Is Trump encouraging a Kurdish revolt? That will pour more oil on the Middle Eastern fire

Summary

• Reports claim US President Trump and Israel are encouraging Iranian Kurds to revolt, aiming for "boots on the ground" regime change, following Trump's calls with Kurdish leaders.
• Iranian Kurdish groups, backed by alleged US/CIA weapons, announced a "struggle to overthrow" Iran, with Peshmerga militias massing at the border under code name "Zhina".
• Encouraging Kurdish revolt risks Iran's disintegration, boosting nationalism, and destabilising Iraq/Turkey, potentially escalating Middle East conflict rather than toppling the regime.

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LONDON – For now, all we have are some rumour and plenty of speculation.

Reports carried by several American news outlets claim that senior officials in the administration of US President Donald Trump are in contact with leaders of the Kurdish ethnic minority
in Iran, hoping to enlist them in the effort to overthrow the clerical regime of the Islamic republic. Mr Trump himself is alleged to have had some phone calls with key Kurdish leaders.

This could all be just political signalling, another “psyops” (psychological operations) way of messaging to Iran’s rulers that Washington remains determined to unseat them. But if Mr Trump truly decides to go down the route of encouraging a Kurdish revolt, that would raise the spectre of Iran’s territorial disintegration and provoke seismic shocks throughout the Middle East. A more dangerous policy can hardly be imagined.

Although the Iranians are among the oldest nations in the region, only around 55 to 60 per cent of Iran’s 90 million inhabitants are Persians; the rest are a variety of other ethnic groups.

In practice, the country is more cohesive than a bare glance at such statistics may imply. Around 80 per cent of all inhabitants belong to the Iranian ethnic family, even if not all are Persians. Almost every inhabitant is a Muslim. An overwhelming majority of the population speaks Farsi, the official language.

Still, there are two politically significant ethnic groups. The first consists of the Azeris, Iran’s largest minority, who belong to the Turkic ethnic family and make up 18 per cent of Iran’s overall population. The second are the Kurds, who are about 13 per cent of Iran’s inhabitants.

While the Azeris belong to the Shi’ite branch of Islam, as do a majority of other Iranians, the Kurds are largely Sunni Muslims, adding another layer of distinction.

Both ethnic minorities are spread well beyond the borders of Iran, throughout the Middle East and the Caucasus, on Europe’s southern approaches. But while a large part of ethnic Azeris have a country they can call home – Azerbaijan, which emerged as an independent state after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – the Kurds remain one of history’s great losers: They number just over 40 million but have no country of their own.

Over many decades, the dream of Kurdish independence spawned separatist armed insurrections in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. And all four countries have periodically exploited the Kurds’ plight.

Yet all agree on one point: their fierce opposition to the creation of any independent Kurdish state, which would have to be carved out of their territories. Only in north-eastern Iraq is there currently a self-governed Kurdish region bordering Iran. The autonomous region of Kurdistan was established with US support after the fall of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Several Kurdish groups from Iran have also found refuge in Iraq, and thousands of Iraqi and Iranian Kurds are now massing at Iran’s borders, part of the so-called Peshmerga militias, whose name translates to “those who face death”.

Weeks before the start of the current US-Israeli attack on Iran
, leaders of the country’s Kurdish separatist movement announced “the struggle to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran and achieve the self-determination of the Kurds”, as they put it in a statement issued in neighbouring Iraq.

Kurdish sources claim that their impending offensive inside Iran already has a code name: Zhina, the middle name of Ms Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman whose 2022 death in Iranian police custody after she was detained for not covering her hair “properly” sparked widespread anti-government demonstrations in Iran that year.

There are also credible reports that both Israel and the US Central Intelligence Agency have transferred large quantities of weapons to the Kurds. And it has now been revealed that Mr Trump on March 1 – a mere one day after he ordered the bombing of Iran – spoke with both top Iraqi Kurdish politicians Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani, and with Mr Mustafa Hijri, a key Iranian Kurdish leader.

The purpose of these discussions is clear enough. No regime change can be brought about in Iran by simply bombing the Islamic republic, so the Kurds are now expected to provide the “boots on the ground” required to topple Iran’s clerics.

The plan is strongly pushed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a lifelong believer of the proposition that the more Middle Eastern countries crumble, the better his Jewish state will be.

The idea is utter nonsense: Weak countries spawn more violent militias and, in turn, more Israeli military interventions, as the sad examples of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq indicate.

But Mr Netanyahu will not be persuaded otherwise, and Mr Trump seems to accept his logic. Ironically, the US President only recently abandoned a Kurdish militia in Syria, which helped US forces fight Islamist fundamentalists in that region. But now, the same US President has apparently rediscovered the utility of the Kurds.

Given Iran’s military superiority, it is unlikely that Peshmerga fighters will advance all the way to Tehran, the Iranian capital. The goal, rather, appears to be for the Kurdish militias to engage Iranian security forces in combat. This would, allegedly, make it easier for the population in Iranian cities to rise against the regime without fearing a massacre like the one in January.

But if the Kurds launch their offensive inside Iran at the behest of the US, the results will be terrible. Such a rebellion will boost Iranian nationalism and could well make the mullahs more popular with a public that may hate their clerical government but certainly does not want to witness the disintegration of their state.

Any US encouragement for the Kurds in Iran will also infuriate Turkey, which has its own Kurdish separatist problem. And it will also destabilise Iraq, where Shi’ite militias with close ties with Iran are already fighting for supremacy against Sunni militias.

In short, just about the surest way of pouring more oil on to the Middle Eastern fire is to encourage a new Kurdish separatist movement in Iran. The question is whether the US President and the Israeli Prime Minister grasp this basic fact.

• Jonathan Eyal is based in London and Brussels and writes on global political and security matters.