Iranian Kurds as a Strategic Lever in a Changing Republic | Irregular Warfare Center

Cudi Zerey writes in his IWC Perspectives article, “The Kurds of Iran as a Strategic Factor in Western Approaches to a Changing Islamic Republic,” that Iranian Kurds represent an underutilized strategic asset for Western policy toward Iran. Iran’s successive governments have governed Kurdish provinces through a security-first approach, producing sustained political exclusion and recurring unrest. The 2022-2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, which originated in the Kurdish women’s movement, drew disproportionate state violence against Kurdish communities, and renewed unrest in late 2025 and early 2026 resulted in an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 deaths.

Past US-Kurdish cooperation in Iraq and Syria has already demonstrated that Kurdish actors can operate coherently and align with Western military frameworks… These precedents matter because any future confrontation involving Iran, whether triggered by the collapse of nuclear negotiations, a regional war involving Israel, or internal regime breakdown, is expected to be long, attritional, and shaped by intense regional militarization. Crucially, Kurdish autonomy represents not a threat to Iran’s territorial integrity but a potential stabilizing mechanism.

Iranian Kurdish parties, including the PDKI, Komala, and PJAK, retain organizational networks inside Iran despite sustained Iranian pressure on Iraq’s Kurdistan Region to restrict their operations. Zerey draws on US-Kurdish cooperation in Iraq and Syria to argue that Kurds can serve as reliable ground partners when Western governments provide backing. He then provides several policy implications and recommendations:

“First, Western strategy toward Iranian Kurds should prioritize strengthening civil society, as this is the most politically sustainable and least escalatory form of engagement. Effective measures include providing digital-security tools, training for human-rights defenders, medical support, and forensic documentation capacities… To reduce exposure to Iranian retaliation, such support should be channeled discreetly through Erbil and embedded within multilateral frameworks.”

“Second, the West should pursue structured political engagement with established Kurdish parties and civic actors. Dialogue should remain inclusive and pluralistic while maintaining a strict firewall against any organizations designated as terrorist entities.”

“Third, only under exceptional conditions, such as state fragmentation, extreme repression, or a wider regional war, should Western governments consider adapting the ‘by, with, and through’ model… to Kurdish security actors. Even then, any such engagement must be conditional on strict human-rights compliance, unified command structures, and robust deconfliction with Turkey, whose threat perceptions remain highly sensitive to Kurdish armed mobilization.”

“Finally, Israel can play a limited but strategically useful indirect role. Under U.S. coordination, Israel’s continued efforts to degrade IRGC capabilities, particularly those posing direct threats to Kurdish regions, can shape the strategic environment without placing Kurdish actors at risk of political stigma.”

Supporting Iranian Kurdish civil society, Zerey concludes, offers the West low-cost, high-leverage tools for regional resilience and crisis readiness. Dr. Pasar Sherko Abdullah’s recent SWJ Article, “The Kurds: Realism Over Separatism,” similarly argues that Iranian Kurds seek autonomy or federalism through dialogue within a unified Iran, and that “any state rhetoric labeling Kurds as ‘separatists’ is largely a manufactured threat, used to galvanize domestic nationalist support and legitimize state violence.” 

Where Zerey frames Kurdish autonomy as a stabilizing tool that Western powers should actively prepare for within a future Iranian constitutional framework, Abdullah grounds that same argument in historical precedent. He shows that Kurdish political movements across the region have consistently moderated their demands from independence to decentralized self-administration within existing nation-states, making civil and political engagement the natural and realistic path forward.

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