ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Iranian security forces twice clashed with armed groups in the border area with the Kurdistan region in a space of a week raising the possibility of increasingly tension at a time that Tehran and Washington are competing for influence in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region.
One Iranian border guard was killed on Sunday night in a clash with a group of armed men near Baneh city in the western Kurdistan Province, the commander of the border guards in the province said.
“The border guards clashed with a number of armed bandits who intended to carry out subversive activities inside the country,” Commander Kiumars Sheikhi of the border guards in the Kurdistan province told Tasnim news. “We have found traces of these armed bandits and we are pursuing them.”
In a separate incident on Friday night, a Kurdish group clashed with border guards near the western city of Marivan which lasted half an hour with no casualties reported. No Kurdish group claimed responsibility for the attack.
Iran has several hundred kilometers of porous borders with the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Tehran has historically attached critical importance to this region. Iran has repeatedly protested to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and its two ruling parties to stop Kurdish opposition groups from using their territory to deploy fighters to inside Iran.
Tehran says its adversaries Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States are supporting the Kurdish opposition groups, but the Kurdish groups say they are struggling for greater rights for the Kurdish minority which number over 8 million within Iran.
Peshmerga fighters of several armed Kurdish opposition groups — headquartered in Iraqi Kurdistan since the 1990s — often clashed with Iranian security forces including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) until last September when IRGC targeted.
Two camps in Iraqi Kurdistan belonging to two of the main Kurdish groups. The missile attack came after three years of clashes between fighters of Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and Iranian security forces in which dozens of fighters from both sides died.
In the latest clash on Sunday night, one border guard was killed, commander Sheikhi said without specifying which Kurdish group was responsible for the clash. Iran has been fortifying its border area with Iraqi Kurdistan by constructing roads to the mountain tops and launching large scale clearing operations via artillery, drones and thousands of troops to stop infiltration of Kurdish groups into the country.
While a number of minor clashes have occurred since the missile attack on the Kurdish camps in September, the latest attacks could raise tension between Tehran and Erbil if claimed by the Kurdish opposition groups based in the Kurdistan Region.