ERBIL, Kurdistan Region— Nearly 300 Iranian Kurdish activists and party members have been assassinated by Iran’s intelligence agents inside the Kurdistan Region since the early 1990s, Iranian Kurdish officials have revealed.
“The systematic assassination of our members began in 1991,” says Anwar Muhammadi, spokesman of the Iranian Kurdish leftist party Komala.
The bulk of the assassinations took place in the chaos following the 1991 Kurdish uprising in Iraq against former dictator Saddam Hussein and his army.
“The assassinations began in the border town of Raniya in 1991, but have continued to our day,” Muhammadi claimed. “As recent as 2012, we lost a comrade to an Iranian plot in Erbil,”
Iran, home to around eight million Kurds has also been accused by human rights organizations and some governments of ordering the assassination of Kurdish dissidents in exile.
Abdurrahman Ghassemloo, the then leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), was gunned down in Vienna, Austria in 1989 in the middle of negotiations with Iranian agents.
An Austrian court later found three Iranian agents responsible for the killings.
“We have lost nearly 200 party members to direct assassinations ordered by Tehran,” says KDPI’s Mustafa Mawloodi, deputy general secretary of the party. “But there have been at least 300 attempted assassinations against our associates after the uprising of 1991.”
Ghassemloo’s successor Sadegh Sharafkandi was also murdered in Berlin in 1992 by Iranian agents.
Mawloodi says his party has worked closely with the Kurdistan Region intelligence service to identify the identity of the assassins.
“The relatives of the victims deserve answers,” he says.
The two major Iranian Kurdish parties KDPI and Komala both command military wings and have fought bloody battles with the Iranian government for self rule.
KDPI and Komala however, declared a unilateral ceasefire and have not been engaged in military actions against Iran since early 2000.
