An Iranian Ground Offensive in Kurdistan Region of Iraq?
What Does Iran Really Want: Motives, Consequences, and Stakeholders
As protests in Iran have entered their third month and show no major sign of abetting in the face of the state’s violent repression, Iran’s military has stepped up a troops buildup on its border with the Kurdistan Region (KR) in Iraq.
On November 25, Brigadier General Mohammed Pakpour, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s land forces, announced measures to bolster the presence of IRGC’s mechanized units on Iran’s western and northwestern borders with Iraq “to prevent infiltrations by units from the Iranian Kurdish parties based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq”.
Although senior Iranian officials have not explicitly declared so, there are growing suspicions that the amassing of troops could be possibly aimed at launching a ground invasion into KR to target Iranian Kurdish armed opposition groups based there.
Since September 24th, Iran has conducted a series of missile and drone attacks on the positions of Kurdish armed opposition groups inside KR. There are four major Iranian Kurdish armed opposition groups based in the KR territory: The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan (Komala), Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), and Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK)—the latter is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey’s Kurdistan. KDPI Peshmerga fighters and their families are based around Koya and Erbil. Komala’s base is in Zirgwez area, south of Sulaimani city. The two parties also have a small number of fighters stationed in the eastern part of Erbil province, though not in the close vicinity of the borderline with Iran. PAK fighters are based in Pirde (Altun Kopri) area halfway between Erbil and Kirkuk cities where the de-facto border between KR and Iraqi forces is located. PJAK is based in the rugged mountainous terrain between Iraq and Iran and the KR authorities have nearly no control over it. So far, the attacks appear to have targeted the KDPI, Komala, and PAK but not PJAK. See the following map to get a better sense of the positions of the IRGC troops on the Iranian side of the border and Kurdish opposition groups in KR (the locations are approximate).
Informed sources whom Eye on Kurdistan (EoK) has spoken to confirmed news reports that the IRGC has deployed two news brigades to its border areas with KR in recent days. The units have been moved there from around Qazvin (in north-central Iran) and Tabriz (in northwestern Iran). The military buildup is focused on a 300 km-long border strip area between Iran and Iraq that covers the bulk of Iran’s border with KR (KR has approximately a 600 km-long border with Iran). Sources say the troops are particularly concentrated around the towns of Oshnavieh, Piranshahr, and Sardasht in West Azerbaijan province, and Baneh and Marivan in the Kurdistan province.
“The way the troops are positioned in these areas is meant to enable them to access the bases of [Iranian] Kurdish parties inside the Kurdistan Region [in Iraq] in the event of an invasion,” a senior military KDPI official who requested anonymity told EoK.
Salah Bayazidi, the representative of the Komala Party to the United States, says apart from several fighters left to guard the facility, the group has now evacuated its members and civilians from its camp near Sulaimani due to ongoing Iranian missile and drone attacks and the possibility of a land operation.
In tandem with its missile and drone attacks and the growing military buildup, Iranian officials have in recent weeks begun a saber-rattling campaign signaling their readiness to pursue a variety of options to target Iranian Kurdish opposition groups inside KR. Although they have not made public threats about waging a ground offensive into the KR territory per se—indeed Iran’s ambassador to Tehran rejected such speculations recently saying his country “respects Iraq’s sovereignty”— there are growing concerns among Kurds that Iran might be just planning such an operation. The concerns do not seem misplaced given a recent report by the Associated Press that Gen. Ismael Ghaani, the commander of IRGC’s elite Quds Forces, has privately relayed a message to Iraqi and Kurdish leaders that if the Iraqi army does not secure the shared border between the two countries against Kurdish opposition groups, Iran will launch a ground offensive against those groups in the KR-controlled areas.
Kurdish officials appear to have taken such threats very seriously. KR’s President Nechirvan Barzani made two visits to Baghdad in recent days, meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Muhammad al-Sudani and other Iraqi leaders. In their meeting, Barzani and al-Sudani discussed “protecting the sovereignty of Iraq”. While Turkey has been for years conducting military operations inside the KR territory, a move some justifiably interpret as a creeping occupation of KR by Ankara, it is certainly the unprecedented scale of Iranian attacks and threats coupled with troop buildup that has KR leaders most worried for now. The fact that Barzani’s second meeting with al-Sudani came just one day before the latter’s visit to Tehran in late November adds credibility to concerns about a possible surprise ground operation by Iran inside KR’s territory. Apart from Barzani, Bafel Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)—the rival party to Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)—also met with al-Sudani to discuss the Iranian threats and a range of other issues (by meeting Talabani, al-Sudani might be trying to pressure Barzani and the KDP to demonstrate more resolve in dealing with the question of armed Iranian Kurdish opposition groups on KR’s soil).
Amid such developments, the KDPI official who spoke to EoK cautioned against rushing to conclusions as to the certainty of an Iranian ground invasion as a result of troops’ deployment and statements by Iranian officials in recent weeks. He said the current weaponry stationed at the border would not be sufficient for a land offensive.
“Much of this is psychological warfare,” said the official without ruling out the eventual possibility of a land operation by Iran against his and other groups. Bayzidi of Komala is in agreement with such an assessment for now, but warns that many did not expect Russia to attack Ukraine either until it actually happened.
There is certainly a lot of psychological warfare going on. But it is a highly complex and complicated picture with many moving pieces. Below I try to shed light on the history, multiple actors/stakeholders involved, their motives and interests, and the possible scenarios that could play out.
Are Kurds An Easy Exit Ramp for Iran’s Regime?
Gripped by an unprecedented revolutionary protest movement potentially threatening its very survival, the regime in Tehran seems to consider Kurds an excellent point of deflection and the least possible costly exit from the current situation. Constituting one of the smaller minoritized/minority communities in Iran, from the perspective of the Iranian state’s calculus, Kurds are a rather easy target and one with considerable potential to create a rally-around-the-flag effect. This Iranian understanding of Kurds rests on the apparent fact that Kurds do not have a major regional or international backer to support them vis-a-vis any outside aggression. Hence, an important component of the Iranian propaganda has been to blame the spontaneous, homegrown protests on outside forces, chief among them what it calls “separatist” Kurdish armed opposition groups based in the neighboring KR.
The ethnic element here is important to dwell on (I’ll have a longer piece in the coming weeks explaining the ethnic dimension/dynamic of the current protests in Iran). Iranian Kurdistan, which Kurds call Rojhelat (meaning the eastern part of the greater Kurdistan which comprises the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, Ilam, and large parts of West Azerbaijan inside Iran), has been a site of anti-Islamic Republic opposition since the 1979 revolution. The Iranian state in its current iteration hinges on a national identity predicated on Persian culture/language and Shi’ism. Kurds, as a community, are the farthest removed from this state-condoned dominant identity along both the axes of ethnicity, i.e. by being Kurdish, and religion, i.e. for being mostly Sunni Muslims (The same is true for other communities such as Baluchis in the southeastern part of Iran who are both a non-Persian and Sunni Muslim people).
No minoritized group has produced the organized and sustained opposition not just to the current Islamist regime but to the modern Iranian state as the Kurds have. The Kurdish opposition to the homogenizing and oppressive policies of the Iranian state has included armed resistance and various forms of civilian protests and disobedience for much of the past century. However, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Kurdish opposition groups have practically ceased their armed struggle against the Iranian regime. Even a resumption of armed engagement of the regime’s security forces since 2015 has been highly limited in scope and scale and is far from posing an existential threat to the regime or undermining its control over Iranian Kurdistan. Additionally, despite common misconceptions in the media and policy circles, all major Iranian Kurdish groups seek some degree of autonomy within Iran and do not articulate an independence-seeking, or “separatist”, platform.
The Iranian state, particularly in the Islamic Republic era, has done much to cultivate a negative image of Kurdish opposition to its rule. In the post-1979 revolution period when the Islamist regime launched a bloody “jihad” against the Kurdish opposition groups, the state propaganda portrayed the Kurdish resistance fighters as “separatists”. Whether rightly or wrongly, there exists a perception of Kurds as separatists within large sections of the Iranian population. This could be said to be the main factor hindering strong expressions of solidarity among the Persian-dominated, and to a lesser extent predominantly Azeri Turkish, parts of the country for the regime’s comparatively far more violent crackdown on Kurds in Rojhelat.
Thus far in the three-month-long protests, Kurds have suffered a disproportionately higher rate of casualties compared to their population size in Iran. According to Hengaw Human Rights Organization, as of late November regime’s forces killed 118 protestors in different parts of Iranian Kurdistan, and arrested over 5000 civilians. In the entire country, according to some estimates, around 450 individuals have been killed during the protests so far and over 18,000 arrested. Thus, Kurds constitute roughly one-quarter of all victims of the protests while they only comprise around 10 to 15 percent of the Iranian population (the other group sustaining high casualties is unsurprisingly the Baluchis in and around Zahedan).
The Iranian regime is well aware that beyond the consensus on the question of hijab that unites all Iranians, political opposition and activism against its rule is deeply fragmented along ethnic, and to a lesser extent class, lines. The regime hopes that launching a ground offensive into the Kurdistan Region (KR) in Iraq will allow it to harness the event in three ways:
First, it will use the offensive to scapegoat Kurds and further push its claim that it is the “separatist” Kurdish groups across the border who have instigated the “unrest” inside Iran. Secondly, it will use the occasion to suppress the Kurdish movement in both its civilian and armed forms, i.e. the protesters inside urban areas in Rojhelat and the KR-based opposition groups. Thirdly, if the land operation develops into some form of prolonged military confrontation between the Iranian forces and Kurds on both sides of the border (which the Iranian state would likely welcome as long as it is manageable), then the regime will have a perfect bogeyman to compel or force non-Kurds in Iran to back down from protests due to what it would claim to be threats posed to the country’s security and territorial integrity by “Kurdish separatists” and outside forces.
The Islamic Republic’s propaganda machine has for years tied Kurdish groups inside and outside Iran and their legitimate political demands to conspiracies by regional and international powers, from Israel and Gulf Arab states to the United States, Britain, and others. In any case, if it happens, a military operation into the KR will take place as one of the regime’s last measures to put an end to domestic protests.
Until then, it will ratchet up its psychological warfare against its Kurdish opposition and KR as much as it can in the hope that KR and Iraqi authorities would feel obligated to take serious steps to secure the border and possibly disarm the Iranian Kurdish opposition. Therefore, an Iranian ground offensive into KR would occur only if the regime decided or felt that the continuation of protests and/or their intensification would pose an existential threat to its rule and survival. Such an offensive, Iranian leaders would hope, helps rally a good section of the Iranian population around the flag and scare protestors into sitting at home out of fears that Iran faces a plausible threat of territorial disintegration at the hands of outside actors, including Kurdish groups (a false notion since as mentioned above, Kurds are not seeking independence from Iran but autonomous mode of rule and power distribution within the Iranian state structure). Forget not that the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, famously described the eight-year war with Iraq as a “blessing” that helped solidify the foundations of his revolutionary order. If necessary, the Iranian regime would not shy away from some form of limited confrontation that will help it generate domestic nationalist sympathies toward itself.
All in all, Komala’s Bayazidi does not rule out the possibility of such a move, adding that the Iranian regime might try to exploit the international preoccupation with the Ukraine conflict to launch a land invasion into KR in the future. Whether a cross-border offensive would succeed in achieving its stated objectives, in the event that it is actually launched, is to be seen and depends largely on the reactions of Kurds, and regional and international actors. But the regime in Tehran appears to view it as one of its best last bets to get out of the growingly dire domestic circumstances it has got itself into.
Iranian Threats and A Brewing Regional Crisis
There are a number of important questions to ask here: What does the Iranian regime want to achieve through its aggressive posture at this stage? And if Iran were to launch a ground offensive into KR, what will be the consequences of such an offensive for the Iranian regime? What outcome awaits Kurds in Rojhelat and KR if Iran succeeds in its plans whether indirectly or through direct military intervention? What about the Iraqi government; what does it stand to gain, or lose, in such a scenario? Would it be actually better for the Iranian regime if it achieved some of its objectives through a mix of saber-rattling and air (missile/drone) attacks; or would it benefit most from carrying out a ground operation in KR? Looking at the possible Iranian cost-benefit calculus and regional/international reactions, I will try to answer these questions below, but not necessarily in the order posed here.
First, as explained above, Iran will most likely launch a land operation only as a last resort, contingent upon the continuation of domestic protests of some considerable intensity in the coming weeks and months. However, if the Iranian regime finds the protests more or less manageable through other means, the current air attacks and psychological warfare through saber-rattling will be sufficient for the regime as these mixed measures, short of an actual ground offensive, will still have the potential to generate certain important gains for Tehran. To this end, one could expect the regime to further intensify its aggressive posture through strong rhetoric backed up by occasional drone and missile attacks (Western, particularly U.S. inaction in this regard will only reward and embolden Iran).
The mixture of rhetorical threats and air attacks will help to deter the Iranian Kurdish opposition forces from military involvement inside Iran. The Kurdish opposition forces have so far wisely refrained from any armed involvement in the current protests, focusing instead on political expressions of solidarity and support for the protests across Iran. Yet, the Iranian regime’s rhetorical threats and air attacks against KR are designed to be more than just a scare tactic. As Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told Iraqi PM al-Sudani on November 29, Iran wants the “Iraqi central government to expand its authority” to the areas where Iran’s security is threatened. This was a clear reference to KR and the presence of Iranian Kurdish opposition groups there.
Hence, short of direct military intervention, Iran’s increased saber-rattling and air attacks are strategically geared toward a few goals: undermining the KR’s autonomy and disarming Iranian Kurdish groups in KR, and possibly expelling them from Iraq altogether. Based on their statements, Iranian leaders appear to think that the redeploying units of the Iraqi army, and at some point possibly the Iranian-controlled Shia Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), in KR would help them achieve these two strategic objectives. Iran is exerting maximum pressure at the moment to make this happen as soon as possible.
If this occurs, Iran will then be hitting two birds with one stone: in the short run, the deployment of the Iraqi army and/or PMF forces will largely help block future access to Iran by the Kurdish opposition groups such as the KDPI, Komala, and others. Importantly, any return of the Iraqi military forces, be it the army or the PMF, to the KR-Iran borders will eventually pave the way for the possible deployment of these forces to other parts of KR, particularly critical locations such as border crossings and oil and gas fields which are KR’s sources of revenue and economic survival. If this were to happen, it will in practice revert KR back to a pre-1991 status where the Iraqi government will be in charge of Kurdistan. Iran would certainly welcome such an outcome as it will rid Tehran of the last vestige of resistance to its influence inside the official territory of the Iraqi state.
Such a takeover of KR would also be meant to send a strong message to Iran’s own Kurds that any gains they might achieve as a result of the Islamic Republic’s weakening would be temporary and that central governments in the states where Kurds live will always find a way to cooperate against Kurds and demolish their gains (a tragic repeat of 1975 and the fate of Kurds in Iraq back then… although history does not repeat itself in exactly the same way).
But most important of all, as part of this strategy, Iran also aims to do with Iranian Kurdish groups what it did to the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq (MEK) group of Iran, which used to be Tehran’s major nemesis based in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s years. In other words, Iran would use any redeployment of the Iraqi forces to the KR territory to disarm the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups and expel them from Iraq (just for context, the MEK is currently based in Albania following years of harassment and pressure by Iran and the Iraqi government and pro-Iranian armed factions in Iraq). In any such scenario, with the least possible cost, Iran would achieve its major goals with regard to the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, undermine the KR’s federal autonomous status within Iraq, and expand the authority of the Iraqi government and the PMF militias it controls to Kurdistan. The ruling Shia elites in Baghdad certainly welcome such an eventuality as it will rid them of the last hurdle to their total control over the entire territory of the state of Iraq. This will be the ultimate triumph of pro-Iranian elements in Iraq who now hold the reins of power in Baghdad on both political and military fronts.
Last but not least, Iran’s pressures against KR are also designed to intensify intra-Kurdish tensions, whether between the KDP and PUK, or between Iraqi and Iranian Kurds. Any aggressive action by KR authorities against Iranian Kurdish opposition groups would revive older painful memories from the 1960s through 1990s whereby Iraqi and Iranian Kurds were pitted against each other by Iran’s pre and post-revolutionary regimes. This will be a huge psychological blow to the Kurdish struggle in the broader region and is something that Kurds are very aware of and sensitive to.
An Iranian Direct Military Intervention In KR
If Iran chooses to launch a direct ground offensive into the KR territory, the degree of its success will depend on the response of others, particularly regional and international actors. There is some chance that it might get mired in a situation with potentially serious consequences. Hence, it will only resort to this option if it considers such a move vital to its survival and quelling the domestic protests. As I said above in the event that the situation inside Iran gets worse for the regime, it will welcome an extraterritorial conflict in KR that would be manageable and help it shore up some degree of domestic nationalist sentiment.
Sending its ground forces to KR can lead to other quick gains for Iran such as controlling the bases of the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups around Erbil and Sulaimani, and possibly controlling a couple of the border crossings on the Kurdish side, at least for a temporary period until it hands them over to Iraqi military and/or PMF units. There is precedence for this as in the 1990s, during the KR civil war, when Iran, as part of its assistance for the PUK, also dispatched troops to Koya to attack the KDPI base there.
But such a move could also backfire by generating protracted armed confrontation with Iranian Kurdish groups, and possibly even the KR forces, particularly on the KDP side. Additionally, an Iranian ground offensive will have significant ramifications for regional geopolitics and could trigger responses from the regional states and the international community.
On the regional side, Turkey will be deeply alarmed by such an Iranian move, seeing it as an attempt to cut off its access to KR and, through KR, to the Sunni parts of Iraq. This would undermine the Turkish role and influence in Iraq which is mostly exercised through direct military intervention against the PKK, the Sunni groups, and the KDP. Turkey would be worried that ending the KR status and the deployment of the Iraqi army and PMF groups would provide an opportunity for the PKK to deepen its relations with the PMF and pose a greater risk to Ankara (the tragic reality of Kurdish politics in the region is that it is fragmented and Kurds in each state have to rely on other regional states to support their struggle against the state they are officially part of). In other words, Turkish and Iranian regional neo-imperial agendas could come to a loggerhead if Iran were to launch a ground assault on KR. History here is a good guide as past Ottoman and Iranian Safavid, Afshari, Zand, and Qajar empires clashed multiple times, with various levels of intensity, over the control of Kurdistan or threats emanating from Kurdistan to their respective rule.
Gulf Arab regional states and Israel would be also worried by an Iranian ground offensive in KR and viewing it as part of Tehran’s expansionist regional policy and cementing its control over the entirety of Iraq. It is hard to predict what these actors will do, but diplomatically they can be expected to lobby international actors against Iran’s aggression and encourage a strong material response against the move (not just rhetorical condemnations). They could also provide material support for armed opposition groups from ethnic communities within Iran to pressure the Islamic Republic from the inside.
For their part, the U.S. and European states might or could take some punitive measures against any Iranian ground offensive. The U.S. and Europe are already furious with Iran for its role in the Ukrainian conflict and its provision of drones to Russia. Witnessing Iranian aggression on the borders of Europe, Western powers might feel compelled to react to any Iranian military intervention in Iraq in the name of concern for “violating Iraq’s sovereignty” (though so far, Iran’s meddling in Iraq and other regional states’ affairs, from Lebanon and Syria to Yemen, traditionally met with a weak, and sometimes muted, Western response). What has changed now is heightened Western sensitivity to Iranian military capabilities and aggression as they view Iranian involvement in the Ukraine conflict as destabilizing Europe and supporting the Russian war machine.
A Western reaction would be more likely if Arab states were willing to keep global energy supplies stable to reduce the economic repercussions of punitive measures against Iran for global energy markets. The options in the Western toolbox can include taking the matter to the United Nations Security Council and ratifying international measures to punish Iran. Further sanctions will be a likely option in such a scenario. In its most potent form, the Western response could possibly include threats and selected military attacks on Iranian troops inside Iraq and, even, enacting a no-fly zone over the KR territory, something for which there is precedence in the aftermath of the Kuwait War in 1991 (if the regime crackdown in Rojhelat intensifies, Iranian Kurds would like the idea of a no-fly zone there as well. This might be a long shot for now, but it was implemented in Iraq and Syria and could take place in Iran too if the regime’s repression continues and gets more violent). Implementing a no-fly zone and engaging in some military strikes against Iranian targets within KR will require strong resolve to materialize and it remains to be seen if Western nations will be able or willing to muster such a resolve. Russian response and Moscow’s degree of willingness and capability to get itself involved in any such situation would impact the course of these events.
Even if an Iranian ground offensive results in casualties on the part of the Iranian regime’s forces and does not achieve its stated objectives of dismantling Iranian Kurdish opposition, the regime would still seek to capitalize on the event and possible confrontation with outside forces (particularly the West, if things got to that point) to its advantage and try to shore up nationalist sentiments and support inside Iran, particularly in parts of the country subscribing to or assimilated into the dominant Persian-Shi’i national identity.
Also of importance to the question of Western reactions to an Iranian invasion is whether the West considers its relationship with KR of such strategic value that would require concrete action to protect Kurdistan against direct and indirect existential threat by Iran and its proxies. This is unclear at the moment, particularly in light of the Biden administration’s significant disengagement from Iraq and the broader region. The West has not done anything worthwhile in the face of Turkish aggression against Syrian Kurds and KR so far. But inaction will seriously embolden Iran and their Shia proxies across the region who pose a considerable threat against the U.S. and its other regional allies and partners, from Gulf Arab states to Israel.
Kurdistan Region’s Options
KR authorities and its two ruling parties, the KDP and PUK, are extremely apprehensive of the Iranian regime’s moves and its intentions and appear prepared to take certain measures to alleviate Iranian concerns. But the question is how far would they be willing to go? A statement that was released following KR President Nechirvan Barzani and Iraqi PM al-Sudani’s meeting signaled that KR might be willing to take measures toward ending the current form of presence of Iranian Kurdish opposition groups on its territory. The two sides apparently agreed that they will not “allow the presence of armed groups in the Kurdistan Region” and will coordinate to protect the borders. Earlier the Iraqi government had declared that it will deploy troops to secure the KR border with Iran.
Although it is not totally clear what measures KR authorities are willing to or capable of taking, their most preferable choice at this stage would be to deploy troops to the shared border between KR and Iran. But it is unclear if the Iraqi troops deployed to KR borders will be from the Kurdish units in the Iraqi army, or a mix of Kurdish and non-Kurdish units. KR’s Deputy Peshmerga Minister Sarbast Lazgin has said that all forces deployed to the border will be drawn from existing KR units and that an additional 3000 people will be recruited in KR to secure the autonomous region’s borders. These forces will be part of the Iraqi border guard run by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. This certainly indicates that KR does not want non-Kurdish units of the Iraqi military on its soil, though it might accept a limited deployment of such troops. So far, the Iraqi border guard units in KR are Kurdish.
KR authorities will also be willing to remove Iranian Kurdish opposition groups from near Iran’s border. KDPI and Komala might be understanding to such a proposal and agree to move their forces even farther away from the border. PJAK, however, is a different story since its ties to the PKK will mean that the KR authorities cannot do much about relocating its troops short of violent engagement (which will likely not succeed anyway even if it happened). The PKK shares certain strategic interests in Iraq with Iran and pro-Iranian groups as demonstrated by the relationship between the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) who are made up of elements formerly organized by the PKK (in the aftermath of ISIS’s attack on Singer) but are currently part of the larger Shia PMF structure.
It remains to be seen as to whether the KR and Baghdad’s efforts will go as far as trying to disarm Iranian Kurdish opposition groups and relocating their leaders and members inside or outside KR. This would be an extremely unpopular and embarrassing course of action for KR leaders to pursue. KR leaders are cognizant of this. Iranian Kurdish opposition groups have been also mostly considerate of KR’s interests and delicate position in regional geopolitics and have sought not to provoke Iran. It will further diminish the credibility of KR leaders and parties in the eyes of the KR population and Kurds everywhere. What path the KR authorities take will determine their standing in Kurdish, Iraqi, and regional (geo)politics. Caught between a rock and a hard place, KR’s leaders are woefully and unenviously short of options. In the past, at critical moments like this, they could count on some degree of U.S. and European engagement and support to protect KR and counter external threats, from Iran or Baghdad (Western powers have always been tolerant of Turkish aggression in KR).
It is important to note that any renewed conflict in KR will destabilize the already volatile region, create a new refugee wave and, in its worst case, some form of humanitarian crisis. There is also the possibility of prolonged violence as an extensive Iranian aggression could potentially result in a unified armed resistance by Kurds on both sides of the border with grave repercussions for the stability of Iraq and possibly Iran. Islamic Republic’s leaders and their Iraqi allies need to be dissuaded from a new expansionist regional adventure and made to understand that they cannot successfully pull such a stunt and reap the spoils without expecting serious backlash by Kurds and other regional and international actors. The responsibility of Western powers in this regard in preventing an Iranian ground offensive is crucial. Serious diplomatic messages and demonstration of resolve (short of military confrontation) by the U.S. and Europe at this early stage could deter Iran from, at least, proceeding with a ground offensive and pushing further.
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