Kurds in Iran Want a Separate Kurdish State

In Iran, the Persians constitute a little more than half of the population. The rest are Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, and Arabs, all of whom chafe under Persian control. There are fifteen million Kurds in Iran, who constitute nearly 17% of Iran’s population. Now with Iran suffering a historic drought that may lead to the forced evacuation of the ten million people in Tehran, with its military weakened by the 12-day war with Israel, during which Iran’s 100-billion-dollar nuclear program was obliterated, and its ballistic missile stores and production plants were also devastated, and with the crushing defeats of its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, and the overthrow of Iran’s ally Bashar Assad and his regime in Syria, the government in Tehran is in a weaker position today than it has ever been in since the beginning of Khomeini’s regime.

More on the Kurdish fight for an independent Kurdish state, that would initially unite Kurds in Iran, Syria, and Iraq, and then, at a later date, try to incorporate Turkish Kurds as well, can be found here: “US, Israel, don’t abandon us to Iran, Kurdistan Freedom Party leader, military chief tells ‘Post,'” by Suzan Quitaz, Jerusalem Post, November 30, 2025:

The Trump administration should continue keeping US Army bases in the autonomous Kurdish Region of Iraq as a deterrence to Iran, according to Hussein Yazdanpanah, president of the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) and commander in chief of the Kurdistan National Army.

“The Kurdistan Region needs the assistance of the major powers to overcome Iran’s hegemony,” he recently told The Jerusalem Post.

Major powers such as the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia must not abandon the Kurds, Yazdanpanah said.

The PAK is a Kurdish nationalist and separatist fighter group with roots in the Kurdish region of Iran, which Kurds refer to as Rojhelat, or Eastern Kurdistan. It is based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Rojhelat is Iran’s most heavily militarized and oppressed region.

It is home to Iran’s estimated 10 to 15 million Kurds, or about 10%-17% of Iran’s population, as well as being strategically located along the borders with the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq….

The Kurds are opposed to the regime of the mullahs, and have been the best organized of the regime’s domestic enemies. They have their own separatist and nationalist political group, the PAK, which has its own military, the Kurdish National Army. It is a well-trained force that helped the Americans during the Iraq War defeat Saddam’s forces and then ISIS in Iraq, and received American weapons in grateful return.

Last week, Mazloum Abdi, general commander of the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), delivered a key address at the Middle East Peace and Security Forum (MEPS 2025) in the Kurdish city of Duhok in the Kurdish Region of Iraq.

He called for dialogue with the regime in Damascus and decentralization where regions govern themselves. Yazdanpanah said decentralization was “meaningless,” adding that the “need to go to the root of the Kurdish problem, which lies in the very nature of what Syria is about – an artificial state.”

“Syria, as a nation-state, has not existed in history,” he said. “Whereas Kurds are a nation – an indigenous and ancient nation.”…

Certainly Syria as a nation-state is of recent — early 20th century — vintage. Under the hundreds of years of Ottoman rule, it was divided into various vilayets, among them Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut. There is still little consciousness of a Syrian people. Instead they see themselves as Sunni Arabs, Alawites, Kurds, and Christians (far more numerous in the past than today). The Syrian civil war was not fought to preserve the non-existent “Syrian nation,” but to keep the Alawite regime in power.

So far, the regime in Damascus has not dared to attack the Kurds in Syria. They are the largest minority in Syria, with 2.5 million people, more than three times the number of Druze. The SDF — the Syrian Kurdish militia — still has close ties to the Americans, with whom they fought against ISIS. Were Ahmed al-Sharaa to attack the Kurds, he would anger the Americans, who would likely reimpose the sanctions on Syria that had recently been lifted.

The Trump administration should continue keeping US Army bases in the autonomous Kurdish Region of Iraq as a deterrence to Iran, according to Hussein Yazdanpanah, president of the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) and commander in chief of the Kurdistan National Army.

“The Kurdistan Region needs the assistance of the major powers to overcome Iran’s hegemony,” he recently told The Jerusalem Post.

Major powers such as the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia must not abandon the Kurds, Yazdanpanah said….

Of those three powers, it is Israel that is likely to be of the greatest military help to the Kurds. Jews and Kurds in the Middle East have the same Arab enemy, and Israel knows that Kurdish separatists, and a possible Kurdish state, would manage to weaken three of its enemies — Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Trump administration is reluctant to send troops abroad. But Israel, that since its modern rebirth in in its ancient homeland has had to fight four major wars — in 1948, 1967, 1973, and from 2023 to the present — does not share that reluctance. And the attack on October 7, 2023 has provided a salutary dose of grim reality; now 80% of Israelis reject the idea of a “two-state solution” and the treacly version calling for “two-states-for-two-peoples.”

On June 13, PAK was one of the few daring Kurdish groups that openly welcomed and supported the Israeli attack against Iran and called for a nationwide uprising, despite the fear of a brutal crackdown.

There was no nationwide uprising in Iran this past summer, but it looks ever more like a possibility. The Iranian economy continues to sink; the historic drought has devastated the agricultural sector and may require ten million people to be evacuated from Tehran. Iranians are infuriated by the realization that the one hundred billion dollars spent on the now-destroyed nuclear program could have been used instead to build dozens of advanced desalination plants, buy thousands of water atmospheric generators, install drip irrigation methods everywhere to husband what water is available, and repair the thousands of miles of leaky pipelines that waste so much water.

PAK called on Kurds to attack Iranian regime targets and avenge the tens of thousands of Kurds who were massacred by the mullahs.

After the military humiliation the Iranian regime suffered during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which subsequently led to a brutal crackdown, the Kurds were on the receiving end.

Humiliated by its loss to Israel, the mullahs decided to punish Iran’s Kurds, rounding up thousands of them, who were charged with having been spies for Israel. It wasn’t true, but their public execution fulfilled the need to find a scapegoat.

This insensate campaign by the Iranian government to blame the Kurds for their loss to the IDF, and then to execute more than a thousand of them, has only made the Kurds draw ever closer to Israel, the only country that might conceivably come to their military aid, as it did with the Druze in Syria. Eighteen million Kurds in Iran are desperately unhappy with their treatment in the Islamic Republic, and want to be part of a separate Kurdish state that will in the end be comprised of the Kurds not just in Iran, but in Syria and Iraq as well. And their only certain ally in this endeavor is the IDF, which sees the benefits of a state of Kurdistan, as a vehicle to weaken all three of Israel’s main enemies — Iran, Iraq, and Syria.