Imperialism, repression and resistance: The long war against Kurds in Iran

For most of the media, the United States and Israel’s war on Iran has become last month’s story, but this story is far from over, and has many prequels. Like other conflicts and wars in the region, Iran’s troubled relations with the US and Israel — and also with the Iranian Kurds — have their roots in the poisonous soil of European imperialism.

The border between Rojehlat (eastern or Iranian Kurdistan) and the other parts of Kurdistan has hardly changed since the 17th century, but the division of the rest of Kurdistan by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, and the treaty’s failure to recognise a Kurdish state, weakened the position of Kurds everywhere. While Lausanne followed the imperial conflict of World War I, World War II — in many ways a continuation of the first — was followed by the creation of Israel and international recognition of the Zionists’ settler-colonial project.

World War I helped catalyse the Russian Revolution and subsequent global competition between the forces of Communism and capitalist imperialism. World War II allowed this to transform into the Cold War between East and West. In both periods, as still today, an overriding mission of Western governments has been the crushing of any emergence of communism, or even socialism.

Their geographical separation from World War II, and relatively late entry into the conflict, gave the US economic, political and military dominance, and enabled the growth of the US’s military-industrial complex, whose power President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address in 1961. This power has been used to intervene in other countries to prevent the emergence of left forces and unseat governments out of line with US capitalist interests.

During the 19th century, Iran fell under increasing economic dominance by European imperial powers. Iran’s leaders gave away economic concessions in exchange for short-term gains, and early last century, the British Anglo Persian Oil Company took control of oil fields in southwest Iran.

In 1953, it was Iran’s turn to undergo a CIA regime change — a joint operation organised by the US and the old imperial power, Britain. Iran’s parliament had voted to nationalise the oil industry — a challenge to Western commercial interests that was deemed intolerable. Prime Minister Mohamad Mosaddegh was removed in a coup, and power was consolidated under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had first been put in control by Britain and Russia during the war, when his father had refused to let the Allies use the trans-Iranian railway.

Pahlavi maintained his rule through his notorious secret police, the Savak, but, by the 1970s, economic hardship and inequality were becoming increasingly unbearable. In 1978–79, a mass movement strengthened by workers — especially oil workers — crippled the country and forced Pahlavi to flee.

The rise of the Islamic Republic

Support for the left was surging, and workers’ strike committees were creating kernels of alternative organisation when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France. Khomeini was able to appeal to the more conservative elements, especially small business owners and the rural or recently rural poor, while neutralising potential opposition through superficially progressive rhetoric.

One by one, Khomeini crushed those opposing him — secular leftists, Islamic leftists, women, groups seeking national autonomy. He had no hesitation in carrying out mass assassinations to impose his version of Islamic rule and himself as supreme leader. He was able to do this because he initially had the West’s backing — as a safe anti-left alternative — and because many left party leaders failed to understand the threat he posed, casting him as a “progressive bourgeois” who they should work with rather than oppose.

In November 1979, Iranian student activists took over the US embassy in Tehran, taking 66 US citizens hostage and demanding the extradition of Pahlavi, who had gone to the US for cancer treatment. Fifty-two of the hostages were not released until January 1981. Khomeini supported the hostage-taking, calling the US “the Great Satan”. 

In 1980, the US cut diplomatic relations with Iran and implemented sanctions in response to the hostage taking, which were subsequently increased several times, with drastic impacts on people’s living standards. During the 1980s, the US gave support to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, and, in 1984, President Ronald Reagan designated Iran a “state sponsor of terror” following attacks on the US military in Lebanon by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

With the US’s “war on terror” following 9/11, President George Bush declared Iran to be part of an “axis of evil”, alongside Iraq and North Korea. Meanwhile, fears that Iran was developing nuclear weapons led to more sanctions by the US, EU and United Nations. In 2015, Iran agreed to a deal whereby they would limit nuclear development and submit to regular inspections in exchange for the lifting of these sanctions. However, in 2018, US President Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement and reinstated sanctions.

In the early summer of 2019, explosions blamed on Iran hit oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, and Iran shot down a US drone. The next year, the US assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

Under Pahlavi, relations between Iran and Israel had been good, reflecting shared alignment with the US and against pan-Arabism. Israel helped develop Iran’s military and secret service. Relations changed with the revolution, when Khomeini declared Israel an enemy of Islam and handed the Israeli embassy to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — though the Iran-Iraq war forced Iran to continue to rely on buying Israeli weapons for some years.

Iran’s support for Palestinians was both ideological — as fellow Muslims — and strategic. It wanted to win support as defenders of Islam, and to distract attention from continued economic hardship. After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 — a time when 11 members of the Kurdistan Workers Party died fighting alongside the PLO — Iran helped organise Lebanese Shia and create Hezbollah.

The end of the Cold War, and the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, left Iran and Israel competing for regional dominance under the US, the one remaining superpower.

Kurdish resistance

Kurds — who make up 12–15% of Iran’s population — suffered under the ethnic nationalism of Pahlavi and were active in the revolution. They fought for autonomy, not to replace one autocratic centralised regime with another. The Kurdish provinces held out the longest against Khomeini’s Islamic Republic.

Kurdish resistance was largely led by the leftist Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and Komola, the Society of the Revolutionary Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan. In August 1980, Khomeini declared a jihad against the “infidel” Kurds, licensing extreme brutality by the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. By the end of 1981, Kurdish resistance was largely defeated, with small-scale fighting continuing into 1983.

Kurdish struggles for rights and freedom have become entangled in rivalries between regional powers, exploiting these divisions and being exploited by them. In the Iran-Iraq war, support given to Iran by Kurds persecuted by the Iraqi government helped bring the full wrath of Saddam Hussein down on Iraqi Kurdish towns and villages, including Halabja, where Hussein’s military massacred 5000 people in a chemical attack. (Palestinian reverence for Hussein as a supporter of their cause has undoubtedly complicated relations with the Kurds.)

The Islamic Republic proved to be every bit as racist towards non-Persians as Pahlavi had been, as well as prejudiced against Sunnis, which most Kurds are. Rather than attempt to win Kurdish support, the government has kept control over the Kurdish regions through economic deprivation and pervasive securitisation.

Overt political opposition of any kind is impossible in Iran, where even campaigning on ecological issues can land you in prison, and the remnants of the KDPI and Komola moved across the border with their families to refugee camps in Iraq.

The Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) was founded in 2004 to propagate the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan in Rojhelat, but Öcalan’s influence there was already strong, as demonstrated by the mass protests at the time of his capture in 1999. PJAK guerrillas are based in the border mountains.

Anti-regime protests

Iran under the mullahs [religious clerics] has seen several waves of mass protest — against lack of freedoms, poor economic conditions and lack of vital services — each put down with extreme violence.

In 2019, anti-government uprisings were taking place in over two-thirds of Iranian provinces when the government unleashed its security forces, leaving 1500 people dead. Between then and the 2022 protests triggered by the government killing of Jina Amini for a misarranged headscarf, there were mass strikes by groups struggling to survive on starvation wages and pensions, and protests by farmers unable to get the water needed for their crops, as well as protests for women’s rights. More recently, there have been more protests about the lack of clean water.

The Iranian regime demands the total subservience of women, and also takes every opportunity to oppress its Kurdish minority. Of the many communities that make up the population of Iran, Kurds have been left with the least to lose, and, despite strongly patriarchal tribal traditions, many Iranian Kurds have also been exposed to the Kurdish freedom movement and its focus on women’s freedom.

The protests — which developed into an uprising — were especially strong in Kurdish areas and among the Baluch minority at the other end of the country. The Kurdish movement’s slogan of Jin Jiyan Azadi — Women Life Freedom — became the call of the resistance, alongside anti-regime slogans such as “Death to the Dictator”.

People rose up in resistance in every province, and there was tremendous support among students. But outside the Kurdish regions, the uprising failed to achieve the mass mobilisation of workers needed to stop the functioning of the economy and bring down the government. The tight grip of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on every aspect of life has made this much harder to achieve than it was in 1979, and reports of brave and inspiring resistance began to be overtaken by accounts of brutal and sadistic state violence.

Last September, two years on from the uprising, Amnesty International reported that “people in Iran continue to endure the devastating consequences of the authorities’ brutal crackdown” and that “authorities have also further escalated their assault on human rights, waging a war on women and girls”. Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights reported that 143 Kurds lost their lives in the uprising.

Although the Iranian Kurdish parties outlawed in Iraq did not intervene practically, they were attacked by Iranian missiles and drones, and, under Iranian pressure, Iraq has forced them to disarm and relocate away from the border. This has not impacted PJAK, whose bases are hidden in the mountains.

Shifting balance of forces in the Middle East

This last year has seen seismic changes in the political balance in the Middle East, with Israel, armed and backed by the US and their Western friends, gaining hegemonic power over an increasing area at the expense of Iran — and Russia. Besides their genocidal attack on Gaza and Iran-backed Hamas, Israel crippled Hezbollah. This seriously weakened the Iranian presence in Syria. With Russia — President Assad’s other backer — distracted by war in Ukraine, Ahmed al-Sharaa and his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were able to take control in Damascus.

There is evidence that Britain and the US supported this takeover, and they have been quick to rebrand al-Sharaa from “terrorist” to welcomed head of state. Israel took advantage of the change of regime in Syria to bomb the country’s military bases and ensure that it will never be able to challenge Israeli dominance.

For many years, Israel has carried out limited attacks against Iran, including assassinations and sabotage, often targeting its nuclear program. With Iran’s regional allies, Hamas, Hezbollah and Assad, weakened or vanquished, the Zionist state is determined to consolidate its dominance.

On June 13, it launched a well-prepared attack, which included the assassination of 30 generals and nine nuclear scientists, as well as attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military resources. This was framed as preventing the imminent development of an Iranian nuclear bomb, but Israel has been making the same claim that Iran is on the threshold of achieving a bomb for over a decade.

At the time the attack took place, the US was attempting to negotiate a new deal that would restrict and monitor Iran’s nuclear developments in exchange for lifting sanctions. As Israel had planned, the US stopped their negotiations and followed Israel with an attack of their own, employing weapons that could penetrate Iran’s underground facilities, which Israel did not have the means to do themselves. It is thought that Israel hoped to draw the US into a full regime change war, but the US made clear that their intervention was a one off — at least for the time being.

For Iranian Kurds, this 12-day war brought brief hopes that they might be able to use the chaos to build democratic autonomy — as in Syria — alongside fears that, like other attempts at regime change from outside, this would end in years of violence and instability. PJAK explained that what was happening was “a war of power and conflicting interests, not a war of liberation for peoples and nations”. More immediate concerns that the Iranian regime would take out their anger on their own minorities and political opponents proved well founded.

Post-war repression

A month after the ceasefire, Hengaw reported that since the beginning of the war at least 1800 people had been arrested, 500 of them Kurds, and that most had been accused of espionage for Israel. While Israel clearly has many spies in Iran, there is no reason to believe that these are the people being arrested, as this is used as a convenient charge for destroying government opponents. Six people (including three Kurds) have already been executed for espionage. 

At least 29 civilians were killed by government forces during checkpoint raids, and there has been increased pressure on political prisoners, heavy sentences — including death — for political activists and increasing use of the death penalty.

Israel’s attack was the result of years of planning and demonstrated how deeply Mossad had infiltrated into Iran. However, it is unclear how much damage has been done to Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon, and it can be argued that it now has a much stronger incentive to do so.

Israel was shocked by the extent of the Iranian response and the damage it inflicted in Tel Aviv. But even after agreeing to a ceasefire, Israel made clear that, as in Lebanon, it has no intention of abiding by it and will cut Iran down to size whenever it wants. Its defence minister stated, “I have instructed the [Israel Defence Forces] to prepare an enforcement plan against Iran, which includes maintaining Israel’s air superiority, preventing the advancement of nuclear capabilities and missile production, and responding to Iran’s support for terrorist activities against the State of Israel.” 

Trump stated just this week that if Iran rebuilds their nuclear facilities, “we’ll wipe it out faster than you can wave your finger at it”.

Meanwhile, plans for a “Zangezur Corridor” could prove a trigger for new conflict in the region. This corridor would link (pro-Israel) Azerbaijan to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave — and hence Turkey — through a slice of Armenian territory along the border with Iran. Washington has proposed that the US should build and manage it. But what is seen as an east-west link by Azerbaijan and Turkey is regarded as a barrier to north-south trade by Iran and Russia, and Iran has moved its forces to the border.

There is no end in sight for further fighting, both across Iran’s borders and internally. On July 19, an Iranian drone killed a PJAK fighter in Iraq. PJAK retaliated by killing three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

Meanwhile, alongside the continuing crackdown, Kurds in Iran have been mourning the deaths of three environmental activists who died fighting wildfires because the Iranian government has no interest in stopping fires destroying Kurdish lands.

This is an edited transcript of a speech given by Sarah Glynn to a Green Left forum, “The Kurds and the Israeli-US war on Iran” on August 1.  Sarah Glynn is Strasbourg-based writer for Green Left, a socialist activist and co-author of several books including Climate Change is a Class Issue.