Their target is the long-exiled Iranian Kurdish opposition, installed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran in the 1980s.
Tehran considers these armed factions “terrorists” and accuses them of attacking its territory.
A general in Iran has accused Kurdish opposition teams of inciting Mahsa Amini protests in Iranian Kurdistan in the face of a fatal crackdown by security forces.
Amini, 22, was pronounced dead on September 16, days after Iran’s infamous moral police detained her for allegedly violating Iran’s strict women’s dress code.
Adel Bakawan, director of the French Center for Research on Iraq (CFRI), Iran had to “find an enemy” to blame for stoking national protests.
“The weakest link that can be attacked without causing consequences is the Iranian Kurds,” he said.
On September 28, Iran unleashed a barrage of fire on Kurdish militant positions in northern Iraq, killing another 14 people and wounding 58, adding civilians. He followed with less bloody attacks.
On Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani reiterated Tehran’s accusations against the groups, which threaten the country’s national security.
However, experts say far-left teams have virtually ceased all military activity, focusing on political action.
All the fighters they still have can be only reservists, proceeding to their training.
Iranian Kurdish journalist Raza Manochari said there was an agreement since the 1990s between those teams and the government of Iraq’s own Kurdistan region.
It protects their deployment, “and in return, they have no interaction in the activities of the military, by causing disorder in relations with Iran,” he said.
Manochari, who has lived in Iraq for 8 years, ties the Kurds in both countries: they speak the same Sorani dialect, and many have relatives on both sides of the border.
Massoud Barzani, leader of the Democratic Party of Iraqi Kurdistan and former president of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, born in 1946 in Iran.
He is the son of iconic Kurdish nationalist leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani, head of the only separatist state in Kurdish history founded in the Iranian city of Mahabad until he crushed Iranian troops in 1946 after a year.
Today, Iran’s Kurdish minority (around 10 million people out of a population of 83 million) complains of marginalization.
“In Iran, the Kurds don’t have many fundamental cultural and political rights,” said Shivan Fazil, a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
“Schooling in their mother tongue is still prohibited,” he said.
Their situation is darker than that of the Kurds in the region, Fazil said, mentioning the Kurds in Turkey’s parliament since 2015, de facto autonomy in northeastern Syria and Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq.
Aso Saleh, a member of the executive committee of Iran’s Kurdish KDPI attacked through Tehran last month, said he had “never used Iraqi soil or territory to launch an attack on Iranian forces. “
Saleh, founded in Sweden, said the motion was “mainly located inside Iranian Kurdistan,” where its activities will have to remain “secret. “
In Iraq, only “leadership and bureaucratic apparatus” was provided.
“This motion seeks to bring democracy and federalism to Iran,” he told AFP of the one founded in Iran in 1945.
Edris Abdi of the Iraq-based Kurdish Kurdish nationalist organization Komala told AFP: “We are participating in army activities. “
Hardi Mahdi Mika, a political scientist at Iraq’s Sulaimaniyah University, questions the marginalization of the Kurdish minority.
“In terms of economic expansion and unemployment, the Kurdish regions are the poorest” in Iran, he said. “The government is neglecting those areas. “
Kurdish staff cross the border every day in search of temporary jobs in Iraq that pay more than their homes in sanctions-hit Iran.
Even in Iran’s majority provinces, “Kurds have no voice in the government,” Mika said.
STR-BURS-TGG/SRM/HC/IT