ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A Sunni religious school in Iranian Kurdistan, whose late founder tried to strike a deal for Kurdish autonomy soon after the 1979 Iranian revolution, has come under renewed scrutiny by Iranian intelligence.
A spokesman for the Quranic School of Kurdistan said a member of the organization was called in by the local Iranian security office in Baneh in recent days.
“The questions were repetitive. He went through the same procedure as others who had been called in before him,” said Saadi Quraishi of the school’s governing body.
Stressing that the school is a purely religious organization, Quraishi said: “This is not something new. Our members have been investigated by the intelligence authorities for the last few years.”
Quraishi himself was summoned for questioning last summer. Shortly afterwards, the goverment fired four members of the organization from their teaching posts at public schools.
In its more than 30 years’ history, the school was a focus of efforts to gain political autonomy for Iran’s Kurds but was also rejected by more militant groups for trying to reach an accommodation with the Tehran regime.
It split into rival wings in the late-1990s, with some insisting it should avoid politics and others believing it should pursue a larger political role.
Members of the governing body gave no explanation for why they should have now become a target for Iranian intelligence.
The school was founded in the Kurdish town of Sanadaj in 1978 by Ahmad Moftizadeh, a nationalist and Islamist leader who was the son of the mufti, or Sunni religious leader, of Iranian Kurdistan.
Moftizadeh died aged 60 in 1993, six months after he was released from 10 years in prison on unspecified charges of endangering national security. His followers claim his death was hastened by the torture he received while in jail.
He went into the Iranian revolution as leader of a Kurdish faction that supported the establishment of an Islamic and democratic Iranian state, with autonomy from the Kurdish people, a doctrine that was attacked by the local communists and other secular groups.
In negotiations with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, conducted through intermediaries, Moftizadeh believed he had secured the backing of the revolution’s leader for his autonomy plan.
He believed Khomeini had guaranteed autonomy in return for Kurdish support in the revolution and became a prominent Kurdish supporter of the new Islamic Republic.
But when the new regime turned against the Kurds and other minorities soon after the revolution, brutally putting down rebellions in the region, Moftizadeh said he considered that autonomy agreement had been violated and that he no longer supported the Islamic Republic.
After his prison term and death, some of his associates were arrested and killed, effectively crushing the movement as a political force.
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