Exclusive: Iran Kurdish leader says ready to join war if US gives support

The head of an Iranian Kurdish opposition group has told Newsweek his forces were prepared to launch ground operations against the Islamic Republic’s security forces if and when President Donald Trump promises support in the midst of the joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign.

“I think if the United States decided to protect and to support the Kurdish parties, then we could play a very, very significant role,” Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan Secretary-General Abdulla Mohtadi told Newsweek. “We could start the liberation—not in the classic sense of this—we could remove the Iranian forces and control cities in Kurdish areas, protect our people, protect them against massacres by the regime forces, provide security, preventing chaos, and also it would be a great boost of morale for the Iranian people to rise.”

“So, it could mean a big advantage for the people against the regime,” he added.

Reports swelled last week of the White House reaching out to Iranian Kurdish factions to coordinate on potential operations, sparking intense speculation of a land theater being opened in a predominantly aerial war, along with fears among supporters and opponents of the Islamic Republic of potential separatist aims.

Ultimately, Mohtadi said the discussions did not rise to the level of an agreement and, as such, a joint framework “never materialized.”

But given the history of U.S. wartime collaboration with Kurdish parties in the region, including in Iraq and Syria, Mohtadi said the conditions for a new chapter could emerge in Iran.

“The alliance, in my mind, is strong enough, and the alliance with Iranian Kurds would be a big, big step, both in the interests of Kurds, Iranians and the United States,” he said. “That didn’t happen, but let’s see what happens in the future.”

Where the Kurds Come In

Iran is home to roughly 90 million people, with an ethnic Persian majority and a sizeable array of minority communities. Kurds are estimated to comprise between 8 and 17 percent of the population, largely present in the northwest, including the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, West Azerbaijan and Ilam, and significant presences in Hamadan and Lorestan as well.

A number of other ethnic groups, including Arabs, Azeris and Baloch, have also historically claimed armed dissident movements, though the Kurdish groups have traditionally been viewed as the most organized. Kurdish insurgency in modern Iran dates back more than a century and persisted after the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, with some groups allying with Iraq under then-President Saddam Hussein during the eight-year war between the two nations.

Today, many Iranian Kurdish groups, including the Komala Party, largely continue to operate from northern Iraq, where the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government was established in the wake of the U.S. intervention in the First Gulf War in 1991. The Iraqi Kurdish region has cooperated with Baghdad since the ousting of Hussein during the U.S.-led invasion of the Second Gulf War in 2003, though tensions continue to persist, including among different Kurdish factions.

Last month, days before the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran would plunge the Persian Gulf into a third major confrontation and the most serious since the Middle East was rattled by regional turmoil with the eruption of the war in Gaza in October 2023, five Iranian Kurdish factions overcame their own internal feuds in order to establish the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan.

They include the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI), Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), the Organization of Iranian Kurdistan Struggle (Khabat) and Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan. The Komala Party, from which the Komala Toilers faction first splintered in 2007, did not initially join the alliance, but ultimately signed on earlier this month in a move Mohtadi said was geared toward prioritizing a united Iranian Kurdish front in the throes of the war.

“We have a couple of points which we thought should be clarified before announcing the coalition,” Mohtadi said. “Something about the unification of peshmerga forces in Iranian Kurdistan at the latest stage, and also about the joint Kurdish administration in the Iranian Kurdistan, things like that.”

“But when the crisis came and the war started, we realized that it’s not time for these corrections,” he added. “It’s better to unite
and pursue our aim through and within the coalition, and that’s what we did.”

In Between Washington and Tehran’s War

When reports first surfaced in various outlets of a looming U.S.-backed Kurdish offensive, Trump initially welcomed the prospect, telling reporters last Thursday, “I think it’s wonderful that they want to do that, I’d be all for it.”

By last Saturday, however, the president changed his tune in a rare outright dismissal for a leader known for traditionally teasing all options being open.

“I have ruled it out. I don’t want the Kurds going in,” Trump said on Air Force One at the time. “I don’t wanna see the Kurds get hurt, get killed, and we’ve had a good relation. They’re willing to go in, but we really, I’ve told them I don’t want them to go in.”

Iran has already taken action amid reports of a looming Kurdish incursion. Iran’s Khatam Al-Anbiya Central Headquarters has announced several rounds of strikes against Kurdish rebel positions in Iraqi Kurdistan, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warning, “if separatist groups in the region make any move against Iran’s territorial integrity, we will crush them.”

Iran, which is engaged in an ongoing and unprecedented campaign of drone and missile attacks across all Middle Eastern nations hosting U.S. military bases—especially the Arab Gulf states—in response to the U.S.-Israeli campaign, has a record of striking alleged Kurdish dissident positions as well as alleged U.S. and Israeli spy sites in Iraqi Kurdistan that predates the current conflict.

Israel also has a history of reaching out to Kurds and other ethnic and religious minorities across the Middle East, a strategy that received new attention last year as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered support to another regional minority, the Druze, after the fall of the former Iran-aligned government in Syria to an Islamist-led coalition of rebels in December 2024.

But the experience of U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria offers a cautionary tale. The White House has courted the new Syrian government and, after a decade of Pentagon aid to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF) fight against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), now backs Damascus’ demands for integrating the self-ruling lands held by the SDF in the northeast.

Also factoring into the equation are other neighboring countries, namely Iraq, whose government has vowed to not permit any cross-border Kurdish operations against Iran, and Turkey, a NATO ally that has long waged war against Kurdish separatism both in and across its borders.

“The Kurds have been reliable allies of the United States since decades ago, in 1991, in 2003, even before that, during the 1970s, and then in Syria, and then against ISIS. Iranian Kurds are no exception,” Mohtadi said. “But I think we would be wiser and more cautious towards our neighbors. We would not provoke Turkey or any other neighbor, and we would convince them that we have no harmful intention against them, and we are not separatists in Iran.”

“So, we enjoy the most widespread connections with the Iranian opposition inside and outside the country,” he continued. “So, the Iranian Kurds would be, I think, less provocative and more in tune with the developments in the region. So, I think we could protect ourselves, providing that the United States, at least in the initial stages of the campaign, protected us and supported us.”

Separation Anxiety

While Mohtadi dismisses any separatist aims, concerns over Iran’s potential division have already fueled blowback toward a Kurdish offensive from across many segments of Iranian society.

Fears were further stoked by Trump’s remark that Iran’s map would “probably not” look the same after the war, when discussing the Kurdish issue with reporters on Air Force One last week.

Iranian officials have fervently pushed back against any talk of territorial division. Speaking to Drop News last week, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Esmail Baghaei accused the U.S. and Israel of striving to create “failed states” through exploiting ethnic divisions. He alleged that tactic was at play during the nationwide protests in January in which Iranian officials blame foreign-backed infiltrators for stoking much of the violence that led to thousands of deaths and sparked Trump’s initial military build-up in the region.

“They love to create bloodshed,” Baghaei said at the time. “They have so much appetite for turning the states into chaos, and that’s what they are trying to do in Iran, abusing ethnicities, abusing other countries’ ethnic minorities. That’s what they are trying to do.”

Newly named Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei also referenced alleged U.S.-Israeli plans of “dividing” Iran on Thursday in the first statement attributed to him since being named successor to his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening day of the war.

Opposition factions have expressed criticism as well. Among them is one of the most prominent Iranian anti-Islamic Republic figures abroad, Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s last shah who was toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution led by founding Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and after which the Komala Party participated in one of the most intensive Kurdish rebellions in Iran’s modern history.

The Komala Party once allied with Pahlavi upon the formation of a previous opposition coalition in the wake of previous large-scale protests that erupted over the death of an Iranian Kurdish woman held by police for failing to adhere to mandatory hijab codes in 2022. This bloc ultimately fell apart, however, and frictions between Pahlavi, who has portrayed himself as the only leader capable of ushering in a new democratic era for Iran, and other opposition factions have only intensified amid this year’s protests and the war that followed.

Pahlavi responded to the recent Iranian Kurdish coalescence by stating “several separatist groups—some of whose records include collaboration with both Khomeini and Saddam—have made baseless and contemptible claims against the territorial integrity and national unity of Iran,” crossing what he called the “ultimate red line.”

Mohtadi, for his part, argued that since the collapse of their opposition, Pahlavi “abandoned his conciliatory tone, and started to attack people—at least his people, his advisers started to attack people, to destroy people, and they created a situation where nobody trusts nobody, and it was a big division.”

“I know he has the right to fight for what he thinks is right, and he has the right to promote himself or promote the organization that he thinks suitable for the democratic cause in Iran,” Mohtadi said. “But his actions—not he himself, but his organization, his people—have been very divisive, very aggressive, and his reaction to the Kurdish coalition was not constructive at all.”

Asked if he would seek to pursue a similar form of self-rule as witnessed in Iraq and Syria, Mohtadi said the final arrangement would be subject to discussions and negotiations among different parties in Iran.

“Every country is unique and any arrangement where the rights of Kurds and ethnic groups are discussed is something between political parties, between lawyers, between the political elites, between the masses of the people,” Mohtadi said. “So, we have to reach an agreement with other people, with other political groups in Iran. It’s not something we want to impose on Iran. It has to be the result of discussions, compromises and eventually coming out with an idea, with an arrangement that is acceptable to all.”

Some prerequisites Mohtadi referred to would be “a central education in mother tongue, along with Persian, of course, and the local parliaments running their own affairs in their region.”

“My experience tells me that it is possible to reach such an arrangement in the future, providing it is at least a semi-democracy,” Mohtadi said. “Freedom of speech, freedom of political parties, free and fair elections, if we have something like this, we can be hopeful that we reach an agreement in the future.”

Such an outcome, however, is only possible if the Islamic Republic is ultimately overthrown, a goal against which the Iranian government continues to battle fiercely and to which the White House has avoided commitment as the war drags on.

Mohtadi said he was “hopeful that the regime’s days are numbered” as “they’re weakened” and “there is a glimpse of hope that, at some point, somehow the life of this regime will end.” Yet at the same time, he was “concerned about the massacres, about the revenge, about what if the regime survives.”

“Because I’m sure that for them the definition of victory is not crushing Americans in the war,” Mohtadi said. “No, it’s survival. If they survive, they feel victorious.”