March 16, 2018
In less than a week, two military commanders of two Iranian Kurdish opposition parties—the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (DPIK)—have been assassinated in Iraqi areas controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
The Islamic Republic is widely assumed to be behind the killings.
On March 6, the car of Qader Qaderi, a military commander of the KDP, was shot more than 20 times in the city of Sulaymaniyah.
Five days before that, Sabah Rahmani, an officer of the other group, was killed along with his son in a car bomb explosion in Erbil.
Both Kurdish parties blamed the deaths on Iran.
In an interview with Kayhan London, Hassan Sharafi, a DPIK official said: “Al-Hashd Al-Sha’abi [the Popular Mobilization Militia units], the militia group backed by Iran, has been mobilized to carry out terrorist activities. Conflict between the KRG and Baghdad has become a pretext for the expansion of Iranian terrorist activities.”
In the years following the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian regime killed two successive KDPI leaders in Europe.
In July 1989, Iran negotiated with Abdul Rahman Qassemlu in Vienna but shot him three times at close range.
In September 1992, Sadegh Sharafkandi, who succeeded Qassemlu as KDPI’s secretary general, was assassinated in a mafia style attack along with three of his comrades at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.
The bad publicity stemming from the Mykonos trial seemed to prompt Tehran to halt its assassinations in Europe.
However, in November of last year, Ahmad Mola Nissi, the leader of the “Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz,” was shot in front of his house in The Hague, suggesting assassinations of opposition figures may now be back on Tehran’s agenda.
