Ground Forces Commander Ahmad-Reza Purdastan also announced last week that the Army is now helping the Pasdaran fight the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK). Whether that means the Army simply didn’t want to be left out or that the Pasdaran was unable to handle the task by itself was unknown.
Majid Kavian, 29, the PJAK deputy commander who went by the nom de guerre of Semko Sarholdan, was killed last week. A PJAK announcement said he died “in heavy Iranian shelling,” the first death of any PJAK members by shelling that PJAK has admitted.
A few days later, the Pasdaran announced the death “in battle” of Brig. Gen. Abbas-Ali Jannesari. The announcement said Jannesari was an artillery officer. Such officers are not normally at the front lines “in battle,” so it was unclear how he actually died.
Earlier this month, PJAK offered a ceasefire. The Pasdaran swiftly denounced the offer, but then thought twice and said it wanted more information before acting. Since then, there has been no more talk about a ceasefire and the offer appears to have been a public relations move rather than a serious offer.
The Iraqi government, meanwhile, stumbles about without actually doing anything about the fighting that local residents say constantly pours across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki last month voiced a rather mild objection to Iran’s shelling of Iraqi border areas and other officials have periodically complained. The strongest action so far was taken by the Iraqi parliament, which suspended its session September 8 for half an hour as an expression of protest at Iran’s actions.
Details of the combat are unknown beyond the fact that the Islamic Republic is persistently firing artillery shells into Iraq territory, trying to knock out PJAK sanctuaries. There have been Iraqi reports of several ground incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan by Iranian troops.
The Pasdaran last week said they had killed 30 PJAK rebels in the first week of September and had suffered two causalities in addition to Gen. Jannesari’s death.
The Iraqi national government does not have troops in Iraqi Kurdistan. The military force there is run by the Kurdistan Regional Autonomous Government. But it hasn’t sent any troops to confront PJAK or the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which opposes the Turkish government and also takes sanctuary in Iraq.
Masud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan, said his government won’t get involved. “We are in a difficult situation because there are two countries [Iran and Turkey] telling us to control our borders so there will be no problems,” he said. “But we are reluctant to send forces to the borders for fear of a Kurdish-Kurdish war.”
He said, “The PKK and the PJAK are not taking the situation of the Kurdistan region [of Iraq] into their considerations. I call on the two parties to stop the idea of getting their rights through military means.… We will not be part of the war.”
Yussef Koran, who is with the political bureau of the Patriotic Union of [Iraqi] Kurdistan, told Agence France Presse there are two reasons why Iran decided to make a major effort to repress PJAK right now.
First, he said, Iran was responding to increased activity by PJAK rebels inside Iran. Second, he said, is the uprisings around the Arab world “which have made some countries afraid of the presence of armed groups on their borders.” In other words, he thinks Iran fears a broad uprising by Kurds in Iran if the regime does not move to squash PJAK forcefully.
Meanwhile, the shelling has resulted in more Iraqi Kurds being displaced. Earlier in the summer, the Red Cross said it was housing 200 displaced families. Last week, Hassan Abdullah, mayor of Qalat Dizah, just across the border in Iraq, said 330 families from his town alone have now been displaced and dozens of houses leveled by the Iranian shelling.