Iran strikes Kurdish opposition positions in Iraqi Kurdistan
An Iran-made drone is launched during a military drill in Jask port, southern Iran, December 25, 2014. Photo: AP
TEHRAN,— Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards used drones and missiles to strike headquarters of a Kurdish militant group near Iran’s border with neighboring Iraq’s Kurdistan region, the Iranian semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Friday.
“A large number of terrorists were killed and wounded in the attacks that had started from Wednesday to target terrorist headquarters and their training camps,” said the agency, citing a statement from the elite Guards.
A report from Tasnim in Arabic and a tweet in English from Iran’s Press TV described the strikes as taking place on the Iraqi side of the border. However, the full statement in Farsi said only that the strikes had taken place along the border.
The statement said the strikes were launched in retaliation for recent attacks by the group that killed at least five members of the Guards in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat) in northwest and western Iran.
“The Iraqi Kurdistan government is expected to take Iran’s warnings seriously and not allow terrorists to use its territory as a shelter to train, organize and endanger Iran’s sustainable security by carrying out terrorist attacks,” the statement said.
“The Guards … will respond harshly to any aggression against Iran’s security.”
Meanwhile the Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Friday that they had launched deadly strikes against “terrorists” across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan.
“Terrorist camps and training centres were attacked from Wednesday,” with rockets, drones and artillery, the Guards said in a statement published by their official website Sepahnews.
The statement did not name the groups targeted in the strikes, but said they were behind efforts to “disrupt security” in Iran.
Iran had warned authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan not to allow “terrorist groups” to set up training camps close to the border with Iran, the statement said, but the warning “had not been heeded”.
The statement claimed the targeted groups had tried to use “villagers as human shields” and asked the “noble people of Iraqi Kurdistan to distance themselves from the terrorist camps”.
Ehsan Shalabi, mayor of Sidekan — north of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital Arbil — told AFP a female civilian was killed and two members of her family wounded Thursday when “a rocket hit their agricultural land”.
The strike targeted “the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan”, he said, referring to the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), Iran’s oldest Kurdish separatist group.
The group was banned after the 1979 Islamic revolution and appeared to resume operations in 2016 after a long truce.
On Wednesday a civilian was killed by Iranian army shelling in Iraqi Kurdistan, a Kurdish official has said. A girl had been killed and two of her brothers wounded during an Iranian bombardment of Bradost sub-district, local media reported.
Earlier in July Iran’s Guards kill two Kurdish PJAK fighters in Iranian Kurdistan.
There are frequent clashes in the area between Iranian security forces and Iranian Kurdish militant groups based in neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan, such as the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), accused by Tehran of having links to Kurdish PKK insurgents in Turkey.
Since 2004 the PJAK (Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistane) took up arms to establish a semi-autonomous Kurdish regional entities or Kurdish federal states in Iran, similar to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. The PJAK has more than 3,000 armed militiamen, half the members of PJAK are women.
In September 2018, 17 top Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran KDPI members were killed in Koya in Iraqi Kurdistan after Iran targeted a coordination center for the opposition groups in a rocket attack.
Ever since its emergence in 1979 the Islamic regime imposed discriminatory rules and laws against the Kurds in all social, political and economic fields.
Iran’s Kurdish minority live mainly in the west and north-west of the country. They experience discrimination in the enjoyment of their religious, economic and cultural rights.
Parents are banned from registering their babies with certain Kurdish names, and religious minorities that are mainly or partially Kurdish are targeted by measures designed to stigmatize and isolate them.
Kurds are also discriminated against in their access to employment, adequate housing and political rights, and so suffer entrenched poverty, which has further marginalized them.
Kurdish human rights defenders, community activists, and journalists often face arbitrary arrest and prosecution. Others – including some political activists – suffer torture, grossly unfair trials before Revolutionary Courts and, in some cases, the death penalty.
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