Once again, the Kurds appear to be pushed to the front lines of someone else’s war. As Iran faces internal pressure, armed Kurdish groups are allegedly being nudged into cross-border operations—serving as deniable ground forces for a familiar trio: the US, Israel, and Turkey.
The usual suspects appear to be nudging Kurdish actors toward cross-border operations, quietly positioning them as ground forces and deniable hired guns.
Using stateless peoples as expendable instruments and then discarding them when the geopolitical weather shifts is the standard MO for the US and its friends in the region, and not only in this region, but in many other places around the world.
To understand how the Kurds repeatedly end up in this role, one only needs to look no further than the Sykes-Picot agreement. Negotiated in secrecy prior to the end of the First World War (1914-1918), the agreement between Britain and France carved the remains of the Ottoman Empire into artificial “nation-states,” drawn with ruler-straight lines and imperial indifference.
The map was not designed to reflect history, ethnicity, or stability—it was designed to control the region and its resources.
Enter the Kurds
The Kurds, one of the oldest peoples of the region and a recognized nation within the Ottoman framework, were deliberately excluded from this new order. Their statelessness was not a bureaucratic oversight but a strategic choice. Even the Russian Empire was promised its slice of the post-Ottoman pie—until the Russian Revolution intervened—making moot the role that Imperial Russia would have played.
The Kurds, by contrast, were offered nothing at all. A century later, they remain the region’s most reliable shock troops and its most disposable allies. And once again, they may be being pushed to the front lines of someone else’s war.
Did we not see the same in Syria with Kurdish and Chechen fighters in support of ISIS*?
Kurds are being used to destabilize Iran
Armed Kurdish militant groups attempted to enter Iran from northern Iraq in recent days, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the incident, raising concerns in Tehran over coordinated efforts to exploit nationwide protests and destabilize the country.
An Iranian security official said units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intercepted and clashed with the fighters near the western border after receiving advance intelligence warnings, including information passed on by Turkish authorities. The official said the attempted crossings were not spontaneous but involved organized movements of armed men and equipment.
“These groups were moving with the clear intent of creating instability inside Iran at a moment of internal pressure,” the official said, adding that the fighters were dispatched from positions in Iraq and Turkey.
Furthermore, it is claimed that regional intelligence sources corroborated that Ankara had alerted Tehran to suspicious cross-border activity, reflecting Turkey’s own security concerns over Kurdish militant networks operating in northern Iraq. It is little wonder why Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and the Turkish presidency declined to comment.
It is rather ironic that Turkey, which designates Kurdish militant groups as terrorist organizations, and which has publicly warned in recent days that external interference in Iran could trigger wider regional escalation, may be the very conduit for the infiltration,
Irony in action!
If history is viewed rationally, particularly taking into account the support of ISIS* fighters in Syria, with the invisible hand of MIT, it is rather ironic that Tehran has formally requested that both Iraq and Turkey prevent the transfer of fighters and weapons toward Iran.
While independent verification of the alleged movements remains difficult without being on the ground, the very intersection of Iranian, regional, and intelligence accounts suggests a coordinated attempt by armed Kurdish groups to take advantage of Iran’s internal unrest, with outside help, financing, and logistical support, rather than the media being able to explain what is happening as isolated border incidents.
Taken together, including oil deals with the US for Northern Iraq, the available evidence points to more than opportunistic border violence. It suggests the calculated reactivation of a long-standing regional playbook: using stateless or semi-autonomous groups as expendable instruments to apply pressure while insulating sponsors from direct accountability.
For Iran, the attempted incursions represent not only a security challenge but also a warning that domestic unrest is being tested as a vector for external interference.
Nearing the threshold of overt war!
For Turkey, the episode exposes a contradiction between public warnings against escalation and alleged intelligence channels that may facilitate it, and for the United States, Israel, and Turkey—long practitioners of proxy pressure in the region — the pattern aligns with a familiar strategy: destabilize, fragment, and exhaust without crossing the threshold of overt war, pushing for an internal collapse in the target state that can then be exploited.
History offers little comfort. Rarely do the architects of such schemes pay the price. Instead, the fallout lands on border populations, minority groups, and fragile states already scarred by previous outside meddling and interventions.
More than a century after British and French officials drew artificial borders under the Sykes–Picot Agreement—deliberately excluding the Kurds and embedding permanent fault lines into the region—the same lines are once again being activated, not with pens and maps, but with proxies, weapons, and deniable wars of convenience.
Betrayal of Kurdish SDF
What makes the situation even more perverse, is the outright betrayal of Kurdish forces of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) by the USA in Syria. A recent offensive by the new Syrian government has driven the Kurds from the oil-rich areas they gained under US protection during the early part of the Syrian civil war.
The fact that the government forces are openly displaying ISIS* badges and flags while driving the Kurds from Raqqa, Aleppo, and Deir Ezor, the latter particularly important for its oil fields.
Wherever they go, government forces release the ISIS* terrorists detained by the SDF, causing the Iraqi government to reinforce its border with army and popular mobilization forces (PMF), and the mutilation of Kurdish bodies, particularly those of female fighters, has been repeatedly reported.
It may be possible that this situation is being engineered to drive the Kurds in the direction of Iran, with promises of a homeland once the Ayatollahs are deposed.
If so, it simply proves that the Kurds are very slow learners, having been repeatedly betrayed by the west in general, and the US in particular, over the past 50 years.
*-terrorist organization, banned in Russia
Henry Kamens, columnist and expert on Central Asia and the Caucasus
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