Kurdistan, War, and the Failure of Ready-Made Narratives
How Kurdistan became a dominant war narrative, obscuring other military geographies and reducing a living society to a proxy image.
During the five-week war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran, one name was repeatedly pushed into the media and political spotlight: the Kurds. The announcement of a coalition among Iranian Kurdish political forces before the war, Donald Trump’s calls during the war with Kurdish leaders in Iraq and later with Mustafa Hijri, a senior leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, his remarks about armed Kurdish groups entering Iran, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ drone attack on Iranian Kurdish party camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq all came together in a short span of time and produced a single image: Kurdistan as a possible theater of proxy war.
That image meant different things to different actors. Media close to Israel presented it as evidence of an expanding front against the Islamic Republic. Some anti-war voices repeated the same image with the opposite moral sign, reading it as yet another expression of an imperialist and Zionist project. The judgment differed, but the center of the narrative remained the same: the Kurds.
At the same time, far from Kurdistan, in the western desert of Iraq, another story was taking shape. According to a Wall Street Journal report published after the war, Israel had established a military base in a dry and remote area: an airstrip, special air-force units, search-and-rescue teams, and a logistical support center. The first reports of unusual activity and helicopter movements came from a local shepherd. When the Iraqi army was sent to investigate, airstrikes forced its troops to retreat. One Iraqi soldier was killed and two were wounded. In its complaint to the United Nations, Iraq attributed the attack to the United States.
The day after the report was published, open-source analysts used Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to identify a runway about 1.6 kilometers long in a dry lakebed roughly 180 kilometers southwest of Najaf and Karbala. There was no evidence that this base was connected to Kurdish forces. Its significance lay elsewhere: while the Kurds were being pushed into the foreground, another military geography was operating more quietly, and perhaps more effectively.
This is the starting point of the argument. The question is how a dominant narrative took shape in ways that weakened our ability to see other layers of the war. The Kurds mattered in this war, but the political importance of Kurdistan should not become a cover for ignoring other battlefields. In war, the loudest news is not always the most important. Sometimes the loudest sound is precisely what turns the eye away from somewhere else.
Two Memories That Do Not Easily Overlap
In recent years, Israel has tried to present itself as a defender of minorities and stateless peoples in West Asia. This effort has extended from the Druze in Syria to the Kurds. But this image faces an obstacle that cannot easily be removed through money, media, or lobbying: the historical memory of communities that have themselves suffered erasure, denial, and displacement.
Zionism, in its historical roots, was a settler-colonial project. The construction of an ethno-national state on land inhabited by an indigenous Palestinian population proceeded through displacement and removal. From the Nakba of 1948 to settlement building in the West Bank, from the siege of Gaza to its destruction, this logic has continued in different forms. One can debate the phases, factions, and vocabularies of Israeli politics, but the erasure of Palestinians is not an accidental margin of this history.
The political memory of the Kurds is of a different kind. In the twentieth century, the Kurds did not build a state that colonized another land. Their historical experience, in different forms, has been one of division, denial, repression, and displacement: from the defeat of the Republic of Mahabad to Anfal and Halabja, from prison and execution in Iran to the denial of identity in Turkey, from burned villages to the displacement of Afrin. Kurdish nationalism, in its diverse currents, emerged as a response to this memory. That response has not always been emancipatory or free of contradiction, but it came out of the experience of national oppression.
For this reason, Israel’s attempt to place itself alongside the Kurds is marked by a deep contradiction. Some Kurdish political forces may, at a particular moment, consider foreign support; others may see it as dangerous; and parts of society may distance themselves from both positions. But turning Israel into the Kurds’ natural friend is historically difficult. A memory formed through displacement and denial cannot easily identify with a state built on the displacement and denial of another people.
This does not exempt the Kurds from the contradictions of politics. No society stands outside contradiction. But it does require us not to reduce Kurdistan to a consumable image. Kurdistan is not only mountains, weapons, parties, or a force ready for the scenarios of great powers. Kurdistan is a society: cities, markets, schools, prisons, families, workers, cross-border porters, teachers, women, young people, and a memory inseparable from national oppression.
The Kurdish Coalition: Historical Possibility and the Risk of Being Consumed
This is the background against which the coalition of Iranian Kurdish political forces should be understood. Before anything else, this coalition was an independent political act by Kurdish parties. It emerged from months of talks and drew on decades of struggle, defeat, experience, and political knowledge in Kurdistan. Any analysis that treats it simply as the product of a phone call from Trump or Israeli propaganda erases the social reality of Kurdistan.
National oppression against Kurds under the Islamic Republic has never been a secondary matter. The militarization of Kurdistan, executions and imprisonment, the shooting of cross-border porters, linguistic discrimination, the closure of production units, restrictions on teachers’ and workers’ organizing, and the securitization of every political and cultural demand have all been part of the ruling order. Whenever this order has faced linguistic, labor, economic, or political demands, it has responded through the language of security.
This structure of repression has made Kurdistan a sensitive point. A society long deprived of the right to speak, organize, and participate equally sees new possibilities in every shift in the regional order. These possibilities are not necessarily pure, safe, or morally simple. Real politics begins precisely here: where right, fear, opportunity, and danger are intertwined.
The broad strike by shopkeepers and bazaar merchants in more than twenty cities of Iranian Kurdistan in January 2026, held in response to a joint call by Kurdish parties, showed that these parties can still generate a form of social coordination. After the bloody repression of protests in Kermanshah and Ilam, the strike carried the meaning of a historical moment for the Kurdish movement. The Kurdish coalition formed in February–March 2026 should be read in continuity with this sense of possibility.
The coalition brought together different intellectual and political traditions. That diversity could have been a strength. The representation of a broad spectrum of Kurdish party politics can build social power if it is accompanied by clear rules, transparent political boundaries, and trustworthy decision-making mechanisms. But the absence of a basic agreement on relations with foreign powers, the ambiguity of executive mechanisms, and the lack of a clear intellectual hegemony opened space for propagandistic use.
Statements by some leaders or senior figures from parties such as Khabat, the Komala Party of the Toilers of Kurdistan, and PJAK about seeking support from Washington and Tel Aviv, interviews with global and regional media, and the presence of some figures at events linked to Israeli institutions all highlighted this contradiction. Israel did not need the whole of Kurdish society to construct the narrative of a “Kurdish ground force.” A few voices, a few images, a few interviews, and the atmosphere of war were enough to produce a narrative that both pro-Israel media and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps could use.
In this context, the position of the Kurdistan Organization of the Communist Party of Iran, Komala, became analytically important. This organization did not join the coalition from the outset and warned of the risk of exploitation by the United States and Israel, the coalition’s internal contradictions, and the possibility of turning the Kurdish struggle into an instrument of great-power politics. This position rested on the understanding that the struggle against national oppression can lose part of its social force when it is drawn into the orbit of great powers.
On the other hand, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan and then the coalition itself later rejected the claim that Kurdish parties had become proxy forces, saying they had received no weapons and were not part of such a scenario. A BBC Persian report by Jiyar Gol raised different points, but these remain in tension with the coalition’s own statements and with its actual logistical and operational capacities. This insistence should be taken seriously. Yet in politics, the intentions of actors are not the only determining factor. Sometimes the structure of a narrative is built outside the direct will of a political force and places that force in a dangerous position. This was the problem facing the Kurdish coalition: the intersection of a legitimate demand with an environment ready to consume it.
The IRGC and the Target It Was Always Ready to Strike
The IRGC targeted the camps of Iranian Kurdish parties in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. These camps were generally places where peshmerga, refugees, and families lived. Attacking them was understandable within the Islamic Republic’s habitual securitization of Kurdistan. For Israel, too, it was useful in propaganda terms: the narrative of an “armed Kurdish threat” became an operational reality. This does not imply hidden coordination. Coordination was not necessary. It was enough for the informational architecture of war to be organized in such a way that each actor, through its own interests and blind spots, helped reinforce another’s narrative.
Here the tragedy of Kurdistan becomes clear. Israel elevated the Kurds globally as a threat or potential ally. The Islamic Republic took the same image from the opposite side and struck Kurdish camps. Some anti-war voices also kept the Kurds at the center, but this time as a proxy force of the West.
Anti-War Narratives
A significant part of anti-war discourse, in Iran, the diaspora, and the West, read the war through a ready-made framework: U.S. and Israeli imperialism against Iran as the representative of resistance. This framework began from a real truth. The war was launched by the United States and Israel. The attacks on civilian targets, including the Shajareh Tayebeh elementary school in Minab and dozens of other catastrophes, revealed the criminal face of the war. No critique of the Islamic Republic or its regional policy should minimize this fact.
But a framework can see part of the truth while blinding itself to other parts. When “imperialism versus resistance” becomes the entire language of analysis, any force that comes into conflict with the Islamic Republic is quickly placed in the position of an instrument of the foreign enemy. Here, the Kurds became victims of precisely this logic. Israel said the Kurds were its potential allies. Some anti-war voices said the Kurds had become part of a Western project. The two narratives were morally opposed, but they shared the same focus.
This unintended convergence matters. Israel benefited from the foregrounding of the Kurds because it diverted attention from other layers of the war. The Islamic Republic also needed that foregrounding in order to securitize Kurdistan and strike the camps. Part of the anti-war discourse, without necessarily intending to do so, helped consolidate the same centrality. The result was that Kurdistan was seen, but not as a society. It was seen as a security, proxy, or propaganda issue.
This logic also operates through vocabulary and political reflexes: unity against the foreign enemy, the danger of separatism, the priority of national security, and automatic suspicion toward any marginalized force that speaks of national rights or independent organization. Interestingly, this language was not limited to forces close to the Islamic Republic. Reza Pahlavi, too, demanded serious action against the coalition of Kurdish parties through the same logic.
Another reason lies in the poverty of inherited anti-imperialist frameworks. Some of these frameworks still read the world through a map in which everything belongs either to the camp of imperialism or to the camp of resistance. This map is necessary for seeing the beginning of war, sanctions, attacks, and the crimes of Western powers. But it is not sufficient for understanding complex states. It cannot see Turkey, which is both a NATO member and aligned with Iran on the Kurdish question. It cannot see Russia, which is officially a rival of the West yet benefits from an oil war. It cannot see the Islamic Republic as both the victim of foreign attack and a state that speaks to Kurdistan, workers, women, and its own society through the language of security.
The tragedy of politics often comes from the collision of values, each of which carries part of the truth. A serious anti-war position condemns imperialist war without qualification. But if that position leads to the erasure of Kurdish national oppression, the erasure of Iranian society, or the whitewashing of a repressive state, it distances itself from its own truth. Defending the right of the people of Iran against foreign attack comes close to defending the state if it fails to see the very people whom the Islamic Republic has long deprived of political rights. Defending Kurdish rights, meanwhile, can fall into another simplification if it ignores the danger of being consumed within the orbit of great powers.
In this war, the Kurds carried the heavy burden of three forms of misuse. Israel tried to turn them into the image of its desired ground force. The Islamic Republic labeled them a security threat and attacked them. Some anti-war voices, in order to preserve their familiar map, placed them in the same proxy position. All three, despite major differences and different intentions, separated Kurdish society from its own complexity.
What Was Lost
Israel benefited from the foregrounding of the Kurds. The Islamic Republic struck a target it had always been prepared to strike within its security logic. Turkey, too, played on more than one level: its NATO infrastructure served the attacking side, while its anti-Kurdish policy helped contain the scenario of arming Kurdish parties. Russia benefited from the prolongation of the war and rising oil prices. Anti-war voices, when they relied on ready-made maps, saw part of reality and missed another part.
At the center of this field, the Kurds were neither angels, nor passive instruments, nor predetermined proxies. They were a society with a history of oppression, real parties, real disagreements, real possibilities, and real mistakes. It was this human and political reality that disappeared in the narratives.
Any narrative that already knows who is resistance, who is a mercenary, who is a victim, and who is not a political subject blinds itself to part of the field. In this war, the blindest point may have been the very place everyone was talking about: Kurdistan.
Quelle:
https://en.radiozamaneh.com/38126
weitere texte von Siavash shahabi:
https://freethinker.co.uk/2025/02/the-silent-revolution-against-religious-oppression-in-iran
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