Kurds Part Of Covert War Against Iran

Behind the increasingly shrill rhetoric and saber rattling over Iran’s nuclear ambitions the US and Israel are engaged in a secret war against Iran that has echoes of the years when the CIA supported the Afghan Mujihadeen against the Soviets.
This time, the US and Israel are running covert operations with the help of rebel Kurdish militias and Iranian mujihadeen fighters. For some observers, training and arming Islamic fighters smacks of the days of Soviet rule in Afghanistan. Then, the Soviet army, which was the second most powerful military in the world, was defeated by Islamic militants, including men like Osama Bin Laden. They were trained by the CIA and provided with the most up-to-date weapons, including Stinger missiles. It is estimated the CIA spent billions of taxpayer dollars arming the Afghan mujihadeen. Many of those same mujihadeen later turned against America and formed Al Qaeda, the organization responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Others joined the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan and preached hatred of the West.
Now the US, with Israel in tow, is arming and secretly training a different Mujihadeen – Kurdish militias with links to ethnic Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria and fighters from the Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq which has bases in southern Iraq and has provided the US with intelligence on the Iranian military and Iran’s nuclear sites. The history of the Kurds in particular makes them ideal recruits for a covert war in Iran and Syria.
During and after Saddam’s rule, the Kurds of northern Iraq longed for an independent Kurdistan and when the No-Fly zone was in place over Iraq, they had protection from the US and its coalition allies. That enabled them to build an extremely large militia and to develop a strong economy. But, since the fall of Saddam they have become disillusioned with the country’s slide into chaos and have hinted that they would be happy to see Iraq divided onto three. In that event, they would establish an autonomous region called Kurdistan and the rich northern oil fields of Kirkuk would ensure their prosperity for decades if not into the next century.
Not everyone in the region sees the creation of an independent Kurdistan as a good thing. The Turks, Iranians and Syrians who, don’t always see eye to eye on many matters, are united in a belief that it would generate instability by encouraging large ethnic Kurdish communities in their countries to demand separation and an alignment with Iraq’s Kurds. As for the Kurds, they all believe that historically Kurdistan encompassed parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran and that has led to their persecution.
In the 20th century, for example, ethnic Kurdish demands for autonomy led to more than 30,000 of them being slaughtered by the Turks. In Iran, they were brutally suppressed in three provinces they dominated.
It is, therefore, easy to see how the US in it desire to destabilize the Iranian regime and to prepare the groundwork for possible Special Forces attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities should turn to disaffected Iranian Kurds for help and to Iranian dissidents of the Mujihadeen-e-Khalq, (MEK). The MEK has carried out a series of attacks in Iran, using fighters trained by the US in secret bases in southern Iraq. In recent months, there has been increasing instability inside three Iranian Provinces dominated by Kurds, as well as attacks on Iranian troops near the border with Iraq. A Kurdish guerilla group claimed responsibility for two of the attacks, saying they were in retaliation for Iranian shelling into Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.
The New York journalist, Seymour Hersh claimed earlier this year that US combat troops were already in Iran and on April 9 Iran said it shot down a US surveillance drone. There was also an incident near the Iran-Iraq border in January when an Iranian military cargo plane carrying ten top Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders mysteriously crashed. Later, there were rumors it was brought down by US Special Forces within Iran.
The US is not the only country involved in a covert war that uses Kurdish fighters based in Iraq and Iran. Israel has been running its own black operations with the help of Kurds it has trained. The Kurds have strong ties to Israel because it supports the creation of an independent Kurdistan. From an Israeli perspective, such an entity would provide Israel with an ally in a region in which it is totally isolated. It was Israel’s neocons friends in Washington who once believed a new Iraq would be Israel’s best ally but the more that has seemed a fiction, the more Israel has looked to the creation of a separate Kurdish state in Iraq as the next best thing.
Israel’s relationship with the Kurds goes back a long way and during the Iraq-Iraq war it supplied the Kurds with weapons to attack Saddam Hussein’s forces. Then, after the first Gulf War when the US and its allies abandoned the Kurds, it continued to provide them with weapons and training. When the No-Fly Zone was enforced by the US to limit attacks on the Kurds in northern Iraq, Israel set up special military training camps there. For Israeli military strategists, Kurdish northern Iraq is an ideal bulwark against its main enemies – Syria and Iran. To that end, Israeli Special Forces and Mossad have been training and recruiting Kurds for black and clandestine surveillance in those two countries. The advantage of having Kurdish fighters carry out operations is that they can easily blend into ethnic Kurdish communities and sow dissent. They can also recruit rebel elements and build bases for future operations. In essence, Kurdish militiamen and fighters from the Iranian mujihadeen (MEK) are seen by the US and Israel as ideal insurgents.
Turkey, a member of NATO, has not taken kindly to the Israeli presence in northern Iraq and to Israel’s use of Kurdish fighters. The Turks worry the Kurds have their eyes on oil and the more Israel arms and trains them the more likely they will be to declare independence and seize the oil fields of Kirkuk. Turkey has warned such a scenario might force it to invade northern Iraq. Should that happen, the region would be further destabilized.
The use of Kurdish rebels and Iranian Mujihadeen in a covert war could eventually backfire on the US if the past history of CIA involvement with Islamic militants is anything to go by. There is also a high risk that a secret war aimed at weakening regimes in Iran and Syria could destabilize the whole region. In particular, if Turkey sent its forces into northern Iraq to seize Kirkuk it would place Turkey at odds with the US and NATO and would wreck diplomatic links between Tel Aviv and Ankara, pitting Israel against one of the largest Islamic nations in the world.
There are some who believe that Israel will act in its own interests and do whatever it takes to weaken Iran and Syria. If that is so, the Kurds could suffer and Israel, as it has done in previous conflicts in that part of the world, would happily supply all sides with weapons and would watch as its enemies annihilated each other. For the US, which has already become bogged down in Iraq, a wider conflict would have catastrophic consequences for the US military.