The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is actively working to arm Kurdish opposition forces operating along the Iraq-Iran border, with the goal of triggering a popular uprising inside Iran, multiple sources familiar with the plan have told CNN.
The Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about providing them with military support, the sources said. (Channels Television) The CIA declined to comment on the report.
Iranian Kurdish armed groups have thousands of forces operating along the Iraq-Iran border, primarily in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. Several of the groups have released public statements since the beginning of the war hinting at imminent action and urging Iranian military forces to defect.
The plan, as described by sources, is built around several tactical objectives. One person familiar with the discussions said that the idea would be for Kurdish armed forces to take on the Iranian security forces and pin them down, to make it easier for unarmed Iranians in the major cities to turn out without getting massacred again, as they were during unrest in January.
Another US official said the Kurds could help sow chaos in the region and stretch the Iranian regime’s military resources thin. Still other ideas have centred around whether the Kurds could take and hold territory in the northern part of Iran that would create a buffer zone for Israel.
A Trump administration official also tempered expectations about the reliability of proxy warfare. “It may not be as simple as Americans convincing a proxy force to fight for them,” one official said. “You have people thinking about their own interests, and the question is whether bringing them in aligns with those interests.”
The operation’s viability is also logistically dependent on the cooperation of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Any attempt to arm Iranian Kurdish groups would need support from the Iraqi Kurds to let the weapons transit and use Iraqi Kurdistan as a launching ground.
Trump also called Iraqi Kurdish leaders on Sunday to discuss the US military operation in Iran and how the US and the Kurds could work together as the mission progresses, two US officials and a third source familiar with the conversations said.
Tehran, meanwhile, signalled it was aware of the developing plan. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Tuesday that it targeted Kurdish forces with dozens of drones. The IRGC claimed it had targeted “separatist groups in Iraqi Kurdistan that were planning to infiltrate the border and carry out operations.”
Reports also emerged that weapons have been smuggled into western Iran to arm thousands of Kurdish volunteers, with a ground operation expected to begin within days.
