Deadly attack on IRGC could spark yet another conflict with Kurdish groups

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A group of gunmen ambushed a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in western Iran on Tuesday, killing him and two of his guards. The brazen attack was carried out in broad daylight in Divandareh, in the heart of Kurdistan province – one of the most heavily militarized areas in the country.

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.

“Following a clash between the forces of Bayt al-Muqaddas Corps with the anti-revolutionary grouplet of PJAK in the Divandareh area, the Corps’ colonel Shakiba Salimi … and two of his soldiers of Islam were martyred,” an outlet affiliated with the guards said on Tuesday.

The Kurdish armed group most active in the Divandareh area is the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), guerrillas affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been fighting the Turkish security forces since the early 1980s.

PJAK has not claimed responsibility – however, media outlets close to PJAK have published reports lauding the attack. IRGC-affiliated outlets such as Tasnim News Agency reported raids targeting what they called “separatist terrorist groups” in its western provinces, but refrained from naming their target.

Now, statements coming from senior security and political officials in Kurdistan province appear to suggest Iran may be preparing to strike back at PJAK.

The Supreme Leader’s representative in Kurdistan province, Mohammad Hosseini Shahroudi, said on Wednesday that the “anti-revolutionaries' actions were an unforgivable treason.” The same day, General Alireza Marzabni — head of the border force in Kurdistan province, where the IRGC alleges foreign infiltrators entered Iran to carry out attacks — warned that enemies should expect “a hard and decisive response” from Iranian security forces.

PJAK appears to have been settling a grudge against Colonel Salimi – who headed the IRGC in Mariwan, Kurdistan province from 2017 until late 2019. Before that, he was a senior commander in the Bayt al-Muqaddas Corps, part of the regional headquarters of the Guards known as Hamza Said al-Shuhada, which oversees security operations in most of the Kurdish areas in the west of the country. It was under Salimi’s leadership as the top commander of IRGC in Mariwan that Iranian agents gunned down a top PJAK operative in July 2018 in the city of Penjwin across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan — then executed his son, who was in prison allegedly on trumped up charges.

Violence between the IRGC and Kurdish insurgents spiraled in 2018, mounting with a ballistic missile attack that targeted the headquarters of two Kurdish opposition groups in the town of Koya more than 100 km deep into neighboring northern Iraq. After several lethal clashes with its security forces in western Iran,  the IRGC had repeatedly said it will retaliate against these Kurdish groups if they destabilize the Kurdish areas in western Iran.

Prior to assassination of the operative, two teams of PJAK fighters were ambushed by the IRGC in Mariwan and four guerrillas – two of them from Turkey – were killed. PJAK allegedly retaliated by gunning down a number of Kurdish collaborators who worked with the IRGC to facilitate the ambushes. It later launched a major operation against an IRGC outpost, again in Mariwan, killing 11 Guards. But the guns soon fell silent and both parties backed off.

PJAK and a number of other Kurdish armed groups, including the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDP-I), operate underground cells roaming Iran’s Kurdish areas. Frequent clashes have occurred in recent years between Kurdish militants and Iranian security forces. Since the last major rumble in the Qandil mountains between PJAK and IRGC special forces in 2011, the parties have tried to avoid each other inside the Kurdish areas in Iran.

Now, cyclical tensions built up by insurgent attacks and grievances based in the Iranian security forces’ deployed to the area threaten to spill over once again.

In a statement published Sunday, senior PJAK member Amed Shaho launched a searing reproval on Tehran, portending that an escalation between PJAK and the IRGC may be forthcoming. “Iran is a state which has developed a fondness for massacres, arrests, torture, and violence,” Shaho said.

“The oppressive establishment of Iran since the beginning of the revolution until today has approached the Kurdish people with denial… the Iranian state has turned the prison into a butchery for dissidents by labeling them enemies of God, foreigner’s tools, separatist, anti-revolutionary, and terrorists.”

As thousands of mask-wearing mourners attended the funeral of the three Guards killed in Kurdistan province, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence said Wednesday that security officials had arrested 16 people it claimed were counter-revolutionaries that had infiltrated the country from a neighboring region.

Local human rights organizations disputed that claim – and published the names of 15 people they say are “ordinary citizens living in the cities of Baneh and Piranshahr.”

“The counter-revolutionaries should know that by carrying this kind of desperate action they will not be able to create the slightest vacuum in the lasting security of Kurdistan,” Hossein Khosh Eqbal, the deputy governor of Kurdistan province for security, political and social affairs said on Thursday. “Those who ordered this crime should know that the children of this nation will inflict a hard revenge on them.”