Iran’s regime has been weakened but will not fall without a ground offensive by Kurdish forces, a leader of one of their armed groups has told The Telegraph.
Babasheikh Hosseini, the general secretary of the Khabat Organisation, told The Telegraph: “If we are not on this battlefield, the end of the regime will either not occur, or be delayed by a lot.”
Iranian Kurdish groups have been desperate to join the fight against Iran, topple the regime, pave the way for greater autonomy – and possibly an independent state – but have received mixed messages from the White House.
In the early days of the war, Donald Trump said: “I think it’s wonderful that they want to do that, I’d be all for it.”
Days later, he appeared to change his mind. “The war is complicated enough without getting the Kurds involved,” he said.
His fickleness over the last week has not fazed the new coalition of Iranian Kurdish groups, formed six days before the war broke out, and of which Khabat is a member.
Using his community’s preferred term to refer to their fighters and the Kurdish region of western Iran, Mr Hosseini said: “If our peshmerga were on the ground, and we told the people of Rojhelat to rise, then the fall of the regime would have been much closer by now.”
But Mr Hosseini would like some answers.
“We want to understand America’s policy,” he said, adding that at one point “Trump said, ‘We’re going to stop fighting,’ but then hours later he said, ‘No, the war is going to continue.’”
“We don’t understand their position at the moment,” he said. “We can still launch an invasion alone, but with their help it will be much better.”
Mr Hosseini and other Kurdish leaders in the coalition have welcomed US-Israeli attacks against Iran, which they see as sufficiently weakening the regime to allow for a successful ground offensive.
Ali Khamenei, Iran’s former supreme leader, was killed on the first day of war, and subsequent strikes have killed several more senior leaders – most recently, Ali Larijani, the national security chief.
“The regime is very damaged now, but the US needs a strategy to fully overthrow it,” said Mr Hosseini, speaking from the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region inside Iraq. “The conditions are good now on the ground. The conditions are great for us to go into Iran.
“But we shouldn’t forget that we are guests here, and we cannot pose a threat on Iraqi Kurdistan. If we take any action, it could put the Iraqi Kurdistan region [in northern Iraq] under threat.”
Northern Iraq is already in the crosshairs. The presence of Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, which have long operated from the region in exile, has been enough to invite several deadly attacks from Iran and Iran-aligned militias, which are also based in Iraq.
Iran and its militias have also sought to attack Western embassies and military assets in Iraq, while the US and Israel have hit back at those same Iran-backed groups. That has made Iraq the only nation to be hit by both sides in the current war.
Khabat locations have been attacked by drones, killing at least two people and causing a handful of injuries.
Matin Parishan, who is 18 years old and among Khabat’s youngest peshmerga, said of one of the attacks: “We didn’t even hear the drone. But we were ready – we expected that we would be targeted.”
On one night during the first week of the war, explosions occurred around 6.50pm, prompting Mr Parishan and his fellow fighters, who were aged between 18 and 45, to spring into action, evacuating the entire compound on the outskirts of Erbil.
“We were so worried about each other,” he recalled. “We were standing outside, watching people come out one by one. As we saw more people leave – alive – our hopes grew.”
Minutes later, another drone plunged into the compound a few feet away from the initial drone blast. A fire erupted and smoke billowed into the sky – remnants of which are still visible on a nearby building that is caked in thick, black soot.
That night, Khabat did not lose any of its fighters. However, the organisation buried a few of its own the following week, when yet another attack hit shortly after The Telegraph visited.
“We continue living here, and we will continue no matter what,” Mr Parishan said. “Even if they attack us a hundred times, we will not stop.”
Such defiance has echoed across the Iranian diaspora. Some Iranian Kurds living in Europe have arrived in northern Iraq to join opposition groups in whatever operations may be launched next.
A 37-year-old man who arrived last week said: “It’s our national and ethnic duty to return to fight. Many of us have come back to fight.”
To the Iranian Kurdish community, the war represents a prime opportunity to fight for greater freedoms and autonomy – a stated goal of the coalition, which has already outlined plans for self-governance in western Iran if the regime falls.
The Kurds are one of the world’s largest stateless ethnic groups, numbering around 40 million people. Spread across Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, the community has faced varying degrees of discrimination.
Mr Trump may change his mind again on whether to weaponise the Iranian Kurds. There is precedent for such co-operation in neighbouring Syria, where Kurdish fighters were instrumental in the broader fight against the Islamic State terror group.
But using the Iranian Kurds for a US-Israeli initiative is a plan that many, including the first lady of Iraq, have campaigned against.
On March 5, Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed said in a statement: “It is very difficult, indeed impossible, for Kurds to accept being treated as pawns by the world’s superpowers.”