Leave the Kurds Out of It

Ms. Geranmayeh is the deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The United States may once again be poised to turn the Kurds into their foot soldiers in a Middle East war, this time inside Iran. Regime change is seemingly one of the American goals in the latest U.S.-Israeli attack. But the air campaign alone, while devastating, is unlikely to bring that about, so Washington appears to be assessing if it should use Kurdish fighters in Iran.

This will most likely backfire terribly — both on the Kurds and on other U.S. allies in the region. It could also set in motion the nightmare scenario of a civil war.

Although President Trump has flip-flopped about supporting the deployment of armed Iranian Kurds, saying on Saturday that he did not want them to go in, several developments suggest that such U.S.-Israeli plans exist.

The country’s Kurdish region in the west has been heavily targeted during the bombing campaign in an apparent effort to weaken Iranian security forces there. The United States has also made a political push to rally Kurdish factions. On the second day of the war, Mr. Trump spoke to senior Kurdish leaders in the semiautonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, considered U.S. allies. He reportedly pressed them to allow armed Iranian Kurds — long operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan — to cross the border into Iran. There have also been leaks to the media that the C.I.A. and Israel have increased the arming of Iranian Kurds in recent months.

Like Kurds who fought Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Iranian Kurdish minority has been harshly treated throughout history and has long sought self-rule. Since the brutal crackdown on Iranian protesters in January, six Iranian Kurdish dissident groups running operations from Iraqi Kurdistan have come together for the first time. According to the groups, they were considering the proposal to join the fight on the condition that a no-fly zone would be imposed and enforced by the United States to protect Kurdish troops. Iranian Kurds will no doubt also want stronger U.S. political assurances that they will have autonomy in whatever version of Iran emerges after the regime falls.

At first glance, it seems plausible that an Iranian Kurdish deployment could help the United States and Israel weaken the regime and possibly bring about its collapse. In Syria, local Kurds, backed by the United States, helped to loosen Mr. Assad’s grip, assisted America’s fight against ISIS and gained control of oil-rich territory. Iranian Kurds may adopt a similar blueprint regarding Iran’s mineral-rich region and use their land as a safe haven to launch ground attacks against Iranian security forces farther afield. If the United States and Israel were to deploy ground troops of their own — as has been broached — they could use Kurdish positions as a buffer zone to operate from.

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