Once again, the Kurds are on the global agenda. Kurdish forces are being encouraged by the US and Israel to spearhead the initiative to force regime change in Iran. Indeed, the overthrow of Iran’s Islamist regime is likely impossible without forces on the ground to make it happen. And it is the Kurds who can provide these forces on the ground.
Still, the Kurdish political elite should learn from past mistakes and approach any encouragement to get involved militarily against Iran’s mullahs with caution, while using the opportunity as a strategy to advance the Kurdish national cause.
Like several countries in the Middle East, Iran is a forced state. It is basically the remnants of the ancient Qajar Empire. The non-Persian peoples that are part of the country today did not consent to being part of Iran. This includes the Kurds.
In fact, the Kurds never agreed to be part of any country in existence today. They were promised a state of their own in the Treaty of Sèvres, following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. But Turkish nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic, rejected the treaty and forced the Allied Powers into a renegotiation.
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne replaced Sèvres entirely, recognized the new Republic of Turkey, and made no mention of the Kurds, Kurdistan, autonomy, or independence. The Kurds in other parts of Kurdistan were also denied self-determination. Instead, they were forcibly incorporated into what became Syria and Iraq, while the Kurds in East Kurdistan, Rojhelat, remained part of Iran.
Ever since, the Kurdish political agenda has been to attain self-rule if not outright independence. This has led to more geopolitical failures – in 1946 in Eastern Kurdistan (Iran) by the Soviets, in 1975 in South Kurdistan (Iraq) by the US, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger, and most recently in January 2026 in West Kurdistan (Syria), again by the US under the second Trump administration.
In all of these cases, the Kurds were used by the great powers as allies, only to be abandoned and often massacred. Thus, the Kurds remain the largest stateless group in the world. Based on these experiences, the right course of action for the Kurds would be to refrain from assisting any major power ever again, without a guarantee of independent statehood.
Kurds lack unified leadership
Unfortunately, however, the Kurds lack a unified leadership that can demand this kind of guarantee. The Kurdish people are divided into factions based on which country they reside in.
For example, the Kurds of South (Iraqi) Kurdistan have the PUK and KDP – two independently acting political factions that compete, at times violently, with each other and have formed de facto states of their own. This land-based competition between the factions led to the loss of half of South Kurdistan to Shia Arabs in 2017, following the independence referendum led by Masoud Barzani.
Similarly, in Syria, following the Arab Spring that started in 2011, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), decided to go on its own instead of allying with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq to expand effective Kurdish rule over lands in West Kurdistan (north and northwest Syria).
Fractured and acting alone with an anarchic ideology, PYD’s military arm, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), crumbled in front of the Jihadist factions led by Syria’s American-backed President, Ahmed al-Sharaa.
It was thanks to the US that the jihadist assault did not result in a Kurdish massacre there, and Kurds should thank both Israel and pro-Israel lobbyists in America for their efforts to prevent such a massacre by promoting the Save the Kurds Act, led by US Senator Lindsey Graham.
Fortunately, some Kurdish leaders have finally gotten the message that to advance the cause of a free Kurdistan, they must form a united front. To this end, five major Kurdish factions in Iran formed an alliance known as the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (also referred to as the Alliance of Political Forces in Iranian Kurdistan or CPFIK).
The next logical step for this new alliance would be to link up with the Kurdish factions in other parts of Kurdistan, specifically the KRG and what remains of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), commonly known as Rojava. The armed forces of these factions should be amalgamated to form a united Kurdish military force.
This military unification would be similar to how armed Zionist militias in British Mandate Palestine came together to form the Israel Defense Force (IDF) during Israel’s War of Independence. It is only when Kurdish factions and their military forces come together that major powers, especially the US, will support a free and independent Kurdistan.
Indeed, the eventual birth of a Kurdish nation-state is going to happen under the patronage of the US. It is only the US that has the power and the interest to dissolve the current blood borders in the Middle East and form independent states for the Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Baluchis, and Ahwazi Arabs.
Mem Husedin, based in Vancouver, is a commentator on Kurdish affairs, Kurdistan, and international politics. On X @mhusedin.
Jason Shvili, based in Toronto, is a freelance writer and commentator on Jewish affairs, Israel, and the Middle East. On X @JShvili.