As US-Israeli airstrikes hit Iran, Kurdish forces eye a ground offensive

With the continuing US-Israeli air campaign over Iran, one question remains: will there be a ground offensive aimed at bringing about the fall of the regime?

“There has long been a great deal of activity in the border region between Iraqi Kurdistan and Iranian Kurdistan,” said Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, executive director of Wadi, an aid organisation based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRG).

In and around the KRG capital of Erbil, many factions of groups originating from Iranian Kurdistan maintain bases and training facilities, some hosting several hundred fighters.

The Kurdish armed formations in Iranian Kurdistan, along with the Baloch, are currently the only groups inside Iran capable of holding territory by force, an essential precondition for the collapse of the regime.

In western Iran, where more than 10 million Kurds live, the authorities have long ruled with particular brutality. “Beginning in 2016, control over the region was taken away from the Interior Ministry and handed directly to the Revolutionary Guards,” said Hiwa Bahrami, the representative of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) in Austria and Germany and head of its international relations department.

The PDKI maintains armed factions inside Iran known as Peshmerga. Though equipped largely with light weapons, they could mobilise hundreds of thousands of people in the event of an offensive, Bahrami said.

The bloody suppression of protests in January, which left an estimated 30,000 dead, made it clear that the regime cannot be defeated with empty hands.

“People across Iran want to see the regime fall – not only the Kurds, even though they have suffered under it for 47 years.”

As a result, Bahrami said, there is now an unusual degree of unity among Kurdish factions. All of them see a rare opportunity to cast off the regime’s yoke under the protection of American and Israeli air supremacy: “People cheer every airstrike, every bombardment.”

Many IRGC positions in the Kurdish provinces have been heavily bombed in recent days. In some cases, even checkpoints manned by only two soldiers have been struck, he said.

It appears that the United States and Israel are shaping the battlefield for a possible ground offensive, with many regime forces are in the area already in disarray.

But one condition is essential, von der Osten-Sacken said: the Kurds of Iranian Kurdistan must not be sacrificed and then abandoned.

“They must be treated as genuine partners – like Barzani and Talabani were in 2003 –not as short-term, disposable boots on the ground”, he said, referring to senior Kurdish politicians from KRG.

(mk)