https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/12/opinion/trump-kurds-iran-middle-east/
Trump wants the Kurds to wage war in Iran. They should beware.
For decades, the United States has used the ethnic group to promote American interests in the Middle East — then abandoned it.
By Stephen Kinzer – Boston Globe - March 12, 2026
As the war against Iran intensifies, an old Middle East impulse has suddenly reemerged: Arm the Kurds. For decades, the United States has used Kurdish militias as proxies. Several times the United States armed and encouraged them, only to abandon them when the politics changed. Now President Trump wants them to enter Iran and try to set off an ethnic uprising. They should beware.
Patterns of bombing over Iran suggest that one of the campaign’s goals is to open the way for a Kurdish insurgency. Precision strikes have destroyed border posts, police stations, and military installations along the Iran-Iraq border, across which Kurdish fighters would infiltrate. Roads leading to the region, along which government forces could mass for counterattacks, were also hit. A spokesperson for the Israeli air force told The Guardian it was “heavily operating in western Iran to degrade Iranian capabilities there and to open up a way to Tehran and create freedom of operations there.” This month President Trump called the two main leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan. Iranian Kurdish leaders in exile report that Americans have contacted them too.
Iran, in response, has announced strikes against forces “opposed to the revolution” in the border region. “Separatist groups should not think that a breeze has blown and try to take action,” warned Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
The Iran war was evidently launched without any overarching strategy or goal. Among all the goofy ideas that have emerged from it, promoting a Kurdish insurgency ranks among the most misbegotten. It would be a strategic gift to Iran.
Even with American air support, the few thousand Iranian Kurds who might launch an insurgency inside their country would have no realistic chance to advance against Iran’s military. The prospect of ethnic war would probably intensify Persian nationalism in ways that would strengthen the regime. It would also horrify Turkey, Iraq, and Pakistan, all of which fear ethnic insurgencies at home and would hate to see one break out nearby.
Kurds are said to be the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own. Forty million are scattered across Turkey, Iraq, Syria — and Iran, where they make up about 10 percent of the population. Regimes in all those countries have repressed them or limited their rights. All fear that allowing Kurdish consciousness to flower could lead to separatist demands.
The United States’s habit of using Kurdish forces to promote its interests in the Middle East and then dumping them when circumstances change is long and sordid.
In the mid-1970s, the United States armed Kurdish insurgents in Iraq as a way to force the regime there into negotiating with our ally, the shah of Iran. It worked, and the two countries reconciled. The Americans declared victory and abandoned their erstwhile Kurdish friends to Saddam Hussein’s untender mercies. “When it was in the interests of the United States and Iran to annoy the Soviet-dominated Iraqis, we encouraged the Kurds to revolt, and supplied them with arms; but when Iran and Iraq made a deal, the United States and Iran left their Kurdish clients high and dry,” the New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in 1976. “Since the aid to the Kurds was in secret, the power‐politicians at State did not have to explain this unprecedented betrayal.”
With few friends in the neighborhood, Kurds continued to look to the United States despite this unpleasantness. They were rewarded after the 1991 Gulf War. The United States carved out a large chunk of northern Iraq and turned it into an autonomous region governed by Kurds. An implicit condition of that gift was that the Kurds would put themselves at America’s service. Since then, the United States has used northern Iraq as a base for Middle East communication and surveillance operations.
Nearly a decade ago, the United States began deploying Kurdish militias as part of a campaign to defeat ISIS and bring down the Assad government in Syria. Americans helped them establish an enclave of resistance and loudly proclaimed their right to self-government. Then, in 2024, Assad fell. The United States embraced the new Syrian regime. Kurds were bluntly told to disarm, abandon their drive for autonomy, and submit to rule from Damascus.
After that dramatic reversal of fortune, according to the scholar Amy Austin Holmes, who has spent extended periods with Kurdish groups, “the Syrian military has carried out sectarian violence against minorities in Syria in a chilling pattern: first against Alawites, then Druze, and now Kurds.…The pervasive sense of betrayal felt by Kurds regarding recent events in Syria may also inform the decisions and next steps of Kurds in Iran, who oppose the current Iranian regime but remain wary of potential attacks on Kurdish fighters and civilians and the possibility of being abandoned by the West once again.”
As they have so often over the last century, Kurds find themselves caught up in the maelstrom of Middle East conflict, buffeted by forces they cannot control. They have been repeatedly let down by outside powers. If they join the war against Iran, it could happen again.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.