Last Thursday, border guards of the Bayt al-Muqaddas Corps ambushed an armed group that crossed the border from the Kurdistan Region in the Sarvabad area, IRNA reported. An undisclosed number of opposition fighters were killed and wounded, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized equipment and ammunition.
There are several armed Iranian Kurdish groups with bases in the Kurdistan Region. None have claimed involvement in the reported clash.
This coincides with heavy bombardments of Shaho Mountain by the IRGC on August 26, reported by Kurdish human rights groups, which caused forest fires.
Shaho Mountain is part of the Zagros mountain range located on the border of Iran’s Kurdistan province and Kurdistan Region’s Sulaimani provinces. It is a protected area because of its environment and wildlife habitat.
Residents of the area said “the IRGC fired artillery shells from the village of Sure Tu in Sarvabad into the forested heights of Lani Sur between the villages of Deyvaznav and Palangan,” the Paris-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) said on Friday.
Another local source told Hengaw Organization for Human Rights that “this bombardment was without any previous warning. The majority of the people living in the area are in these heights and this has caused worry among the people.”
In recent years the IRGC has taken increasingly proactive measures to smother clandestine Kurdish opposition groups by making thousands of kilometers of new dirt roads atop mountain peaks overlooking Kurdish areas, installing thousands of additional troops to seal off its porous western border with Iraq. In 2018, after several lethal clashes between Iranian forces and Kurdish groups, Iran fired ballistic missiles at the headquarters of two Kurdish opposition groups in the town of Koya, more than 100 km deep into the Kurdistan Region.
A senior Bayt al-Muqaddas commander was ambushed last year in May. It was blamed on the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), guerrillas affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been fighting Turkish security forces since the early 1980s.
