The CIA is working to get Iranian Kurdish militia forces into Iran to help the U.S. government overthrow the Islamic regime, according to a number of reports.
“The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran,” CNN reported Wednesday. “The Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about providing them with military support, the sources said.”
There are thousands of Iranian Kurdish forces along the Iraq-Iran border. A source and a senior Kurdistan Regional Government official told CNN that “the CIA support for Iranian Kurdish groups began several months before the war.” Moreover:
Iranian Kurdish opposition forces are expected to take part in a ground operation in Western Iran, in the coming days, the senior Iranian Kurdish official told CNN.
Covert Program
Two officials and a third source said Trump also called Iraqi Kurdish leaders on Sunday to talk about America’s war against Iran and how the United States and the Kurds could “work together.” A senior Kurdistan Regional Government official is quoted as suggesting that they had little chance but to oblige the Americans. “[It’s] very dangerous, but what can we do? We cannot stand against America,” he said. “We are very frightened.”
A source told CNN “that the idea would be for Kurdish armed forces to take on the Iranian security forces and pin them down to make it easier for unarmed Iranians in the major cities to turn out without getting massacred again as they were during unrest in January.” The Kurds could also be used to create chaos.
The New York Times reported that the CIA armed Iranian Kurdish forces “as part of a covert program to destabilize Iran” before this war even began.
Costly Operation
Former CIA officer Tracy Walder told NewsNation that using the Kurds might help achieve the American goals, but it could come at a cost.
“To really squash the regime, if you will, you have to have boots on the ground. That really endangers the lives of American troops,” she said. “The reality is, we have worked with Kurdish forces all over the Middle East … to essentially be those boots on the ground. They have a vested interest in seeing this regime toppled.” Then she alluded to possible downsides to going this route:
It never tends to go well when we do arm a lot of these groups. It usually devolves into infighting and fighting us, quite frankly. I don’t know that it will work out well in the long run, but, yes, in terms of bringing down the entirety of the (Iran) regime and invoking regime change, yes, it could be effective.
False Reports?
A Fox report from Wednesday claimed that thousands of Iraqi Kurds invaded Iran. But Deputy Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Aziz Ahmad, denied the report. “Not a single Iraqi Kurd has crossed the border,” Ahmad said. “This is patently false.”
White House officials have either denied these reports or given vague answers.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said to reporters on Wednesday, “None of our objectives are premised on the support of the arming of any particular force. So what other entities may be doing, we’re aware of, but our objectives aren’t centered on that.”
In a briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called reports that President Trump had agreed to sending the Kurds to launch an insurgency in Iran were “completely false.”
