Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has launched an aerial attack on locations in Iraqi Kurdistan for the second day in a row linked to ongoing mass protests inside its own borders.
The Guards’ official Telegram channel announced the assault this morning, claiming it had targeted bases belonging to the armed leftist group the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK).
According to the news website Kurdistan 24, the IRGC’s drone attack had struck a village in the region of Choman.
In a separate incident on Monday, Iran’s state-controlled Mehr News Agency reported the IRGC had attacked both the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan and Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran in a strike on “the mountainous heights of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region”, understood to be Barbezin and Saghar.
Fars News Agency, which is owned by the IRGC, claimed: “This new round of IRGC attacks has started in response to the separatists' support for the ongoing unrest in Iran."
On September 16, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in hospital in Tehran. She had fallen into a coma on Tuesday two hours after being arrested by the “morality patrol” while on holiday with her family.
Evidence from the hospital indicated Mahsa, who was from Saqqez, had sustained serious head injuries in custody. Her death sparked huge, ongoing demonstrations across at least 80 cities in Iran, in which citizens of all walks of life have called for an end to theocratic rule by the Islamic Republic.
In response, Iranian state media outlets have embarked on a sustained campaign to paint Mahsa as a Kurdish separatist. Her family have insisted to IranWire that she had no interest in politics.
Meanwhile the IRGC has accused Komala and the KDP of fomenting “chaos and disturbance” in Kurdish-majority border towns, where – just as in numerous Persian-majority parts of Iran – aggrieved residents have taken to the streets to protest since Mahsa’s death.
The strikes also came after large rallies took place in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah in solidarity with the uprising in Iran over the weekend. On Sunday hundreds of women in in Rojava, a Kurdish-majority region of northern Syria, also marched through the streets carrying Mahsa’s portrait and chanting “Freedom to all women of the world”.
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