually have to include a ground game.
However, Trump faces considerable domestic political pressure against US troops on the ground, so his phone calls this week to Kurdish leaders in Iraq and Iran, urging them to play their part in the war, have led to speculation that the Kurdish military could fill that role.
But any fervor among stateless Kurds to join the fight for regime change – and Iranian Kurds have been eagerly awaiting that day – would be weighed against the risk of being used again and then abandoned by the United States, several sources say.
Why do we write this?
Once again, a crisis in the Middle East has the United States asking stateless Kurds for military aid, this time as proxies on the ground in Iran. What affects any desire to contribute is the memory of disappointments after vital roles played in Iraq and Syria.
In fact, for Kurdish minority leaders in Iran and Iraq who received Trump’s calls, the avalanche of news from the US president came first.
Added to this is the excitement of a presidential call to “rise up” against the enemy of the Iranian Kurds in Tehran, the rulers of the Islamic Republic, who have been severely weakened by the US-Israel war.
But then, the fall. Initial enthusiasm was tempered, Kurdish sources and other experts say, by the memory of a long history of “use them and release them” treatment by Washington.
“This puts the Kurds in a serious dilemma,” says Yerevan Saeed, a resident scholar at the School of International Service at American University in Washington. “Of course, at first there is enthusiasm for being called by the president,” he adds, “but there is also suspicion and the memory of the betrayal of the United States in very similar circumstances.”
The legacy of Iraq and Syria
The Kurds have not forgotten President George HW Bush’s plea to Iraqi Kurds to rise up against an evil and weakened Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War. Nor the subsequent American silence when Saddam unleashed his massacre forces against rebellious Kurdish communities, who had already been victims of the famous Iraqi Anfal campaign in the late 1980s.
Furthermore, the pain is still fresh after hearing the Trump administration’s Syria envoy, Tom Barrack, declare in January that the usefulness of a more than decade-long US-Kurds pact to fight the resurgence of the Islamic State group in Syria had “expired.” The United States’ interest now, Barrack said, was to see the new central government in Damascus consolidate its power over the entire country – and over independent militia groups.
Groups like Washington’s former partners, the Syrian Kurds.
“Too often, the Kurds are remembered only when their strength or sacrifice is needed,” Iraqi first lady Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed said in a statement Thursday. “Leave the Kurds alone. We are not hired gunmen.”
However, before the Kurds do anything that puts them at greater risk of being attacked by Tehran, “they would want firm guarantees of support from Washington,” Dr. Saeed says. “But even those commitments would not erase doubts about trusting the United States based on past experience.”
Trump reportedly offered air support, among other incentives, during his phone calls with Kurdish leaders. On Sunday he contacted Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, and Bafel Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, leaders of the two main political parties that govern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. On Tuesday, the president called Mustafa Hijri, head of the Iraq-based Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), one of six anti-regime Kurdish political parties.
The six groups recently formed a coalition to take joint military action, although representatives say no decision has been made. They say there would first have to be serious signs of American air cover. Iran has already issued severe threats against Kurdish groups and on Thursday launched missile attacks against their Iraqi headquarters.
On Wednesday, the PDKI issued a statement calling on all Iranian soldiers and military personnel, “especially in Kurdistan,” to abandon their bases and cut all ties with “the armed and repressive forces of the regime.” The statement echoed Trump’s promise of immunity, declared during the first hours of the war, to all elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other security forces who turn against the regime.
40 million Kurds, without a State
Globally, the Kurds number about 40 million people spread from Türkiye and Syria to Iran, and are considered the largest ethnic group in the world without its own state. The closest they come is the group’s semi-autonomous region in Iraq.
Ismael Adnan/SOPA/Reuters
Iranian Kurds, concentrated in Iran’s northwestern Kurdistan region, make up about 10 percent of the country’s population of 90 million.
It is no mystery why Washington would turn to the Kurds in its war against the Islamic Republic. Iranian Kurdish militias based on the country’s northern border have been prepared for decades to return to Iran to fight the hated central government when the time is right.
Recent reports claim that the CIA, which has maintained relations with several Kurdish armed forces throughout the Middle East, has increased the supply of weapons to Iranian Kurdish forces.
As President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week open the door to an eventual ground campaign in the war, some experts speculate that Iranian Kurdish forces could step in and play a role.
“The Iranian Kurds are very eager to return home to overthrow the regime, and the administration understands this and sees working with and through their ground forces as a way to obviate the need for American forces on the ground,” says David Schenker, former undersecretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs.
“But for the Kurds, it is a very risky undertaking,” he adds. “They may get some level of operational support, but generally these people will be on their own.”
They are also held back by a lack of clarity about the mission entrusted to them, says Dr. Saeed, himself an Iraqi Kurd. Does the United States offer a role in a fight whose ultimate goal is regime change, he and others ask, or does it envision that the Kurds will create a distraction in northern Iran, thus forcing the IRGC to respond and reduce its forces and potentially weaken its control over other parts of the country?
“One concern would be whether the Kurds could hope to gain some long-term benefit and advance their own goals by joining the war,” he says, “or whether they would be just a temporary utility that becomes disposable when other U.S. goals are achieved.”
Pros and cons of an ethnic role
Others stress that the United States would have to take into account its own concerns before supporting the Iranian Kurds or any other Iranian minority ethnic group.
“The risk for the United States is that a regime collapse aided by armed opposition groups could very quickly descend into chaos,” says Schenker, who is now director of Arab policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “That could potentially fuel a host of post-regime problems, including a division of the state along ethnic lines.”
Others have offered more hopeful views on how Iran’s ethnic groups, including the Kurds, could be encouraged to translate their experience as minorities navigating a hardline religious autocracy into promoting post-regime multiethnic democracy.
They point out that, along with Iranian students, it has sometimes been the country’s minorities who have sparked important anti-regime movements. One example is how the 2022 arrest and murder of a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, for her refusal to cover her head in public, sparked a wave of women-led protests across the country.
How the Kurds’ long and complicated relationship with the United States influences their role in the Iran war remains to be seen, but in the end, the positive side of US-Kurdish relations will likely outweigh the disappointments, Dr. Saeed says.
“The bitter experiences will not be forgotten, but overall it is still a victory for the Kurds given what they have gained from their alliance with the United States,” he says. He points to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq, which took off under the protective umbrella of a no-fly zone imposed by the United States during the final years of Saddam’s regime.
Still, he says, “It all comes down to what (former Kurdistan Region President Masoud) Barzani has said: ‘We really have no one to trust. We have to rely only on ourselves.'”
